Sandra Pupatello
The following questions posed to Liberal leadership candidate Sandra Pupatello, who met with members of the Huron-Bruce Provincial Liberal Riding Association recently, came from Huron County politicians, and business and community leaders. The answers have been edited for clarity.
Question: You’ve said that the primary thrust of your campaign has to do with the economy and creating jobs and everything else will flow from that. How do you specifically do that in rural Ontario?
Answer: The focus likely is different in terms of sectors for rural Ontario versus urban but if I talk about manufacturing, for example, that’s as applicable in rural Ontario as it is in urban. There is manufacturing here, it’s just based from a different feedstock, frankly.
Working locally training globally is probably one phrase that’s going to be very applicable to rural Ontario in my way of thinking.
We don’t do enough of selling our own products, especially agri-food products around the world. I’ve had that opportunity to meet people who would actually be our counterparts in other parts of the world that want our product. We just need to figure out how to put them together. So livestock, for example, there is a requirement for protein all over the world – beef, pork, halal products. All of those things are things we can do and we don’t do it right now, and if we do it’s on a really small scale. Even other provinces do so more than we. There’s a lot that can be done there and I’m determined to do it. I’ve met the folks in our own embassies around the world who are desperate for this kind of activity and just need us to be interested. I think we can do it. It takes maybe a little bit of money on the packaging, training of cutting, etc., and we can sell to the Chinese market, for example.
I don’t want to just focus on meats. Vegetables: There’s a modest amount of export right now but so much more we can do. When we start talking to people in the business, they get actually very excited to think that we could focus and do a much better job at it. Agri-food products: I really want to focus on going up the value chain on what we do as opposed to just a straight export of raw product and whether that’s natural resources or food, I do mean the same thing.
Question: In terms of economic development, the rural community in the past has relied on the Rural Economic Development Fund, which has come to end. The Liberal government has announced the Southwestern Ontario Economic Development Fund but it’s very hard for local municipalities and organizations to access that money. How do you propose to stimulate the economy through organizations such as economic development departments, chambers of commerce, etc.?
Answer: As long as the outcome is what we’re looking for, which is more jobs, we need to find what those mechanisms are. In this day and age, I think I’ve already been sold on the notion that some kind – whether it’s co-investment, or support of that activity, like the Rural Economic Development (RED) Fund or the Southwestern Ontario Fund or the Eastern Ontario Fund, which actually works. The key is, is the criteria appropriate for its use? You do have to make it work for those local areas.
The whole conversation about RED, will RED come back, I have no idea. I haven’t been around this past little while. I’ve heard the conversation about merging funds, etc., they may have wanted to do that so the fund itself would have a better focus because I do recall historically some examples of use of fund that I’d have a hard time figuring out where the permanent jobs were. And that may be why they decided to change criteria.
I’m going to be open-minded about how we do it. What I do know is that regionally it’s very different from Queen’s Park. So when everyone says ‘to Toronto’ what they really mean is ‘to Queen’s Park,’ which means when you make a policy in Queen’s Park and as soon as you get out of there and somewhere north of the No. 7 highway, or whatever, it’s really different up here and people in my hometown say that too. And that means you’ve got to have a regional application. My rural policy actually says ‘a rural lens.’ It also says ‘a single-window access point.’ All of these things are for simplification and for adaptability of policy to match the region you’re in. When I say ‘rural policy lens’ that’s what that means. Is this really working out here where it’s supposed to? And I’ve found that it hasn’t.
Eastern Ontario Development Fund may be the best example of what actually works because we listened to the local leadership when we set the criteria. Then when we rolled it out, the criteria actually worked. Now they’ve come back and said ‘you know, we can actually tweak this a bit here and we can do even more.’ I’d prepared to that because now they’ve got some credentials. We actually listened and it worked last time.
Teachers always say the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. I think they know I’m pretty adaptable that way.
Question: Here in Huron County the population has been on the decline over the past number of years. Some of the local politicians would argue that part of it is the result of the Provincial Policy Statement (PPS) on severances. It’s too tight and doesn’t allow for people to move to small properties resulting from severances of large parcels of land. Would you consider loosening the PPS on severances for non-prime agricultural land to allow for population growth in the rural area?
Answer: Who asked you that question and did they really think I was going to give an answer to that one? That’s way too specific for me. I’m certainly not going to answer it because I don’t know.
