Muslim Link Interview with PC provincial candidate Matt Young

Muslim Link: Many Muslim Canadians we interviewed have noted disappointment with the Ontario Public Education System in terms of its low academic standards and are concerned that the system will not prepare their children to compete in an increasingly globalized workforce. What are your thoughts on this?

We find it a travesty that the province sets the level of expectation at 75%. So only 75% of our kids need to be able to read, write and do math. Instead of looking at it that way let's look at it the other way, 25% of our kids can't! And let's be honest these aren't difficult tests; standardized tests are not difficult and 25% of the kids are still failing. So forget about competing with people from Russia, Brazil, India, China we won't be able to compete with anyone in the developed world because 25% of our people can't read and write. We have to get that number higher; it has to be closer to 90 or 95%. And then we have to focus more on Maths and Sciences because focusing on anything other than Maths and Sciences will not prepare us to compete with people from the developing world because they understand what it is going to take to compete and they are putting tremendous resources into improving their education system so they can compete with us.

Muslim Link: According to the Simon Fraser Institute, several elementary and secondary schools in the riding, such as Charles H. Hulse Public School, Hawthorne Public School, Ridgemont High School and St. Patrick's High School, are under-performing. What immediate steps would you take to address this matter if you were elected?

You notice that a lot of those schools that you mentioned are clustered in the same geographic area, with St. Pats, Ridgemont and Charles Hulse all within less than a kilometre of each other. I think it tells us something; it tells us either the populations attending that school aren't getting what they need or that we are simply failing to pay enough attention to that community that goes to that school. And I went to Ridgemont; I took a credit at Ridgemont years ago and I can attest that it is a very different community than where I went to high school at Brookfield. We don't have to spend any more money. We just need to do things differently to recognize that the community attending these schools is different. It doesn't mean they are worse; it doesn't mean they are better. It just means they are different and we probably need to deliver services and education slightly differently within the curriculum.  It is absolutely unacceptable that you can have an identifiable community within one kilometre of each other that underperforms. If these were just schools underperforming across the country, you know what, that's just a poorly administered school. But this is an identifiable group that is saying you know what if you live hear your kids aren't going to have the same chances as everyone else and that is unacceptable to us. We cannot say that because you come from the Ridgemont area you are not going to get a good education. That's got to change. We will make whatever steps necessary to deliver the same quality of education to people in that part of the city, in that part of the riding, as everywhere else.

Muslim Link:  In 1975, Dalton McGuinty had to work for a sum of only 6.4 weeks in the summer to pay off his undergraduate tuition fees. In 2006, students would have had to work for 16.6 weeks in order to finance only 1 year of undergraduate tuition fees. Over the past 15 years, tuition fees in Ontario have increased by over 200%. How do you propose students pay off their debt, especially with growing unemployment and underemployment of post-secondary graduates?

Paying off debt is unfortunately a part of our lives. I am not a proponent of no tuition. What I am a proponent of is guaranteeing access so there are a lot of families who don't qualify for OSAP because the parents make $60,000 or $70,000 a year. That's not a lot of money. And if you are making that much money it is going to be hard to send your kids to school. What I want to do is I want to guarantee that these kids have access to OSAP loans no matter what. If you qualify to get into school, we will make sure that you can go to school. Then, when you get out of school you will pay us back, eventually, maybe not right away. That's what we owe to kids if they want to get educated. But they can't stay there forever on free tuition because we need them in the workforce because that is what is better for the country and better for the province.

Muslim Link: Some Muslim Canadians refrain from taking student loans on religious grounds. Has your party ever considered creating alternatives to student loans for financing post-secondary education?

I don't think we have ever thought about it. I understand that accumulating interest in the Muslim world is a problem. It's an interesting option, right? You could put all sorts of things together like service bonds where you work for the state ostensibly after you are done school for a period of time to pay back your loans. It would provide good on the job training and it would also provide a means for people to get loans who otherwise couldn't afford it and it wouldn't be an affront to the religion. I think it could be a great idea. Has anyone ever thought about it? You know, in other jurisdictions they have national services where you can go to school and you owe the state x number of years of service.  They will pay you while you are there but you have to work for the state. You can join the military, you can join the police force, you can clean dishes, you can do a variety of things under the auspices of a national service. {sidebar id=13}

Muslim Link: According to research conducted at York University, Muslims have the second highest unemployment rate in Canada with 14.4% of the population being unemployed as compared to 7.4% of the general population. This may be due to racism. This also may be due to the fact that some Muslim Canadians are newcomers and newcomers to Ontario face many barriers to finding gainful employment. What actions, if any, does your party propose to take to address unemployment amongst racialized Canadians and newcomers to Ontario?

