“Even though we hear all the time that, this riding, Hastings-Lennox and Addington, I hear it all the time oh you know this is a blue riding you’re up against a lot. That’s true but people deserve to have an alternative. And I thought, well maybe I’m the alternative for folks like me who feel like they don’t have someone to stand up there who looks like them and sounds like them and shares the same concerns that they have. I just, I think that we need to expect better than what we’ve had in this riding and I really hope that that’s what I can deliver to people here.”
She says she’s been reaching out to as many constituents and local leaders in as many parts of the riding as possible to learn about what they need for their communities.
“And we have something called a New Deal for Municipalities. And the idea with that is to re-upload a lot of those responsibilities that we saw downloaded over the past several governments, both Conservative and Liberal governments. She came out to Tweed in the summertime and she did meet with a group of local mayors. The other leaders were invited to meet with the mayors as well but she’s the one that showed up.”
Zielke also called it disappointing that incumbent, PC Ric Bresee, only attended one of three all-candidates meetings held over the last week.
And while Doug Ford says he called the snap election to give his Conservatives a strengthened mandate to fight possible impending tariffs from the United States, Zielke says that’s not the only issue people are concerned about.
“But I haven’t actually found in talking to people that that’s necessarily the thing that’s at the top of their mind. We do usually have a brief conversation about it but it isn’t long before we move on to those other things that have been affecting them for a very long time and that they recognize are going to continue to affect their well-being if we don’t address them soon. But I don’t think it’s taken over the narrative in my riding the way that I expected it to when the election was called.”
She says if elected, the NDP would collaborate with the other provinces and the federal government to present a united response to American tariff threats along with working to break down interprovincial trade barriers and create less reliance on the U.S. as a trading partner.