But what I will say is that as I’m busy talking to people in leadership, I’m prepared to hear what the issues are. And if people locally think that’s something, then maybe we should look at that. And I will tell you that’s the kind of issue I would expect Carol Mitchell [former Huron-Bruce MPP who is supporting Pupatello’s bid for leadership] to know about, which is why we need Carol Mitchell. She was a fantastic agriculture minister. She was a great MPP and I want her back. I hope if I’m a leader and the premier, I’m going to find a Carol Mitchell who’s going to tell me exactly what we should be doing about an issue like that. Rural Ontario, they do have issues that I’m not going to find in my hometown of Windsor and I’m certainly not going to find at Queen’s Park and that’s really the point of all this, that we’ve got to rely on the strength of our local MPPs and I though Carol Mitchell was ideal.
Question: In the last election, the Liberals lost a lot of seats in rural Ontario as a result of the Green Energy and wind energy debate. Would you consider changes to the Green Energy Act and its policy and implementation plan to be more responsive to rural Ontario?
Answer: [She refers to her comments within her speech made prior to the Question and Answer period for the answer to this question.] Part of the policy that’s on my website is on energy policy. My view is that it will be a best practices, best price policy that drives energy. In particular, on the Green Energy Act, which many folks are asking about, if people look at the 30-year plan of the government, there are actually very few megawatts left to come out that would be assigned on the green energy scale.
I will tell you that the last rendition of the Feed-In-Tariff program, where wind energy was coming out, what Chris Bentley did as a minister just recently meant that many of the projects would not have historically come out that way had these changes been a part of that. Because when they added that community component, in how people were able to move their projects forward, clearly he understood when he was made the minister in this past year, he understood what had happened and he was making moves to fix that.
I’ve said in my policy piece that the local communities will have that level of ability to determine those projects. There’s just too much land in Ontario and there are communities who are willing host communities that we don’t need to be pitting our families against each other in these small towns. I actually feel that way and we’re just going to make sure that happens.
Many of the people are going to the next step and some of the folks, the anti-turbine folks that I’ve met with or spoke with, I know they are asking about current projects, frankly I don’t know their statuses because I haven’t been there for a year-and-a-half and to be fair to me I need to get the lay of the land on what those are like to know what can even be done about contracts that are initiated, etc. We learned a good lesson there. Small town Ontario is just not the same.
But if we’re talking about generation, in my view, communities have to have a hand in generation. It also means a responsibility when we say that because communities need to understand they require generation if they want growth. There are too many agencies in the electrical industry in Ontario and they all work at cross-purposes in my view. I’m going to streamline the number and their activity. I’m looking forward to that.
Question: Depending on who you talk to, there is depopulation going on in rural Ontario and then there are other people saying that the population is beginning to increase as a result of intelligent communities. What would you envision for rural Ontario 30 years down the road?
Answer: I do think most of Ontario is in decline in population, so it’s not a phenomenon that’s just for rural Ontario. Many of our cities as well are facing declining population and our combative nature has said the only we’re going to stop that is immigration. That may be the case. That’s a country-wide issue, not just Ontario’s. We’re seeing a lot of movement for example, the GTA for sure is seeing increases. It’s hard to find other communities facing increases beyond the GTA. In my region for example, Windsor stays the same, so any of the growth goes into the county. So you’ll see increases in the Town of LaSalle but Windsor’s gone down. So you can see what’s happening. It’s sort of the circlization of these cities, smaller cities for sure.
But nonetheless I actually believe there will be more opportunity because of intelligent communities, which is wholly based on IT, that will allow us to have what I would argue with Roger Martin [Dean of Rotman School of Management], who says that if we want to increase productivity he actually feels we should move people from rural to urban. I actually think we should combat that trend and go the other route because people who want to face that kind of living can do so in rural Ontario and still have high-paying jobs. That’s the key. Traditionally when you look at how much do people make depending on where they live, there’s an accepted practice that you make less if you live in rural Ontario. That’s how they’re scoring the wealth of your province. But if you’re a PhD doing your work in downtown Toronto, but you could also do it in Goderich because you have access to high speed, broadband services you can do it and you’re still going to be paid two hundred grand a year just like you’d make affiliated with the University of Toronto. And I think that’s a great opportunity for rural Ontario.
The nature of infrastructure requirements have changed over the years and I’m delighted to see that. Those are the types of things I fought for. So when I was sitting down as minister with the feds and we said now here’s the pot of money and they had to help us with matching funding on broadband, for example, what communities, where could we pick them. That was a key discussion for us because that doesn’t mean you get fancy movies whenever you want. This is about work, and work life, and where for Ontario. So this is critical to me.
