Like her NDP rival in the race to become the next Thompson MLA, Progressive Conservative candidate Charlotte Larocque spent time in Churchill during her campaign to hear the concerns of residents and potential voters there.
Speaking to the Thompson Citizen June 1 from the Hudson Bay port town, which is where her parents met, Larocque said the community has common concerns with much of the rest of the riding, such as education and health care, as well as some unique to it, like the lack of child and family services.
“The children that are being put into the system, if they can’t be placed here, they’re actually being sent to either Thompson or Winnipeg,” said Larocque, who was due to travel back from Churchill later on Wednesday. “That is one major concern and, of course, health care.”
Highways are not a concern in Churchill, since its only land link to the rest of Manitoba is the Hudson Bay Railway, but transportation is an issue, with train and flight schedules dictating when people can leave and come back. Because of the town’s small size, residents may sometimes have to leave and spend days out of town in order to accomplish something that a person in a larger community can do in the space of a couple of hours.
‘”There’s no dentist up here,” Larocue said, recounting a conversation she had with a resident who broke a tooth in March. There is a dentist that periodically comes to the community but no visits were planned anytime soon when the resident was in need of dental work.
“She actually was one of the privileged people that had the money to take the train down to Winnipeg and got her tooth fixed, but a lot of them can’t afford that,” Larocque said.
As she’s spoken to residents of the Thompson electoral division over the course of her campaign, the PC candidate has heard many examples of how services are harder to obtain in the north. Larocque recently spoke with representatives of Manitoba Possible, which advocates for and provides services to Manitobans with disabilities.
“One part of their program is they fix and supply wheelchairs,” Larocque says. However, all the wheelchair repairs are done in Winnipeg, which means that someone who needs to get their chair fixed has to ship it south, then wait for it to get fixed and get shipped back.
“We know what three weeks being locked up and not being able to move does to people’s morale and their mental health," Larocque said. “We’ve got to figure out a way to make that more accessible, because that’s a program that’s out there, we just need to extend it.”
With only about a year between the June 7 byelection and the next Manitoba general election, currently scheduled for the fall of 2023, Larocque feels that having a Thompson MLA on the government side of the house would be a benefit, noting that some PC MLAs are coming up the community this week.
“This is a bylelection, it’s not going to change the party in power,” she said, “It’s just giving us the opportunity to position ourselves strategically to continue having our voice heard louder. It would be advantageous for us to have someone at the decision-making table right now.”
Larocque plans to visit Gillam sometime between now and election day on June 7. Most of the rest of her efforts over the last half-dozen days of the campaign period will be on getting out the vote by contacting people who said they planned to vote for her or had not yet decided and encouraging them to get out and cast a ballot. One vote could count for more in a byelection, as turnout is usually lower than in a general election.
The PC candidate has already struck voting off her to-do list, having done so in an advance poll May 31.
Though the campaign has passed in a “blink of an eye,” Larocque says she has genuinely enjoyed the sometimes hectic experience.
“I thoroughly enjoy talking to people and hearing their stories, their concerns,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what party you’re from, this role is to represent all people. You have to know what’s going on and what people are thinking. And not just one demographic, all demographics. You need to know what’s going on on a personal level and how people are feeling about it.”
