The Green Party’s candidate for the Hastings-Lennox and Addington riding in the 2025 provincial election spoke on the Lorne Brooker Show on 800 CJBQ as part of its Meet the Candidates segment.
Mike Holbrook spoke about his upbringing, saying that he was born in California to Canadian parents, before eventually moving back to Canada at a young age.
He moved to the Hastings-Lennox and Addington riding in 2006.
Holbrook spoke of his home-building background as part of his approach to affordable housing.
“I worked at both ends of the spectrum. So I worked on a lot of very high-end houses and but I also did some work for Habitat for Humanity. So I did volunteering for them, some crew leading for them, and then I was hired on to help train people there,” Holbrook tells Lorne Brooker.
“So I have a pretty good understanding of how that end of things worked and how it does.”
He says that private enterprise can’t be the sole solution to addressing housing concerns.
“If you look at the low end of housing in Ontario, in terms of community housing, for example, we haven’t built anything since the middle 90s. So the push to have private enterprise sort of deal with the whole picture has rather failed,” Holbrook said.
Affordability, as well as the cost of living, was also discussed on the show.
Holbrook outlined his party’s plan to address affordability.
“The Green Party is suggesting at this point that the people who are at the most difficult end right now, those who are living on the ODSP and people on Ontario Works, that we need to increase those payments very significantly.”
“We’ve got to start at the bottom, make it possible for for people to live but then I think we have to move it upward.”
You can listen to the full interview with Lorne Brooker below:
Audio Player