Meet four community members running to be Peterborough-Kawartha’s next MPP

Ontario is headed to the polls on February 27, 2025, after Premier Doug Ford called a snap election 16 months earlier than scheduled.

During the week of February 3, Peterborough Currents interviewed three of the four community members who had put their names forward to become Peterborough-Kawartha’s next MPP: Jen Deck, Lucas Graham, and Adam Hopkins. (Progressive Conservative candidate Dave Smith did not respond to our invitations, while New Blue Party candidate Andrew Roudny and Ontario Party candidate Brian Martindale had yet to declare their candidacies by that time.)

On February 14, Currents interviewed Roudny and added his interview to this page. As of February 14, PC candidate Dave Smith remained unresponsive and Currents had yet to connect with Ontario Party candidate Brian Martindale.

We asked candidates to tell us about themselves and why they’re running, and we also asked how they’d address two big issues facing our community right now: a lack of housing and a lack of doctors.

You can listen to the interviews in the audio players below, and you can also read excerpts from the conversations. If you prefer, you can find these interviews in your preferred podcast app by searching for “Peterborough Currents.”

Jen Deck, Ontario New Democratic Party

Who she is and why she’s running

Jen Deck, who also ran for the NDP in the 2022 provincial election, introduced herself as a union leader for local supply teachers and said she’s running for MPP as a way to address some of the struggles she’s seen her fellow teachers go through recently.

“So much that my members are struggling with [is] because our Ontario government is just not doing its job, not doing its work,” she said. “I ran last time, and I felt like I put in that investment, and people had a chance to start to get to know me. And really, if I want things to get better in Ontario, I need to step up and and be willing to be part of that change. You know, I’m five years from retirement. I am looking forward to having chickens. But I can’t sit by and watch while Ontario goes down this path that is not serving the people of Ontario.”

On the NDP

“The NDP stands for workers,” Deck said. “The NDP is the reason that we have healthcare in Canada. The NDP has a track record of caring about people and wanting to provide people with the supports that can allow them to be successful in whatever way that they want to be successful. Clearly the Conservatives don’t have any regard for the working people of Ontario. And I don’t feel confident that the Liberals are really working for the working people either. I think they they can talk a good talk. They make promises, but then when they’re in power, they govern in a really similar way to the Conservatives. So to me, being an NDP supporter is kind of a no brainer.”

On vote-splitting with the Liberals

Currents asked Deck how she responds to criticisms that the NDP is vote-splitting with the Liberals, especially in a riding that has historically flipped back and forth between conservatives and Liberals.

Deck responded: “The NDP is in much better shape than the Liberals are right now, so if anyone is splitting the vote, it’s the Liberals.”

“It’s an unfair dynamic to create,” Deck continued. “People should be voting for the party that matters to them. We should have a fair election system. We have a flawed election system that disproportionately favours the Conservatives and the Liberals. I would say that the fact that we do as well as we do in an unfair voting system speaks volumes for how much appetite there is for what the NDP has to offer.”

On increasing access to family doctors

Deck started by laying the blame for the local doctor shortage on the Ford government. The shortage has “more than doubled in just two years,” she said. “So we’re obviously heading in the wrong track.”

“How do you get more doctors? Well, first of all, you have to make more doctors. So we need to increase funding to medical schools,” she said. “There’s all sorts of really innovative ideas out there for growing healthcare providers in-house. So rather than having to try and recruit from elsewhere, we should be encouraging people from the area to go and get trained.”

Deck also said that private health care “steals our health care professionals away from public service” and that “we have to stop trying to use private solutions for public service problems.”

On housing

“Part of the problem with housing is that it’s been downloaded, first federally to the province and then from the province to municipalities. And municipalities are just not in a good place to be funding big housing projects … You can see already that Peterborough city council is having to make pretty aggressive cuts to public services and yet our taxes are going up, and this is because we’re asking municipalities to take on roles that really are better suited to the province. So one of the NDP plans is to pull that responsibility back up to the provincial level, and that’s going to take a lot of pressure off of municipal government.”

Lucas Graham, Green Party of Ontario

Who he is and why he’s running

Graham introduced himself as an entrepreneur, Green Party organizer, and board member with the Basic Income Network Peterborough.