I actually think this is a huge opportunity for us and we’ve got an advantage. Canadians are actually more adaptable to IT than any other population in the world. I don’t know why that is but I think it’s because we’re more remote and we have more small communities.
So in 30 years, if I had to look ahead, I would say they may well be fighting over this severance issue we’ve resolved and they may all want to move to Goderich.
Question: In the last number of years, there’s been a polarization over issues like the Green Energy Act, teachers’ issues, and labour issues. Do you have a communications plan to somehow diffuse that polarization?
Answer: You know what they say in Finland: The fish starts to stink from the head. It’s a Finnish expression that I translated. What that saying means is that you have to lead by example in my view.
We have to be upfront with folks and people need to know that about us. We need to be consistent. Even when people don’t get what they want, they should understand fully the thought process that went into the decision. Sometimes I think in our haste to get to the end, we skipped over some of those steps to say ‘here’s why we needed to do this, here’s why it’s important.’ In the middle of all that, we needed to listen for some feedback to what we were hearing just in case we were wrong.
And if this is a consistent pattern and a method of decision-making and implementation, we’re going to avoid a lot of missteps if we do that.
In the last two years as minister, I started a process called Open for Business. A number of people from this riding participated, a lot through the Ontario Federation of Agriculture. One of the sectors we looked at was agriculture. To this day, Betty Jean Crews, the president at that time, and her representatives said this is the best process we’ve ever created. It saw the most result. And it was because we put everybody in the same room to talk about it all at the same time. Remember that game when you were a kid, the can with the string? You used to attach the string at the bottom of the can and you’d that several times and as the person was on the can like a phone, the further away you got from the original message, the message changed. Right? Government’s like that. What is the message? You’re going to tell me, and I’m going to tell him, then he’s going to tell him, and the message is totally different than what was intended. We don’t do that on purpose as a government but the unintended consequence of our system is that we never actually solve the right problem or at least you don’t really know why we came up with that regulation because it sounds just so foolish. Instead, you put everybody in the same room at the same time, everyone knows the problem we’re trying to resolve and everyone has to have their part in making that resolution. Moreover, we turn to the clock and say you’ve got 60 days to find the solution and it worked. We tackled a number of things that were bunging up the system for a long time. We did that across manufacturing. We did that for the IT sector. We did that for medical devices. All with an eye to: how can we do more business here, what do we have to do to encourage more investment? That was the genesis of the idea of it and it’s actually working. I want to do that across the whole government.
Question: Huron County has had a number of hits in the last couple of years – the closure of Volvo, the tornado and Bluewater Youth Centre closed. That young offenders centre used to be a psychiatric hospital years ago. Based on what has happened in Connecticut, would you consider a transition back to institutionalization for mentally ill, and if so, would you consider promoting BYC back to its original use?
Answer: That’s interesting. Probably not in light of Connecticut because we’re a different culture in Canada, thankfully. Our response to these kinds of things is different also.
Their response, I understand, was a massive increase in a certain type of ammo that people felt they needed to rush out and buy just in case the government banned it. And the National Rifle Association came out and said principals should have guns too. Canadians, no matter our political stripe, we all just said ‘you’ve got to be kidding, right?’
In any event, I don’t know the answer to that. I will say that I recognize we’ve got a lack of children mental health services for what our needs are. How we continue that, how we forward the next steps, I don’t know. I was on the board of an agency for children mental health before I got elected. It was the work in the volunteer area that brought me into government as a candidate back then because I saw what happened when the government was cutting across the board, including children’s mental health issues. In my hometown, we had a half-time a psychiatrist for the entire city for children. There was no community that had so little in terms of professional care. When I left, we had eight full-time in my hometown. So I’ve had a big focus on children’s mental health locally as an MPP. We had four brand new buildings for children’s mental health. We merged a couple of agencies.
It’s a special area of interest for me, so I would watch. But to that answer particularly, I wouldn’t know that.
See related story from Saturday’s event.
One Comment on "Pupatello fields questions from rural Ontario"
Her answers seem very thoughtful, a bit vague though considering that if she’s elected to be the Premier she’s going to inherit problems that require her to be more specific than she is in her answers.
That said, I think she’s the best of the bunch of candidates.
I also think that if she’s the next Premier and we head in to an election, Hudak and the PCs are in BIG trouble from both the NDP and Liberals because both Pupatello and Horwath have more public appeal than does Hudak. The PCs will be wishing that they’d gone with Christine Elliott.
Interesting times ahead.