Lauren Pezzella is a Red Deer local, currently attending Red Deer College as a business student, and working part-time around her studies. She is interested in advocating for families, rural Canadians and the interests of the middle class, and those trying to get there. 

This is Pezzella's first foray into politics, and she is hoping to inspire central Albertans to choose NDP this year when they head to the polls on October 21.

1. How do you plan on getting more money for Canadian families? 

We need to start by reducing the debt burden from our young people. We need to make sure that everyone has an affordable place to live. We need to expand public healthcare service in areas like prescription drugs and dental so all Canadians can save money out of their pockets. We want to create more investment in infrastructure to create more jobs and opportunities all across the country, and most importantly, in our backyards. 

We want to save families over $1000 every year with energy-efficient retrofits and we want to make sure we can electrify transit by the year 2030. We want to launch a Canadian Climate Change Bank to make a big, meaningful investment in innovative clean energy that we desperately need. 

2. Canadians are saying they care a lot about the environment. What issues do you see as having the biggest impact on the environment, and how do you plan to address it?

Climate change is an enormous concern for Canadians and Albertans. We’re facing more climate-related disasters like fires and floods, and our arctic is heating up three times as fast as anywhere else. Last summer was fires, this summer was rain destroying crop fields and reducing tourism - this is local tourism and international tourism. 

We need to make an investment in green futures. Not only for our environment but for our economy as well. We need to take bold steps, like making our energy carbon-free, retrofitting homes across the country and putting more zero-emission vehicles on the road. This isn’t only about the environment, it’s about getting in front of changes that are coming because they are coming and we need to make sure none of our workers are left behind. 

3. What issues do you see in our education system, and how do you plan on addressing them? 

Education is more than just learning and development in the classroom. It’s about outside of the classroom as well. Currently, Canadians pay some of the highest childcare costs in the world - we can pay up to $20,000 per child, which is almost a down payment on a small house. We need to make sure that all families have access to high quality, affordable care when they need it. We need to make sure that every child in Canada has access to early learning [care] and a bright future. 

We want to invest over 1 billion dollars in childcare and make parental leave more flexible so you can be there for your children when they need it most. I was sitting down doing my own budgeting with a friend of mine who has two amazing little boys of her own. I’m astounded how she can make it work. She pays almost her entire wage to childcare alone. 

4. How do you plan to manage the healthcare needs of our aging population?

Seniors have invested their entire lives working to make Canada better. Now, many of them are facing financial insecurity, poverty, isolation, and increased healthcare needs. Hundreds of thousands of Canadian seniors - many of whom reside here in Lacombe, in Red Deer, in central Alberta - are stuck living in poverty because they’re currently having to choose between rent, food, and prescription drugs. we need to create a national senior strategy to ensure that seniors and their caregivers are treated with all the dignity they deserve. 

We need to make drug coverage affordable for everyone with universal and public pharmacare and expanded healthcare coverage to dental, vision and hearing. We need to improve services offered to people who live in rural and remote communities and tackle isolation and abuse. By offering things like dental and pharmacare, it reduces the overall impact on our healthcare system. 

Issues like loneliness increase the strain on our health care and social services. Loneliness increases dependence on health care services- it’s incredible to see the correlation between those things.

5. How do you plan to address any shortfalls in our healthcare system, such as a lack of services and facilities in Central and rural Alberta? 

One of the first things the NDP wants to do is create a national pharmacare program that provides universal, public and comprehensive coverage to everyone across Canada. We want to start this program in 2020 and roll it out immediately, to be able to provide everyone in Canada with the same high quality benefits no matter where they live. 

We want to ensure that access to prescription drug coverage is there regardless of your job, where you live, your age or health status, or how much money you make. This access to necessary medicine will provide a reduction in our healthcare system’s needs, as people are not choosing between rent and healthcare needs, and that keeps them out of the hospitals. 

Rural communities have often gotten the short end of the stick on healthcare. While it is a provincial matter for facilities for healthcare, I want to make sure that I’m fighting for all Canadians, especially people in central Alberta, to have quality and easy-to-access care, no matter where they are. 

In addition to prescription coverage, over 7 million Canadians are avoiding going to the dentist because of how expensive it is. This is hugely detrimental to people's health and emergency dental visits cost Canadians an average of $155 million a year. We want to expand the dental coverage to the 4.3 million Canadians who need it and currently can’t afford it. This also reduces stress on our healthcare system and will give us services when we need it, no matter the cost. 

6. What services do you think should be created or enhanced to address our major social issues such as poverty, homelessness, and unemployment? 

The NDP has a plan to create half a million units of quality affordable housing [units] across Canada. We want to make it easier for young people to buy homes and reduce the stress of renting by making co-ownership easier and reintroducing the 30-year mortgage. 

We also want to tackle issues like food insecurity and make sure that no one goes hungry in Canada. We want to work with farmers to get more affordable, healthy, local food on tables in communities across the country. And we want to tackle food waste with a national strategy to reduce waste and support initiatives to repurpose and process foods that would otherwise head to the landfill. 

We also want to make sure that Canadians can make ends meet with strong public services like affordable housing, universal pharmacare and affordable accessible childcare. 

 

7. How do you plan on supporting Alberta’s core industries, such as oil and gas, tourism, forestry, and agriculture?  

If we don’t get control of climate change, then the industries we’ve come to depend on will disappear - that does count for oil and gas, tourism, forestry and agriculture. In the last two summers, we’ve had horrible fires and this year we had horrible rain. This has greatly reduced our crop yield and affected agriculture. That’s also led to a decrease in our tourism. This is not good for Alberta's economy. 

Step one is to create those renewable energy jobs and to make sure we’re fighting to have every Albertan, in every line of work, be able to have sustainable long-term employment. 

[Oil and gas] jobs aren’t going away overnight. What we need to do, though, is acknowledge that they won’t be around forever. We need to start creating jobs that not only employ people currently living in Alberta, but their children and their children’s children. 

8. What major infrastructure projects do you see as a high priority for our area? 

One of the big ones for many Albertans is having better health care facilities. While that is a provincial matter, I do intend to fight for all of us central Albertans and make sure that we’re getting our fair share of the cut, and in a timely manner. 

We need to invest in telecommunications across Canada. We pay some of the highest rates in the world and are quickly falling behind countries like Australia. Australia also has a very large landmass with a very sparse and distributed population, and yet their internet connection is consistently cheaper and faster than ours.

If we want to keep up in our economy we need to be able to have accessible telecoms systems for everyone in Alberta. Those systems allow us to increase our education, to create job opportunities and without the investment in that infrastructure, we’re going to fall behind in the country. 

A trans mountain pipeline has gone through. It’s been approved by our current government. That’s not changing. What does need to change is our recognition that these are a temporary solution to building our economy. These investments into pipelines don’t have the same long-term economic sustainability as green energy projects and we need to recognize that. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

I want to let my constituents know that I’m going to fight for them. I’m going to help fight for the things we need most in our community. I want to fight for a better Canada. 

The most important thing in this election is taking a look at the issues,  and decide what’s important to you. No matter who you vote for, it’s important to get out and vote.