Huron-Bruce Ontario NDP candidate Nick McGregor says he’s running to improve access to healthcare in the riding. He also wants to focus on affordability, helping municipalities and protecting Ontario industries.
“I’m born and raised in Clinton and my hospital is still Clinton hospital and we have not had overnight availability for the emergency room since 2019,” says McGregor.
He adds, “The fact that our emergency rooms keep closing down because of staff shortages and they haven’t really done anything to fix this problem that’s been going on for almost six years now— has really driven me to run.”
McGregor says, the NDP wants to recruit more doctors and nurses by opening up spots in universities and colleges.
He wants to make staffing conditions better for them, saying, “By making sure that they are paid what they are worth to us. Nurses have had their pay stymied and held back with Bill 124 that the Ford government put in and the nurses had to fight just to get a fair wage, and they’re facing things like violence in emergency rooms.”
McGregor feels the nurse to patient ratio should be more manageable, noting “It’s really important for us to have safe staffing levels.”
He says the staffing shortage has had other impacts. “The reliance on for-profit, private nursing agencies that are costing our hospitals hundreds of millions of dollars. Our hospitals are using private nursing agencies to fill in for missing staff. It’s actually costing us much more than if they were regular staff.”
“Another big concern for me is affordable living,” says McGregor, adding, “Housing and grocery prices keep climbing and the fact is, especially around Bruce nuclear, there is very little affordable housing.”
“The thing that really inspired me to run for the NDP is the fact that we have a Homes Ontario plan which sets a goal for 1.5 million new homes and gets the government back in the business of building homes like we used to,” says McGregor.
He’d also like to change the provincial/municipal fiscal framework, explaining, “People are locally, having their tax rates go up and up because of the downloading of financial responsibilities to municipalities over the years. Things like ambulance services, connecting link highways and other services were downloaded to each municipality as well as municipal housing and shelter programs and that’s causing land taxes for municipalities to be raised.”
His suggestion: “The things that we can best do to support our municipalities to do their jobs best is to reverse the unfair provincial downloads and cuts and ensure that these municipalities have sustainable finances so that they can actually fund programs locally that actually help their communities while not being weighed down by the debts that the provincial government keeps hanging over their heads.”
Meanwhile, McGregor says, “The Trump tariffs are going to be a threat to us. Our autonomy, not just in the products we export but even to our local tourism industry as well. What’s really important for us is that we fight against those tariffs by working with the affected industries.”
“We will support with a buy Ontario program so that things like our education, our hospital sectors they are able to source from Ontario farmers and so that farmers will have a better ability to fight these tariffs and not necessarily have to deal with as much of the brunt of that program,” says McGregor.
He adds, that could also be applied to the food in long-term care homes, noting, “We’re going to adopt a buy Ontario procurement policy to stabilize markets for farmers.”
McGregor says, it’s very important to him to ensure rural Ontario has a say, asserting, “Government after government been put on the back burner by both the liberal and PCs. Both of them closed rural emergency rooms and schools and have made it so that rural Ontarians have to travel further to just have essential services. The importance of our economy is too often dismissed by the provincial government which regularly fails to apply a rural lens to its one-size-fits-all decisions.”
He says, from a provincial perspective, “It’s really important for us to think about Huron-Bruce. Our workers at Bruce Power keep the lights on across the province. Our salt miners in Goderich keep our roads safe in the winter like the winter we have right now and our farmers feed cities. Everyone in Huron County who contributes to the great riding, this great area deserves equitable access to education and healthcare and other essential services just as if they were living in London or Toronto.”
McGregor is a high school teacher in Goderich.
