Where Kanata candidates stand on housing, public service, crime and more

Kanata candidates answer voter questions on housing, public service, crime and more ahead of the federal election.

Published Apr 21, 2025

17 minute read

Federal election candidates in Kanata include Jenna Sudds, Greg Kung, Melissa Simon and Jennifer Purdy. Photo by Graphic by Sofia Misenheimer /PostmediaArticle content

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Hundreds responded, and we drew up what we’re calling the Citizen’s Agenda: five questions for Ottawa-area candidates in the April 28 federal election. Below are responses from the candidates for the four major parties in the riding of Kanata:

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Greg Kung of the Conservative PartyJennifer Purdy of the Green PartyMelissa Simon of the New Democratic PartyJenna Sudds of the Liberal PartyArticle content

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Greg Kung, Conservative candidate in Kanata.Article content

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Greg Kung, Conservative Party candidate

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How do you plan to improve Canada’s economic competitiveness?

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It’s actually probably pretty easy to beat the record we have had over the last 10 years. The feedback that we’re getting from businesses is that there’s a terrible time getting any type of permits and a lot of bureaucracy. The Conservative Party has made it pretty clear that we would like to be one of the fastest jurisdictions in the entire world for getting a permit. One way that we would grab hold of the situation and bring prosperity for all Canadians is actually working to bring down some of this red tape and put all of our attention to becoming an energy-independent and self-reliant country again. If anything, we’ve seen what the situation with the U.S. has probably exposed is that we send almost half a trillion (dollars) to the U.S., and that’s not staying here in Canada.

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Three things that I think we’ve been very clear about. One, deferring capital gains taxes completely. If all that money has been reinvested into Canada, I think will be a fantastic measure for our economy. Two, streamlining the permit process for prospective people looking to build a pipeline, build a data centre, build a refinery so that we can control point A to point B on our resource development. And three, it’s just reducing income taxes for Canadians so that they have more money for themselves, essentially giving Canadians a bigger paycheque at the end of the day.

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What is one locally-focused campaign pledge that you would implement as MP?

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I’m a paramedic in my other vocation… West Ottawa is probably underserved by doctor clinics. We don’t have an urgent care clinic, either. My hope is to advocate as much as possible for more primary care for our community here. West Ottawa is exploding from a population perspective. We haven’t kept pace with ensuring that everyone has a chance to have a family doctor.

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I would urge people to look at our Blue Seal program that the Conservatives have put forward, that actually seeks to expedite the credential recognition for over 20,000 trained doctors and nearly 40,000 nurses as well. This could be an incredible boost to creating more family doctor clinics and staffing our hospitals. There’s been talk about an urgent care clinic in Stittsville, as well. Having the labour and having the people that are qualified and ready to be plugged into the system would be a huge thing for sure.

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What are your thoughts on the current size of the federal public service?

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Obviously, this comes up a lot at the doors. My thoughts are that people are starting to recognize that we need to improve on service delivery… that when you call CRA, you can talk to somebody, that you can get a passport, that your veteran’s benefits are actually processed, that your disability benefits are processed in a timely manner.

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Pierre’s been very clear that any adjustments to the public service side are strictly through attrition; they do not have to give out pink slips. It’s a misconception and fear that that is coming. We appreciate the work that the public service has done. If there’s ever been a time to give confidence to our public servants here, it’s a future prime minister that has served the Ottawa region for so long and knows the value that they bring and how we can make it more efficient.

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The other thing we’ve seen is the huge spike in external consultants replacing the work for our public servants. If we want to say that we have the best public service in the world, we need to invest in the people, the men and women that make up our public service, as opposed to externalizing this and hiring expire expensive consultants.

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How do you propose helping fix the housing crisis in Ottawa?

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First off, I would say that Conservatives have rightfully and correctly identified this problem well before the Liberals even started to take action on this. We’ve been putting together some very thoughtful processes on how we actually fix the housing access and housing availability problems.

