With the federal election less than one month away, London MP’s are out spreading the word about their campaigns.
Dirka Prout is a first time candidate for London North Centre representing the NDP. As an engineer, Dirka knows how to solve problems, and realizes the obstacles a city like London faces on a daily basis. With London being one of the most student driven cities in the country with Fanshawe and Western University both here, Dirka explains how she plans to help out the student body in the Forest City.
“The first thing we’re looking at is to take the interest off of Canada’s student loans” says Dirka.
“That is certainly something that we think the government shouldn’t be profiting off of students who are trying to improve themselves. We do know that post secondary education is a pathway out of poverty, there is a very high payback once you have a post secondary education, there’s a big contribution to GDP as opposed to if you just have a high school so it’s very important.”
The NDP’S end goal? To have free education for all.
“Our long term goal is we want to have dialogues with the Provinces and Territories to make sure that in the future, post secondary education is free.”
In addition to interest free student loans, Dirka also says that housing rentals in London has been an ongoing problem for years, something she wants to fix.
“We see that the Liberal and Conservative platform talks about people who want to own homes, but there’s nothing for renters and a significant amount of students here in London are renters. Been hearing some very disturbing stories about evictions, about bidding wars for apartment buildings, and I’m sure that affects students too.”
Dirka says there is only one way to fix this problem; build more affordable buildings, and that this is her number one goal in this upcoming election.
“The NDP wants to build half a million affordable units across Canada and making sure that they are energy efficient.
We want to make sure that people don’t fall into energy poverty which is when you pay more than 30 percent of your income in heating or cooling.”
All of these problems have been ongoing in London, and it sounds like Dirka wants to change these as quickly as possible in order for London to have a sustainable future for all.
Elections will begin on October 21st.
