There’s a strange thing that happens every time we vote in Sarnia-Lambton. We go to the polls, cast our ballots, and more often than not send someone to Queen’s Park or Ottawa whose job isn’t really to represent us. Their job is to represent their party.
That’s the catch with party politics. It’s packaged as democracy, but it’s more like an assembly line: candidates get stamped with a party logo, shipped off to the legislature, and expected to follow the script. And if that script doesn’t fit Sarnia’s needs? Too bad.
Take Marilyn Gladu, for example. In 2021, when Canada was trying to ban conversion therapy, a practice widely condemned by medical experts, she opposed the legislation. Why? Because it didn’t align with the Conservative Party’s stance on so-called "religious freedoms." Here’s the problem: protecting harmful practices under the banner of religious freedom doesn’t serve Sarnia. It serves a party agenda that’s more concerned with ideological battles than the actual well-being of people in our community.
Or consider Gladu’s public push for hydroxychloroquine during the early days of COVID-19, promoting it as a potential treatment despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary. That wasn’t about Sarnia. That was about echoing the party’s narrative at the time, appealing to a certain base instead of relying on facts. Meanwhile, our healthcare system was overwhelmed, people were scared, and what we needed was leadership grounded in reality—not political theatre.
Then there’s Bob Bailey, who’s made a career out of voting along party lines, even when those votes hurt the very people he’s supposed to represent. Remember the Progressive Conservative cuts to education? Increased class sizes, reduced support for special needs programs, and a general gutting of resources that directly impacted schools in Sarnia-Lambton. Bailey voted in favour of all of it. Not because it was good for Sarnia, but because that’s what the party told him to do. Imagine being an MPP and thinking your loyalty to Doug Ford matters more than your loyalty to the teachers and students in your own riding.
Or look at healthcare. Bailey assured us that services at Bluewater Health wouldn’t suffer under Conservative rule. Yet here we are, with chronic staff shortages, ER wait times through the roof, and a healthcare system held together by the sheer willpower of exhausted nurses and doctors. His party’s policies helped create that crisis, and he backed them every step of the way.
This isn’t about Gladu or Bailey as individuals. It’s about the system they’re trapped in and the one we keep reinforcing every election. Party politics forces good people to make bad decisions because their job isn’t to think critically; it’s to stay in line.
So maybe the question isn’t just, “Who are we voting for?” Maybe it’s, “When was the last time your representative voted against your core beliefs just to keep their party happy?”
And why do we keep rewarding that?