The NDP candidate for Thunder Bay Superior North is Chantelle Bryson. During her tour of the north shore region she stopped in Schreiber to talk with Kim Krause of the Schreiber Media Centre. During the early polls last week one question kept popping up. Do you vote for the party or the person? All but one of the candidates running in the region are new faces, so it was decided that the purpose of these interviews would be finding out more about the person behind the position. Interestingly there seems to be an increase in the number of women taking on the fight for a seat in Ottawa and of the four candidates interviewed only one was male. 

Chantelle Bryson has quite a few personal ties to the region of Thunder Bay. She is married into a well known family in the Schreiber/ Terrace Bay Area and is a practicing lawyer and has lived in the region for over 27 years. We sat down with her to find out what made her decide to run and what her priorities would be. It turns out, being a lawyer brings a different perspective to how she sees her role in the NDP.  Accountability and being able to scrutinize policies from a legal perspective are her strengths and she has a firm understanding of the structures of provincial and federal government. 

This year some of the main issues that all parties are facing are housing, health care and mental health. Chantelle believes that working at the grassroots level of social programmes and reducing bureaucracy is the only way to achieve results in a cost effective manner. She is very concerned about the lack of sustainable funding for first nations issues. Chantelle pondered on the increase in the number of women entering politics and what might seem like a reaction against the male dominated roles of the past few years. In the Thunder Bay Area there are a number of disproportionate crimes against women and the rise in missing indigenous women is a serious problem. 

(Schreiber Media Centre and all CACTUS LJI partners are committed to a full discussion of the election and offers equal time to all candidates.)