I am writing a letter to the editor to publicly ask some questions of Mr. Dalton about his work as the Maple Ridge-Mission representative.
First, let’s get it out of the way – I am a teacher, so yes, I have a vested interest in education in the province.
But, I am also a parent with a young child in the system and my concerns are for her education as well as my career. I wanted Mr. Dalton to stand up for public education, and work to see it get the funding it deserves.
He was a teacher, he should get it. Instead, he and his party have taken even more money away from our districts. Dalton could apparently convince the Liberals that private schools needed more money, after all private schools have seen a massive increase in their funding from tax dollars and he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Education for Independent Schools.
But my child, like the vast majority of kids in this riding, is not in private school. I can’t afford it. So my question is, where is your advocacy on behalf of my child’s education?
Or do you simply advocate for the privileged few?
Shall we move on to health care?
My mother has experienced some serious medical issues as she has gotten older. We have had to take her to the hospital here in Mission. Have you been to the hospital in Mission, Mr. Dalton?
You might not know where it is, since you so rarely come out to the Mission half of your riding. The nurses and doctors have been truly amazing. They are caring, kind and truly experts! But the wait times! And the fact that my mother, while still receiving intravenous antibiotics, had to leave the hospital because they needed her bed. They are starving for funds there. Mission Hospital is dramatically underfunded. They regularly have more patients than they are funded for. Nurses are the glue holding the system together and they are burning out and leaving. My question, Mr. Dalton, is where is your voice on this underfunding of health care? Or is it that you use private services so you don’t care about what the rest of us deal with?
Mr. Dalton has not stood up for public education and public health care.
Janise Nikolic
Mission