This week, Juice FM is talking to each of the candidates in the upcoming election. Today, we profile Alana Delong of the Conservative Party of Canada. All candidates were asked about the same three issues
On affordable housing, DeLong says “there’s a couple of trends that I’ve been noticing. First of all, what I’ve been finding is in suburban homes, there are now often six or seven people with different names and what they’ve been doing is they’ve been sharing a house to be able to afford their housing. The other trend that I’ve been seeing is so many more intergenerational family homes. I mean, I would love to have my kids live with me, with my grandchildren. That would be wonderful. But for them to really spread their wings and to really build upon their lives, they need their own homes… It’s an indication of affordability that people are having trouble with. There is a commitment to build a million homes in Canada over the next three years. I want to make sure that I’m at the table so we get the homes that we need built here in our riding… Our big need is really in one-bedroom homes, to me it’s important that we have someone at the table … who understands what we need.”
On the question of post-COVID 19 pandemic recovery, “we are committed to recovering one million jobs, in all of our sectors of the economy. We will be launching the Canada Job Search plan, which will pay up to 50-percent of the salary of new hires for six-months. And there’s also investment and tax credits and loans to spur small business which is all available in the Canada Recovery Plan. It’s a really detailed plan of what we need after the last year and a half of not doing so well. Mainly it’s economic recovery that we need. We’re also of course doing a lot of work on the mental health file. It’s our number one social issue that we believe needs to be addressed. We’ve got to move in a direction of understanding that mental health is health. We are going to be making major investments in healthcare in Canada with the understanding that we are going to be prioritizing mental health. That’s a really large problem, Covid has been difficult. It’s been psychologically difficult. We really need to address it, it’s past time.”
As for climate change, “we’re not against carbon tax, so much as a carbon tax that doesn’t work so well, we want something that is a monetary push on us, without tax going to the government. If you buy local food, that food hasn’t been transported, it doesn’t have the transportation costs, and so you’ll be able to use your low-carbon savings account to pay for locally produced food. What it does is it really gets the regular Canadians involved in solving this problem. Oil and gas is going to be here for many decades still. And our oil and gas here in Canada is by far the most environmentally sound and environmentally advanced oil that is produced anywhere in the world. In fact, our Canadian oil sands is going to be net-zero by 2050. There are things that we can do in terms of how we manage our forests. There’s technological advances that can be made in terms of forest fire early detection and in terms of fighting forest fires. That really affects us here because forestry is so important to our economy.”
