McCleary an “everyday person”
Sara McCleary says she understands Sault Ste. Marie’s issues on a personal level and feels her experience makes her the right person to represent the riding as the New Democratic Party member of parliament in the House of Commons.
Whether it’s the steel industry, the lack of employment opportunities, or the difficulty retaining talent in the Sault, McCleary says she has felt the issues personally.
“I want to represent the people of the Sault who are going through the same struggles as I am,” she told CBC News. “As in, the everyday person in the Sault, not the lawyers and the doctors who are making hundreds of thousands a year.”
McCleary feels as though there is a balance to be struck between protecting the environment and the local steel industry. She says that large polluters like steel manufacturers shouldn’t be exempt from the carbon tax. At the same time, she says that the government needs to work with those companies to help reduce their emissions.
The federal government needs to be “helping them to invest in new technologies and greener technologies and reducing their emissions and then they won’t have to pay those taxes,” McCleary opined.
Creating jobs and retaining talent is another issue that McCleary thinks needs more attention.
“I know every politician promises to create jobs, but that’s something that is definitely close to my heart,” she said.
“I myself have struggled to find a good, family sustaining, full time job and I know I’m not the only one. I’ve got friends that I went to school with that have been leaving (the Sault) in droves. My sister has gone to Toronto. We hear about it all the time, that people at just leaving the city because they can’t find good work here.”
McCleary added that she really wants to see good jobs coming to Sault Ste. Marie and it’s something that she will be pushing for, if she is elected as Sault MP at the October 21 federal election.
There is a disconnect between the jobs that students are being promised, and the actual state of the job market, McCleary told CBC News.
“I was told ‘hey, go to teachers college and you’ll become a teacher, they need all these teachers.’ So everybody did that,” she said. “And then we didn’t need teachers anymore.”
She thinks there should be more focus on hands-on skills than abstract thinking in the education system.
— with files from CBC News.
