Meet the provincial election candidates in the battle ground of Nepean

Change is coming: For the first time in almost 20 years Nepean will have a new representative at Queen’s Park. Last year longtime PC incumbent Lisa MacLeod announced she would not be seeking re-election after serving the riding since 2006. 

• According to 2021 statistics, 132,000 people call the riding of Nepean home. It includes Bells Corners, the growing suburb of Barrhaven, Arlington Woods, Craig Henry, and Manordale. 

Who’s running: Tyler Watt, who lost to MacLeod by only about 2,000 votes in 2022, is running for the Nepean Liberals again. Days before the early winter election was called, the PCs chose Alex Lewis as their candidate. The NDP are running Max Blair. Shelagh McLeran is running as the Green Party candidate. 

Early polling: Numbers released by Mainstreet Research on Feb. 5, show Lewis is in the lead with 33.5 per cent of respondents saying he has their vote. Watt is polling in second place with 27.5 per cent, and Blair is in third place at 6.9 per cent. Another 26.5 per cent say they are still undecided. A total of 1,200 people responded through a phone survey. 

The Lookout sat down with the three main party candidates to hear their platforms and priorities. Answers have been edited for length and clarity. 

Alex Lewis - Progressive Conservative

Background: Lewis, a proud gay father, has been a police officer in Ottawa for the last decade. Prior to that, he worked behind the scenes in politics. The Nepean PC candidate also used to serve as executive director of the Bell’s Corners BIA. 

Public safety: “I am a municipal police officer and I worked exclusively in the ByWard Market. I've seen the failed policies related to drugs and the effects that that's had on the families and the residents. We talk about public safety as an all-encompassing view. I'll tell you right now, we've seen a 116 per cent increase in Canadian firearms crime alone. That is a result of failed policies, including failed policies at the border. President Trump is forcing us to deal with this issue in some respect. But there’s some irony in the fact that he says we’ve got all this fentanyl coming into the United States from Canada. Well, that doesn’t address the cocaine that we’ve got coming up from the United States. It doesn’t  address the fact that nearly every single gun that’s pulled off the streets is an illegal firearm that’s brought in from the United States.”

U.S. imposed tariffs: “We are facing an existential crisis here in this province right now, and we can have conversations about health care, we can have conversations about education, and I'm happy to have those. The fear however is that if we don't get ourselves prepared for the impending doom that we are actually facing then we're we're in a distinct disadvantage for things like education, things like health care, which are based off a tax base from small and medium-sized businesses if we are faced with the prospect of, you know, 400,000 people losing their jobs and over two million small businesses in the province that will be affected by a trade war. That is why we are pushing for this four-year mandate to match President Trump's term, so we have some continuity in who is negotiating on our behalf.”

Transit: “We are creating an environment for Nepean and Ottawa to be more affordable by uploading the LRT system to Metrolinx. Premier Ford made it very clear that Stage 3 LRT was in the works. It's wonderful to see that type of investment. If you live in a community like Half Moon Bay, you need to take a bus to get to Fallowfield Station. You get off, then get on another bus, and that drives you to the LRT station. Stage 3 will change that. 

When I was the executive director of the Bells Corners BIA, I knew the benefit of having rapid transit based out of a community like this. And with D&D moving into the area, one of my priorities became advocating for a major bus line. I managed to get the 85 to come all the way here and it went all the way to the airport.” 

Sprung structures: “I am not in support of having the Nepean Sprung shelter built. I am in support of affordable housing. I am in support of an immigration system that takes these into account before the federal government decides to offload their failed immigration policies onto the backs of municipalities and onto the backs of the provincial government, which provides these services for healthcare, provides the services for first responders, etc…”

Healthcare: “Wait times are always an issue. In policing, I am bringing people into a hospital literally on a daily basis, and I've seen elderly members of our communities waiting in hallways, in emergency rooms, in ambulance stretchers, in hospital beds, waiting to get rooms. We're going to be adding another 3,000 beds across the province. We're one of the only governments that is committed to building new hospitals. That has not happened in decades. We have already seen the expansion locally with the Queensway Carleton Hospital.”  

Tyler Watt - Liberal 

Background: In 2022, Watt took almost 35 per cent of the vote in Nepean and came in second place. It was a big increase for the Ontario Liberals, who jumped 15 percentage points in the riding. Watt, who’s also gay, grew up in Barrhaven and works as a registered nurse at the Queensway Carleton Hospital.  

Healthcare: “Being a nurse in our riding, I see firsthand what's going on with our healthcare system. I think people are excited about the fact that a nurse is running, and I can bring that nurse lens and experience into our provincial legislature to really advocate for increasing access. For healthcare in our communities, access really is the biggest thing when it comes to healthcare, and right now, far too many people are depending on emergency rooms and are waiting 12-plus hours to get basic primary care that they should be getting-a lot easier into the community. 

Number one there are 30,000 people in this very Ward that don't have a family doctor, and that number is only increasing with the number of people that are retiring or leaving family medicine altogether.

