YOUNG FAMILIES WILL MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE IN ELECTION RESULTS TONIGHT
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
PARRY SOUND-MUSKOKA — Michael Bird “won’t be a sore loser” if Mark Carney wins tonight.
He expects the prime minister to keep his job — even if he didn’t get Bird’s vote this afternoon at the busy Gravenhurst Active Living Seniors’ Centre.
The school custodian who works in Bracebridge and lives in the basement of his parents’ home — with his wife and three kids — likes Pierre Poilievre because he’s “trying” to make Canada a better country.
But “I think Mark Carney will win, because he has a more demanding stance against Trump.”
Bird has lived in the Gateway to Muskoka for 17 years and previously voted for Tory.
However, he says Carney “has more pull with Trump and the younger crowd.
“I’ve never agreed with the younger crowd. I just like to make sure myself and my family are taken care of.”
Never a Trudeau fan, he was asked what the next government should do.
“Personally, I just hope they can help the housing crisis.
“I’m 31 and living with my parents in their basement. I have three kids and a wife. There are four adults and three kids aged 12, 8 and 6 months.”
They have a separate private space downstairs and share the kitchen.
He says his family simply can’t afford a house or even an apartment.
“The pricing is absolutely insane for housing.
“Apartments! Even if both me and her worked, we wouldn’t be able to take care of the kids and just barely afford to live.”
Not even if they considered a second-hand house?
“Everything is way over our price range.”
Bird was reminded of a questioner at a Liberal event Friday who said they’d have to wait until their parents die before they could get a house.
A single child, he said his parents are just under age 60 and he wants them to live a lot longer before he even talk about such a thing.
He pays him mom who buys the groceries and has thought about moving to Bracebridge to be closer to work. However, again prices are the same “if not more” in the neighbourhood of $1,700 a month for a family of five.
He has a mini van that’s paid for and says “thankfully gas just went down.”
Bird says most of his friends have left Gravenhurst and moved away — “to Toronto” — and elsewhere where he’s heard they, too, “are struggling.”
“I have a house … I’m voting Liberal’
Britt Gallant, 25, is voting for the first time in Ontario.
A transplant from PEI, she was headed in to vote “Liberal” when we caught up with her outside the Gravenhurst legion.
“I have a house and that’s exactly why I’m voting Liberal.”
A bartender, she and her partner “they” are a mechanic and they also have little kids.
“I really want to say I hope our generation comes out and votes. The last federal election voting among 18-25-year-olds was just 47 per cent — the lowest it’s ever been among that age group.”
A political science major at the UPEI, she said “I was really interested in that at the time, but I didn’t want to get in to politics.”
So now she’s in to bartending.
For her, food, Trump and his tariffs are all concerns mostly aligned with Conservatives.
She thinks “everything in Poilievre’s platform sides with Trump.
“I know he says he’s opposed to Trump, but all his policies coincide heavily with Trump.”
“Child care and best interests of family”
Mathew and Laura Henry are another young family in their “mid to late 20s” with two small children — one in a stroller they were pushing to the legion to cast their ballot.
For them they’re “voting in the best interests of our family,” he said. “What we see is going to help our daughter and son and my wife.”
Both work and “we have our own house,” she added, “but child care” is a priority for the family of four.
As for who they were going to vote for?
“It’s not something we like to share,” Mathew said.
EMAIL: [email protected]
30 years of TRUSTED ‘Local Online Journalism’
SINCE MAY 20, 1994
Twitter: @muskokatoday, Facebook: mclairmont1
SUBSCRIBE for $30 by e-transferring to [email protected]
Mail cheque to MuskokaTODAY.com Box 34 Gravenhurst, Ont. P1P 1T5
And include your email address to get stories sent to your inbox
