Oak Ridges MPP Frank Klees, one of three leadership candidates for the Ontario Progressive Conservative party, paid a short visit to Fort Frances on Tuesday, meeting with local riding association members and talking about his vision for Ontario and the party.
With less than three weeks before the leadership convention in Toronto, Klees was asking local party members to consider him when they cast their ballots Sept. 18.
“I believe we have a tremendous opportunity to form the next government, if we deliver policies that are sound,” Klees told the group of a dozen people who came to La Place Rendez-Vous to meet him.
The former transportation and tourism minister addressed many issues facing Northwestern Ontario—and how he would deal with them as leader.
“For me, Northern Ontario is not a strange place. I’m someone who understands there is a northwest and a northeast. Not many people do,” Klees said, adding he spent two summers in Kenora—“probably the best two summers of my life.”
He also made many trips to the region during his stint as minister of tourism and recreation, as well as a parliamentary assistant for the minister of natural resources.
Klees began by addressing the party’s policies regarding agriculture.
“Agriculture has always been a bottom-drawer issue for successive governments, and that’s fundamentally wrong.
“I want to make agriculture a top-drawer priority in our party,” he pledged.
One of the first ways to do that is to be aware of how regulations regarding agriculture will affect farmers. “You can’t bankrupt the farmer with regulations,” he stressed.
Klees also called for more communication between the party and its members in order to learn what people’s issues are in their areas, and how best to deal with them.
“I have made it very clear, under my leadership, I would look to people like yourselves to help us, as a party, develop strategies to deal with some of the key issues that you face,” he noted.
Another issue of importance was tourism, Klees said. “Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world today, but individual operators cannot deal with that competition,” he remarked.
The problems they face are marketing and access to capital.
Klees said many tourism operators would expand their businesses if they could access the capital to do so. “But the banking institutions don’t want anything to do with the industry,” he charged.
His solution would be to introduce an access-to-capital program, where the government provides seed money for tourism operators and other burgeoning industries.
“There’s huge potential for tourism throughout Northwestern Ontario,” Klees noted. “I believe we can do some great things to break through these shackles.”
What Klees is perhaps best known for is his support for two-tier health care—an stance his fellow leadership candidates, John Tory and Jim Flaherty, do not agree with.
“Our health care system is on the verge of bankruptcy,” Klees asserted. “No one’s telling you that.”
He cited a study by the Fraser institute which states that if the province’s health care budget continues to increase at current rates, 100 percent of the entire provincial budget will be devoted to health care by 2030.
“I’m challenging the party to have the courage to deal with this issue so we can preserve our health care system for generations to come,” he said.
The solution, he said, is not the pharmacare plan the provincial premiers have proposed to the federal government. Instead, it is to change the Canada Health Act to allow people who want to pay for medical services to do so.
“Paul Martin and Dalton McGuinty say the Canada Health Act is sacred,” Klees said. “I say both of them are wrong.
“To stay within the handcuffs of that act will doom us to having our entire health care system imploding,” he stressed.
Klees suggested mobile MRI units—like they have in the United States—to travel to isolated areas so people don’t have to wait four to 12 months for the test like they do now.
“The fact is, we’ve got two-tier health care now. The second tier is at the U.S. border,” he noted, saying many Canadians travel south to pay for their health care rather than waiting for an appointment at home.
“Why, as a province, do we say it’s OK for someone to take $500 out of their bank account and lose it all at a casino, but won’t allow them to take $500 out of their bank account and pay for their health care?” Klees asked.
Regarding the party’s chances for election three years from now, he remained optimistic but admitted some changes need to be made.
“We lost the last election because of a handful of unelected, unaccountable backroom advisors who disconnected our party and our leader from its membership. Not only from its membership, but from our fundamental values,” he said.
“My commitment is to give the party back to its membership.”
Klees said he did not want the PC party to get back to “power,” but to get back to “serve.”
“That’s what it’s all about. Our role is public service. When we forget that, then we deserve to lose,” he remarked.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