The first thing you do is you create more jobs. You are right; a lot of the Muslim community are newcomers. That said, if you look at a lot of the diasporas, whether it is from Lebanon or Somalia , that came in the 80s or 90s, a lot of them have never known anything but Canada. There is an entire generation of Lebanese and Somali Canadians, who are a significant portion of the population here in the riding, who were born here. They are graduating from university now; they haven't known anything but Canada but that doesn't mean that life isn't tough for them because there is the outward perception that a woman in a hijab looks different than a woman without a hijab. That doesn't mean it's acceptable that there is higher unemployment. What we need to do is create jobs. If you create jobs there will be an opportunity for these people to enter the work force. I'll give you an example. My father worked for a company here in Ottawa partly owned by one of the Caterpillar dealers. After 38 years they closed the doors. So that put over 100 people on the street. So what is my dad doing now? He's working for almost minimum wage in retail.  Who would normally work for minimum wage in retail? Students or new Canadians. So what you have done is you have taken people who have extensive work experience and were traditionally at a higher strata in the work force and you have pushed them down because there are no more good jobs for people. And unfortunately what that does is that pushes out students, young people and new Canadians who are typically entering from that bottom of the workforce. What we need to do is create jobs at the highest level and you create opportunities for people to enter the workforce and then we will seem them climb the ladder like everyone else has. But until we have more jobs it is going to remain this way. 7% is too high for even the general population. 14% is absolutely too high for the Muslim population. But until we get more jobs out there I don't see how we fix these problems. There is a number of ways we create more jobs. Just yesterday we release a White Paper on how to create more manufacturing jobs because 300,000 of them have been lost over the last decade. Manufacturing jobs have traditionally been the backbone of Ontario. Part of what fueled our manufacturing was one-our proximity to the United States and the second part is we always had very very affordable hydro, until recently and that gave us a competitive advantage to our neighbours to the South. That advantage is gone. We also had a low cost dollar in the past. That's gone. We need to find different ways to do things. So we are proposing targeted tax relief to stimulate industrial growth.  We are proposing a lower hydro rate for industrial consumers of hydroelectricity.  It's unfortunate because it's a subsidy but it moves the subsidy from windmills to something that is actually creating jobs. We run a factory where I work at General Dynamics-hydro rates are absolutely killing us. It makes it far more expensive for us to do business than it ever has and the only way that you can get those costs under control is to trim your payroll. You can't simply pass the cost on to consumers because our competitors in other jurisdictions aren't going through those same problems. {sidebar id=14}

Muslim Link: Many Muslim Canadians we interviewed complained about difficulties finding a family doctor. How does your party plan to address the lack of family doctors in Ontario cities?

We do need more doctors. But what this government has done is that they have over spent on everything else so they are rationing health care. They don't want more doctors because more doctors cost more money. We need to bring in more doctors. The federal government last year or the year prior recommended to Ontario that they work together to improve the rate at which we recognize foreign credentials and this Ontario government said no. So, I would propose that we need to do better at recognizing foreign credentials. That doesn't mean that everyone who has a medical degree from anywhere in the world can come and practice in Ontario but it means that we must get better at recognizing the credentials that we have in Ontario that are currently sitting idle. It is unacceptable that people are going to Apple Tree in perpetuity. It is not good for their health and it is not good for the society we live in. Because we have ample capabilities among people whether they come from India or China or Eastern Europe or Western Europe who just don't want to go through the very lengthy and very costly process of becoming accredited to practice medicine in Canada.

Muslim Link: According to Statistics Canada's 2001 Census, Ottawa has the fourth largest Muslim population in Canada, with the riding of Ottawa South having the highest concentration of Muslims. Taking that into consideration, how have you attempted to engage with Ottawa-South's ethno-culturally diverse Muslim Canadian community during your campaign?