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The No. 1 demographic that is asking for this is younger Canadians, people my age… Millennials and subsequent generations. For them it’s becoming tougher and tougher for them to save up for a down payment and get access to the housing market. At the very least, your first home probably comes in under $1.3 million, we’re going to remove the sales tax and hopefully encourage our provinces and territories to remove their taxes on this, which can save a significant amount of money for a first-time home buyer.

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The second thing is we need to start working with our municipalities to incentivize them to build more, get rid of red tape, increase the rate at which we give permits for building homes. To be clear, it’s not throwing out any environmental concerns or any environmental assessments. Right now, we’re not keeping pace with our population growth, we’re not keeping pace with how many people actually need a home. We’re hoping to incentivize municipalities to actually start building, get rid of red tape and hitting benchmarks for how much housing starts they have in a given year. There’s a lot tied to the federal gas tax and how we distribute to the municipalities. The Conservatives have been very clear that if municipalities in fact exceed their targets for housing, they can receive a bigger share of that, which can be very beneficial to municipalities revenues. If they underperform, we’re saying we’ll hold back until you hit those number of housing starts so that you can get your access to your federal gas tax.

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What’s your favourite season in Ottawa? Why?

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I do not do well in the winter. I am very much an autumn guy. My wife and I are very big hikers. We always hit up Algonquin Park, the Gatineaus. There’s not many experiences like that, walking in the hills and seeing the leaves change and the cool weather, no freezing rain and intense humidity. Hundred per cent, 10 times out of 10, I’ll say I’m a full-on fall guy.

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Jennifer Purdy is running for the Green party in Kanata.Article content

Jennifer Purdy, Green Party candidate

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How do you plan to improve Canada’s economic competitiveness?

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Right now, the first thing is to start seeing if we can be manufacturing more domestically and especially manufacturing and producing things more in Canada as opposed to sending them out of Canada. It usually goes out to the States for raw products to be turned into finalized materials.

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The other thing that the Greens feel very strongly that we need to look at trade, improving and increasing trade around the world. And also the whole interprovincial trade issue. That has basically been bogging down provinces and companies for decades.

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Finally, the other piece about improving the economy is helping individuals in the short term. It’s quite possible that we’re going to go into recession because of the States’ economic attack on Canada, and therefore it’s so important, whether it’s people here in Ottawa who were just let go from the Bay, or people who may have problems with their jobs and already in an affordability crisis. We need to look after the individuals, because that’s another way that we can help to avoid the economy completely stalling in the face of that attacks of the United States and anything else that might occur.

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What is one locally-focused campaign pledge that you would implement as MP?

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LRT. Kanata and Bells Corners, and also improvement to OC Transpo overall. Improving the funding, especially if the province doesn’t rectify its spending issues. There’s a significant difference in the subsidies per resident between Ottawa and Toronto. If the province is not willing to step in, then definitely the federal government needs to. We want to get LRT to Kanata.

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What are your thoughts on the current size of the federal public service?

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I would not be cutting just for the sake of cutting. What has been happening by not trying to grow the Public Service, the government of Canada when it needs work done, it turns around and hires contractors. There’s a huge, huge expenditure. Full disclosure: I’m a contractor for the government of Canada… just a tiny bit of contract work. I think it’s better to allow the public service to remain the experts in the jobs that they have. Growing the economy, you have to have a healthy public service.

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How do you propose helping fix the housing crisis in Ottawa?

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The federal government needs to get back into supporting housing, and supporting affordable housing, supporting sustainable housing. CMHC used to play a significant role, until it was defunded … those chickens have finally come home to roost in the last few years. Basically the federal government needs to recommit to housing but this also has to be specifically for affordable housing and accessible housing, sustainable housing. Just throwing money at the problem many without any constraints will just have developers building more houses that too many people cannot afford today.

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Greens are always fans of not-for-profit and also for co-ops. Co-ops are a gem that the federal government should definitely be pursuing and supporting. It used to.

