Charlie McDonald’s push for fair housing, better roads, and local healthcare

Charlie McDonald has several titles to his name: Councillor of Ward 7, deputy mayor, and a member of a variety of boards and committees, like the BIA and the police board.

McDonald is touched to be in his second year as deputy mayor. “I think that there is an accomplishment to have the confidence of everybody in the room that I could do the job.”

He’s very proud of the accomplishments himself, and council, have made in the last couple of terms. As deputy mayor he gets to pick a few different projects to work on, and one he did last year was introducing a renoviction bylaw.

He noticed that developers were buying up all sorts of properties and then evicting the current tenants, claiming extensive renovations were required. Residents were forced to leave, and “if they wanted to come back, the rent was three times higher,” McDonald said. People would go from paying $600 per month to moving back into their same residence and now paying $2,000, which many couldn’t afford.

McDonald says it contributed to the homelessness numbers seen in the area, an issue he cares deeply about. As part of the BIA, he helped to create a printout that is posted in many downtown Lindsay businesses with resources listed for where people can go when they’re in need. The goal is to actually help educate people on issues, like food insecurity, and giving real resources to those who need them.

Meeting up at the Olympia with Kawartha Lakes Weekly, he thinks of how last winter “we had a lot of encampments, we ended up finding 54 of them all homes,” a trend he hopes will continue.

The other big issue top of mind everywhere is the roads. In Lindsay, McDonald’s ward takes up the south part of the town going from Kent Street to View Lake, with roads being worked on all over town. Most notably, a big stretch of Kent Street was recently done, and McDonald says residents can expect more to be work in the future. “We just passed another million and a half dollars to upgrade the roads that have been waiting.”

It’s not just potholes that are being fixed; a lot of roads need attention to ensure they can stay healthy for years to come. When roads like Pottinger Street get torn up, it’s to replace all the cast iron to ensure pipes don’t burst, “you can’t do a lot of them every year, but they also need to be done.”

Noting that a lack of doctors has been a growing concern, McDonald points to how council has just invested more money into afterhours clinics for the second year in a row, “we’re (making) plans of how we’re going to keep it going.” Doctors from the clinic came to council asking for funding, and council agreed considering Ross Memorial’s emergency room would be overflowing without these vital services.

He’s also hoping to make Lindsay more of a travel hub in the future. “I would love to have transportation from here to Oshawa,” something along the lines of a GO Station he said, “I’m hoping before I’m out of this job that I’ll see something like that.”

Having lived in Lindsay his entire life, McDonald has enjoyed his time being able to help his community and trying to make a real difference.