It's been great. I'm going out to the Assunnah mosque this afternoon and I intend to be at Assalaam a little bit later. I've been meeting with members of the Muslim community all the time, usually after I'm done knocking on doors in the evening I will usually go and have a meeting with members of the Muslim community. And it's really been an eye-opener for me because I've never been to a Muslim prayer session at a mosque. And coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, the mosque experience is very different from that of a traditional church. At a traditional church if you show up late you get chastised, at the mosque if you showed up late, nobody seemed to mind. But the way the sermon was delivered it's very similar to what you would see in an Anglo-Saxon Roman Catholic environment. So that's been fantastic for me. I would have not had that opportunity had I not been in politics. We've been out for iftar, we plan to go out again this weekend to see the people. And we'll have the dates! I don't know how you guys can do 17 hours without eating in a day? What I have been trying to tell members of the Muslim community is that you are a massive force politically and you need to take advantage of that. If every Muslim in Ottawa-South voted the same way, you would pick the winner every single time.  But the Muslim community is as diverse as every other community and not everyone is going to vote the same way but you have significant political powers. And if we look at other minority groups in other parts of the province they have recognized this and it will not be long before both the Conservative and Liberal and potentially NDP candidates from Ottawa-South will all be Muslims because the Muslim community is a tremendous political force I behoove on everyone in the community to recognize that fact and get engaged and figure out where your politics align whether it is Liberal, whether it is NDP, or hopefully Progressive Conservative. Get engaged because we can learn a lot from you! And hopefully you can learn a lot from us. And it makes for a more cohesive community, a stronger Muslim community, and a stronger Ottawa-South. {sidebar id=16}

Muslim Link: The head of The Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre, Asfia Sultan, claimed that she was fired due to Islamophobia. Although the case has now been settled without a public hearing, she, among others, such as members of the Canadian Somali Canadian Mothers' Association, have raised concerns about systematic discrimination against Muslims in Ontario detention centres, in which Muslims are often under-represented among ministry employees ”“and over-represented among the inmate population. What are your thoughts on how issues of discrimination and abuse of inmates can be addressed in Ontario?  How can Ontario detention centres become centres of rehabilitation and reintegration, particularly for young offenders, as opposed to the current situation where, according to many Muslim Canadians we interviewed, young people come out of prison worse off than when they went in?

I think we have seen a number of cases, not just of discrimination but of abuse of inmates in Ontario detention centres. It's completely unacceptable. A wise man said a long time ago that you can measure a society on how it treats its prisoners and I think that we have been found wanting, not just with the Muslim community but with the community at large. The Muslim community presents a certain number of other challenges because we have done a poor job at understanding what the specific needs of the community are.  I think we are getting there. I think it is going to take a lot longer and take a lot more effort, a concerted effort to say  we have a Muslim population that is sizable in this country and by extension you are going to have a similarly sized inmate community, no more and no less than anyone else. We have to do what we can to treat these people humanely and consistent with their religious beliefs; it doesn't mean they will be able to get everything they want”because they are in prison now. But at the end of the day, we have to do better.

And your second question, about young people in person-we have to do a better job at keeping kids out of prison. There a terrifying statistic that the two largest population groups that are growing in Canada are Aboriginal Canadians and Muslim Canadians and the two largest population groups in prison are Aboriginal Canadians and Muslim Canadians. So from a strictly economic point of view , if we do not find a better way to deal with the Muslim Canadian population and the Aboriginal Canadian population we will not have enough prisons. That's bad for economics because we can't afford to build more prisons; it's bad for economics because you are taking all of those people out of the work force. And it is bad for societal cohesion because mothers and brothers and sons don't want to visit fathers and sons and other brothers in prison! So we have to do a better job.

The Ottawa Police Service has done a good job in a couple of communities, notably Ledbury-Banff where they had No Community Left Behind. If we could extend those programs,, if we could fund those programs to divert youth away from lifestyles that lead them to these ultimate encounters with the law and then like you said once they get out they're worse than when they went in and we've probably lost them. We have to do everything in our power to extend those programs that work, reach out to the community, and within your community there are a number of organizations who have identified this as a problem themselves and we should support those groups.  It's a non-traditional way and it's a grassroots movement and we should provide any support we can whether it's funding or whether it's employment support or whether it's furthering the number of Muslims that work in social services so that they can relate to these groups and that will be critical because the youth need to see themselves represented in the agencies that are helping them whether that's the police force, whether that's social services, whether it's child welfare services or they won't relate. And the school system is the same way. It's going to be tough, we must remain diligent and dedicated to this fact that we cannot continue on the path we are on because it leads to ruin so let's work together and get better at this. It seems like a trite answer but there is no magic bullet. It's just going to be a lot of work for a long time going forward.  

To learn more about Matt Young visit his website