By Angus Argyle [1]
BELLEVILLE – After serving as a federal MP for more than a decade, Daryl Kramp has won the provincial Progressive Conservative nomination for the Hastings-Lennox and Addington riding.
Kramp said that he decided to continue with his political career after losing his federal seat in the 2015 election because he said he believes he can still contribute and make Ontario a better place to live.
“I just feel an obligation, if I didn’t have the knowledge or the experience or the capacity or even the energy, it would be silly to do this but I think I can still make that contribution,” said Kramp.
He explained that his wife Carol helped him make the decision.
“As my wife said, I’ll be difficult to live with if I go ahead and do this but I’ll be almost impossible to live with if I don’t.”
Kramp told QNet News about several issues he would work on if he is elected as a Member of Provincial Parliament.
He said he believes the education system is under-funded, and that the right skills aren’t being taught to match the available jobs for students graduating from school.
“I’ve been at roundtables with business and industry that cannot get people capable of doing the work. They’re even shutting down lines and not operating at full production, and at the same time we still have people who are unemployed,” he said.
“We need to provide, we need to definitely put a real focus on matching the skills to the available job requirements and to the jobs of the future.”
Kramp also said he believes the province is in the middle of an energy crisis. “I can be as much of an environmentally responsible individual as anybody, but you have to do it in an intelligent fashion,” he said.
He explained that people in Ontario are now paying upwards of 70 cents per kilowatt hour more to pay for green energy projects when the province could be doing those same projects for a fraction of the price.
“All this did was create a massive money transfer to a few people and didn’t give us the environmental results we were looking for and made a cost prohibitor for our business to compete,” he explained.
Kramp said the provincial Liberal government, “butchered the energy file.” He said there are fairer ways of doing things so rural areas don’t have to pay high energy bills.
He explained that other province’s run their energy services differently in a way that allows urban and rural energy bills to be more equal.
Tracy McGibbon, a Bancroft town councillor, and John O’Donnell, the former head of Quinte Emergency Services, also vied for the nomination.