Local Green Party candidate and provincial party leader Mike Schreiner said he feels the winds of change in the air, on the street and, at least according to one polling company exec, in the numbers.
Accompanied by national Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Schreiner unveiled the party’s plan to expand the current Greenbelt Friday outside the Boathouse just south of downtown.
Buoyed by what he is hearing at the door, support from several high profile Guelph citizens and word from the head of the independent polling firm Mainstreet Research that Schreiner will win the Guelph riding, Schreiner said the riding is definitely winnable.
“It validates what we’re feeling on the ground. I’m feeling so much momentum on the ground,” he said Friday following his platform announcement.
“I’m having prominent people who have been lifelong Liberal, PC and NDP voters coming out and publicly endorsing me,” said Schreiner, dropping the names of several high-profile Guelphites he says are switching their colors this election.
“But a poll is a poll. The only thing that matters is on June 7th,” he said.
“I want Guelph to lead Ontario,” Schreiner said. “Electing Ontario’s first Green MPP will just elevate Guelph’s leadership in that regard.”
May was making her third appearance in Guelph in just over a month.
“We have Greens in Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, British Columbia and me in Ottawa and I can tell you, even one Green voice in a provincial legislature, or federal parliament, makes a huge difference," she said.
“We’re kind of like the honest brokers, just like your neighbours in the room, able to tell you what’s really going on. So when you get the political spin from the others, all you get from us is the straight goods,” May said.
“You will be so proud when you make history in Guelph.”
Schreiner said Friday that the current 1.8 million acre Greenbelt that protects agricultural land and watersheds in Southern Ontario should be expanded to include the 1.5 million acre Bluebelt, an area environmental groups have identified that includes expanding current watersheds in the belt and adding new ones.
“The Green Party not only supports maintaining the current Greenbelt, but we want to expand the Greenbelt to include the Bluebelt … the full Bluebelt that’s being proposed by the Greenbelt alliance, which would include the Grand River watershed, the Paris/Galt Moraine as well as the watershed in Simcoe County, particularly the Nottawasaga Watershed,” Schreiner said.
He said that because of the climate crisis we are going to see more extreme weather events, including flooding, “and that is why it is so essential to maintain the Bluebelt as a way to manage stormwater runoff, in particular, to help manage flooding moving forward.”
Schreiner also called out the Liberal government for what he said was “a failure to protect Guelph’s water from the Dolime Quarry.”
“For five years now the City of Guelph has been asking the province to put conditions on the quarry’s water-taking permit," he said.
