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Key Issues
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It is about SUSTAINABILITY and BALANCE—a balance between our SOCIAL, ECONOMIC and ENVIRONMENTAL realms, with a focus on investing in people and in our communities.
Investing in our people
Our riding needs to build on its’ assets, and our greatest asset are the people who live here.
- Education enables people to get jobs; therefore it is key to make education accessible to everyone. Higher education needs to be affordable and become a right, not a privilege. We also need to focus on retraining opportunities in order to enable our current labour force to gain new skills to stay competitive in the labour market.
- Everyone should be able to access the labour market. Toronto Centre is very diverse ethno-culturally, yet new immigrants face barriers to accessing employment. The lack of recognition of immigrants’ qualifications and experience costs the country an estimated $3.42 to $4.97 billion each year. We need to act NOW in order to get foreign trained professionals into the jobs that they deserve.
- We need to provide livable incomes to people. With the rising costs of living, survival has become the way of life for people living on minimum wages and social assistance rates- this is unacceptable.
Investing in our communities
To focus on building healthy communities that prosper in the social, economic and environmental realms, we MUST:
- Ensure that our youth have access to appropriate programming and sustainable economic opportunities.
- Have appropriate supports and resources available to parents; including early learning programmes for children as well as accessible and affordable child care.
- Invest in social infrastructure
- Make housing affordable, as housing is a key determinant that contributes to the well being of people.
- Provide more funding for our health care system to bring it to a level where everyone can access it more easily.
- Guarantee equity to groups who continue to be marginalized such as women, members of racialized communities, Aboriginal people, people with disabilities and LGBTTQ.
It’s about a new vision
- The way governance is done NEEDS to change, the assumption that the bureaucrat or the politician knows best needs to STOP.
- Community knows more about the strengths that exist, about the challenges that are faced, and also about the solutions that could be put into practice.
- We need a more participatory approach to governance, we need to listen more and involve people in planning processes.
- The electorate needs to be respected and a way of doing that is by having greater government transparency and accountability
Ultimately it’s about building this TOGETHER, COMPLEMENTING the key values and principles that our party stands for, but with an INNOVATIVE and fresh approach to doing things.