“The reason that I am running now is I don’t think that there’s enough progressive perspectives, and particularly youth perspectives, among some of the choices here,” he said. He said he hopes to bring “representation” and “hope” to citizens who might be disappointed by politics right now.

“If you don’t feel heard by some of the other candidates, it can be really difficult to want to get engaged in the political process,” Graham said, noting Ontario’s “abysmal” turnout of 44 percent in the 2022 election. “So I wanted to get involved, just to see if I could bring some of the energy that I bring to some of the local non-profits and volunteer opportunities that I work with.”

On the Green Party

“The Green Party tends to prioritize solutions over partisanship, so Green politicians are always working across party lines to get things done,” Graham said. “The NDP, as a traditional party, is more focused on jostling for power with the Liberals and Conservatives, at least in my perspective. There’s also the fact that the NDP does support climate action, but the Green Party makes it a core of the platform.”

“The Greens push for stronger, faster climate policies, whereas the NDP often balances labour interests with climate policies, which can lead to slower action on phasing out fossil fuels.”

What’s the point of his campaign?

Currents asked Graham what the role of a Green candidacy in Peterborough-Kawartha is, if it’s not to win the riding.

“Other parties tend to act only when they start to feel pressure,” Graham said. “So when Green support grows, even if it doesn’t mean winning an election, some of the mainstream parties are forced to adopt stronger climate, housing and social policies.”

On doctors

“Expanding public funding for family doctors and nurse practitioners is going to be really important,” Graham said. Other strategies will include “hiring more nurses and personal support workers and hospital staff to ease the burden on our health care system [and] fast tracking licensing for internationally trained doctors and nurses.”

Graham also emphasized the need to prioritize public, rather than private, healthcare. “Right now, it’s better for [doctors] financially to try to move towards one of the privatized clinics, or to move somewhere else entirely, and that’s not what we want.”

On housing

“There should be more provincial investment in the municipality” for housing, Graham said.

“The real key is going to be intensification rather than sprawling outwards, because that’s that’s one of the major reasons that it costs so much for the city to build new housing is because that comes along with roads. It comes along with infrastructure hookups and the farther from the downtown core, or some of the core parts of Peterborough that they get, the more expensive it is to service those bits of infrastructure.”

Adam Hopkins, Ontario Liberal Party

Who he is and why he’s running

Hopkins said he is Lunapeew and Anishinaabe and grew up in Eelünaapéewi Lahkéewiit — also known as the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, in southwestern Ontario. He said he moved to Peterborough about twenty years ago to attend Trent University and then stayed as he pursued a career in the postsecondary sector. Currently, he works at the First Nations Technical Institute, where he develops academic programming that is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, he explained.

Hopkins is also a dad, and he said that’s what drove him to run in this election. “I have not felt good about the direction the province has been taking,” he said. “I have not felt good about what my children will be experiencing in this province in the near future. And specifically [I’m] very worried about our public education and healthcare system. That’s the main reason that I became involved.”

On the Liberal Party

“I’ve been a Liberal for a very long time,” Hopkins said. “I have always thought of the Liberal Party as being a big-tent type party. We’re not driven by ideology. I think of the party as being responsive and nimble.”

“The folks that are supporting the [local] campaign are all really progressively minded people,” he said. “They really are energized by Bonnie. They’re really energized by the fact that we’re kind of in this period where we’re rebuilding.”

Hopkins said he doesn’t know much about Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie. But his local campaign volunteers do, he said. “What they tell me is that she’s a strong voice. She comes from pretty humble background. She’s got a diversity of perspective because of that.”

On the Liberals’ place on the political spectrum

Currents asked Hopkins if he agrees with Bonnie Crombie’s 2023 statement that the Ontario Liberal Party moved “much too far to the left” under Kathleen Wynne and should instead “govern from right of centre.”

“I’m not familiar with her making those comments,” he responded. The Liberals’ approach in this election is to remain “hyper focused on what we all know are the issues that everyone [is] worried about, and that’s health care, that’s affordability, that’s housing. So we are hyper focused on those.”

On doctors

“The [Liberal] plan is 3,100 doctors into the system at a cost of $3.1 billion,” Hopkins said. “So that’s creating spaces for new doctors, that’s retaining doctors who are aging out of the system, that’s removing barriers for internationally trained doctors.”

