Kristen Halfpenny wants to stop building on Flamborough and Glanbrook’s farmland, get rid of wind turbines and reinstate doctors and nurses who lost their jobs for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Halfpenny is Flamborough-Glanbrook’s MPP candidate from the New Blue Party.
While Halfpenny, 41, lives in Fort Erie, she was born in Hamilton and has family in the area.
She descibes herself a “Jill of all trades” and an “entrepreneur”, having worked as a beekeeper, a bookkeeper, and entertainment business operator. Halfpenny hosts karaoke nights and is involved in her local New Blue Party.
She said rural communities are important to her, and she's especially concerned about protecting farmland.
“People think there's so much land, we have so much to work with. It's not true,” she said.
Halfpenny said wind turbines are an issue Flamborough-Glanbrook is facing. "They're going up at a higher rate now," she said, adding that wind turbines emit a noise that disturbs neighbours and kills birds.
According to data from the Canadian government, there are no wind turbines in Flamborough or Glanbrook.
If elected MPP, Halfpenny said, she would allow private clinics to open to alleviate the backlog in Ontario’s hospital system.
“We've got people waiting a year for scans and people are dying on a waiting list,” she said, adding that if some residents can pay to see a doctor faster, it will free up room for people who cannot afford to pay for private healthcare.
Another way to deal with that backlog, she adds, is to reinstate healthcare workers who lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic for not getting vaccinated.
“We need family doctors, and before we start bringing in people from other countries or paying to train new people, we need to bring back the experienced people that have years, even decades, of expertise behind them,” she said.
Lilian Badzioch, a spokesperson for Hamilton Health Sciences, said 178 of the hospital system's more than 18,000 employees did not comply with the vaccine policy and were terminated. For the staff who did receive their vaccinations, Badzioch wrote, "We appreciate their ongoing commitment to the safety of our patients and each other."