Number two is that we have to change the way that we experience healthcare. I have a vision for getting a healthcare hub here in Nepean, which is where people have access to a kind of one-stop shop type of thing. So this would be having access to physicians, practitioners, phlebotomy blood clinics, diagnostic imaging, instead of the current complicated and convoluted system where you're lucky enough to speak with a doctor if you happen to have a family doctor.”

Education: “We have a growing number of families that are coming to Nepean and what I hear at the doors is that they're really concerned about the quality and meaningful education for their kids. Doug Ford got rid of class size caps, so we're going to reduce class sizes and cap them. That way, we can provide a more attentive and meaningful education for our students. No one can manage a class size of 30, 35 plus students. There's workplace violence and there's just not enough support or resources for our education workers.

So if we help them have a good, safe job where they can actually do their job and where they're passionate about it, that's going to be great for our students and that's what matters the most.”

Housing and affordability: “Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals have released their affordability plan and housing plan. We need to bring back rent control. This is something that Doug Ford got rid of in 2018. There are a bunch of development charges that we can change to reduce the price of building houses by up to $170,000. We're going to get rid of the land transfer tax for first-time homebuyers, for seniors who want to downsize and move to somewhere else to let that home become someone's first-time home or next new home. We're going to cut your taxes, we're going to get rid of the HST on home heating and hydro.”

Transit: ”Anyone in Ottawa knows that transit and getting around here is a nightmare. Our leader Bonnie Crombie came down to Ottawa. She is here frequently, which I love, and she announced that the Ontario Liberal government, under her, will upload the LRT. Now what we're doing differently than what Doug Ford promised last minute is we are not going to upload it to Metrolinx and privatize it. We're going to take on the funding for it, but still let OC Transpo manage it, and all of their staff will keep their jobs. We want to protect that unit and protect those workers, but we know that they need funding and they need those investments.”

Max Blair - NDP 

Background: Blair is a recent Carleton University graduate who has been employed as a legislative assistant for the House of Commons. He also worked as a policy analyst at Natural Resources Canada. 

Transit: “I think that my colleague Catherine McKenney really hit it on the head, which is that we keep getting capital funding, which is great when you have an already flourishing bus service.

But when your bus service is in what's been described as a death spiral, where you have fares going up, which is lowering ridership, which then causes fares to go up and it just keeps spinning, you need to do something to stop the spiral and start that growth again.

What we need to do is we need to invest in operations funding so we can actually hire new drivers, get the bus here on time, get the train here on time, make sure that there is a pair of transport drivers who can actually come out when you need them to come out. Once we have those in place, we'll start seeing ridership go up, which will allow us to lower fares, which will then allow us to build out our transit properly. 

I think the Liberals and PC plans to upload the LRT system to the province is a bad idea for two reasons: First, Metrolinx has shown that they are adding a lot of bureaucracy to things that don't necessarily need it. They have a couple of projects in Toronto that are many years past deadline and over budget. When Greyhound closed down across the province, they couldn't seem to get things together enough to fill in all of the spaces that were already existing.

I don't think there's a good decision to be made about uploading a municipal issue to a provincial level. When you start talking about something like transit where it really is a community's need-based and start putting it in the hands of a group that may say ’oh well my voters over here don't want me to spend on this so I'm not going to,’ and suddenly Bell's Corners doesn't get the bus that it needs, or Barrhaven doesn't get the service rates that it needs.“

Healthcare: “For Nepean residents specifically, there are two main approaches that I think that we should take.

The first is expanding the number of residency spots that we have in our schools and also increasing, or not increasing, and expediting the rate at which international accreditation gets recognized. Doing that alone would allow us to start stopping the shortage that we're having. We have two great universities and a great college that all have spots for nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals, which we could then use to leverage into our own local healthcare workforce.

The second step would be to make sure that we actually are taking the funding that we need and giving it to our healthcare workers. We're seeing more and more of our nurses in particular, leave for private practice, which you can't really blame them when it comes down to it. They can either feed their family doing private service or they can work overtime constantly and maybe make ends meet because Ford's capped our wages for so long.” 

Education: “The schools that we have here in the riding are some of the best in Ottawa and, I would argu,e potentially in the province, but that doesn't mean that they aren't without their issues. We're seeing more and more young people currently facing issues and traumas that they've never faced before. The need for counselors and support staff is higher than it's ever been. And the repair backlog across the province is growing larger and larger. At Franco West, we're seeing more and more portables appear outside of the school, which is not an ideal learning environment for kids, especially when their class sizes are ballooning.”

Affordability: “Our rents are 26 per cent above the national average, which is absolutely absurd. Bringing back rent controls and instituting bans on unfair evictions and unfair rent heights would be the first step in stopping that unaffordability from skyrocketing.

The second is we've seen so many folks falling off the housing ladder. We're at a spot where there are more people living on the street in province's history, and so we need to make sure that we're building supportive housing, non-profit co-op housing as much as we can, to make sure people can get back up onto the housing ladder and to ease the pressure that other folks are feeling.”