Hopkins acknowledged it would be hard work to connect every Ontarian with a family doctor within four years, as the Liberals have promised to do.

“From time to time, I get people rolling their eyes at me,” he said. “They say, ‘We’ve heard that before. That’s BS, man.’ And fair enough. But I think this can actually work. It’s going to take some hard work. It’s a big investment. It’s a big idea, but having come from post-secondary, I know it can work.”

Hopkins also said he wants to explore the possibility of expanding the use of nurse practitioners. “Why don’t we have more nurse practitioners in the system?” he asked. “As I understand it, they’ve got a relatively wide scope of practice, and it seems to be one of those low hanging fruits.”

On housing

“We do have a plan so that builders, so that municipalities, will have more ability and more resources to build houses,” Hopkins said.

Hopkins raised two other policy proposals from the provincial Liberals: eliminating the land transfer tax and eliminating development charges. “In some of the bigger centres, development charges are sometimes in the neighbourhood of 30 percent of the end price [of a home],” Hopkins said. When asked if the Liberals would make municipalities whole for the lost revenue of development charges, Hopkins said yes. “There is a plan for some of those costs to be recouped by the municipality.”

Andrew Roudny, New Blue Party of Ontario

Who he is and why he’s running

Roudny said his campaign materialized quickly after Premier Doug Ford called the snap election. He saw a Facebook ad from the New Blue Party recruiting candidates, and he signed up, he explained.

“The biggest motivation is just where I come from politically. My family defected from Czechoslovakia in 1979 so I’m very sensitive to the big, big problems that come about when government becomes too controlling and borderline tyrannical,” Roudny said. “And I’m noticing a lot of that kind of thing happening in Canada in general, and Ontario in particular, particularly around COVID.”

Roudny’s campaign centres on one core message: he says Ontarians are overtaxed, and that this is the root cause of the challenges facing the province. By lowering taxes (the New Blue Party wants to eventually eliminate the HST, according to its platform), the province can spur economic growth, which in turn would actually increase government revenues while strengthening the private sector, he argued. “I want the private sector to be powerful enough to either contribute or to offer up some kind of resistance when government becomes overly belligerent,” he said.

On the New Blue Party

“To be perfectly honest, you don’t really know how a political party is going to govern until they govern,” Roudny said. “And that’s just a fact. You know, politics is soaked in lies. Everybody knows that. And so it would be disingenuous of me to say the New Blue Party is different.”

But “it appears to me that they have all the right principles,” he continued. The New Blue website “points at things like smaller government, more power for the individual, [and] letting people control their own lives, rather than having government involved in every little thing. The party got started with two MPPs who stood up and protested against the very draconian and very damaging COVID lockdowns and they were kicked out of the PC Party for that. I can’t help but admire their courage.”

On harm reduction

The New Blue Party platform states that the party “opposes provincial funding for drug injection sites.” Currents asked Roudny if that wasn’t inconsistent with his commitment to personal and medical freedom. Why not let people access the health care they believe is right for them?

“Many people believe [harm reduction] is the right thing to do,” he responded. “And so I think if I’m really for personal freedom, I think I need to honour that. And if people believe that a safe injection site is what they need to improve the healt-care situation in Peterborough, I have to respect that.”

On housing

Currents asked Roudny why any citizen should trust the New Blue Party to solve the housing crisis, when the only idea regarding housing in the party’s platform is to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants for unpaid rent. “I don’t think the solution is to allow government more power to solve that problem,” he responded.

“I think that problem gets much better solved when everything in Ontario is cheaper,” he said. “Because when that happens, there will be far, far fewer people who have trouble paying their rent, who have trouble finding a job, who can’t put gas in their car because it’s much too expensive.”

He said housing supply will increase if the government reduces taxes and regulations on housing construction. “Government is never going to build houses in any kind of quantity, and if they do, you will not want to live in one. It will be a disaster. People who build houses, who are good at it, have to build houses for people. It has to be a business.”

On doctors

Roudny said “years of media manipulation” have made private health care into a controversial issue and pushed the idea that “we can’t have anybody else involved in health care other than government.”

That’s not true, he said. He supports private health care and said it will be accessible to people — as long as taxes go down. “We can’t make private options illegal,” he said. “That’s entirely wrong. If we do what we need to do with taxation, private options will be affordable to lots of people.”