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What’s your favourite season in Ottawa? Why?

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Autumn, because of the colours.

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Melissa Simon, NDP candidate for Kanata.Article content

Melissa Simon, NDP candidate

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How do you plan to improve Canada’s economic competitiveness?

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That’s a great question. Usually, that question is phrased as affordability. There can be a lot of politicking around that. As an NDP candidate, of course, I support taking care of one another. Sometimes that’s interpreted as higher taxes and more public services. But taking care of one another also means taking care of the economy so that we can all have the resources that we need. Competitiveness means having the resources within Canada to sustain ourselves. It means investing in education and training so that we have skilled workers to keep our economy alive. It also means sometimes immigration and recruiting skilled workers from elsewhere in the world. There’s an opportunity right now, perhaps even from our southern neighbours, to look for skilled workers that might be looking for a new place to call home.

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What is one locally-focused campaign pledge that you would implement as MP?

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One thing that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention this campaign that does affect us locally is transit. We often think of transit as a municipal or provincial responsibility. But actually, transportation is a shared responsibility between federal, provincial and municipal governments.

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I moved to the area 20 years ago with a young family because I believed they my kids would be able to choose to live at home and attend local post-secondary institutions if they wanted to. How lucky we would be to be able to save some money and have our kids live at home during that time. As I’ve learned since then, sadly, two of those children have gone to post-secondary education within Ottawa and public transit still is not an option. We’re right in suburban Kanata. We’re not even 20 kilometres from Algonquin College. It can take up to two hours and multiple transfers to get from our house to Algonquin College or Carleton University. That’s a real disappointment. It’s a letdown. It’s not good for the environment. It’s not great for folks who are looking to be able to afford education for their kids. We all know the costs have gone up. I support absolutely Phase 3 of LRT coming out to Kanata.

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I also believe, though, as a federal government, when we made an investment like transit, we have an obligation to hold folks accountable for those projects, and I don’t see that we’ve done enough of that, especially with light rail transit so far.

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What are your thoughts on the current size of the federal public service?

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Well, I think it’s always important to invest in social infrastructure and to have strong public services. Now is an even more important time to focus on those things. Now isn’t the time to cut the public service. Absolutely, I feel it’s appropriate to have everyone doing important work in the public service. There shouldn’t be people doing things that aren’t important. At the same time, I don’t think the public service should be cut for the so-called sake of saving money.

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In the long run, if we look at economics beyond, say, a four-year term of the federal government, our country’s well-being, the well-being of Canadians, depends on having access to public services. Something as simple today as calling CRA with a question about your tax return is more than an hour’s wait, and that’s if you can get an answer. And there have been cutbacks there. As long as we want to be a healthy society, we have to have people administering public services, we have to fund public services, and we have to have people working in those roles to make sure those programs run efficiently.

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How do you propose helping fix the housing crisis in Ottawa?

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This is very much a party position and I support it. We need to invest in housing. It’s as simple as that. New homes need to be built. Those homes need to be affordable. Some of the ways that we can do that are by building publicly funded housing on public lands. We can help with housing costs by considering not just house prices, but the costs of things like utilities. The NDP proposes, and I support, an immediate removal of the GST on everyday essentials such as home heating and utilities. In terms of real affordability for homes though, when we talk of the price for a house, we think of that as whether a home is affordable or not. But really, if we think about what our expenses are, if we are paying for our health care because public health care isn’t covering itself, if we don’t have expanded pharmacare and we have to pay for prescriptions, if we don’t have grocery price caps, then are groceries are expenses. Then affordability really means our ability to pay. Yes, housing is too expensive, and there needs to be developments so that we have a good balance of supply and demand, and we need to invest in public housing. But we also need to consider the overall cost of living for Canadians when we put together a picture of what it means to have affordable living.

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What’s your favourite season in Ottawa? Why?

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I moved here from southwestern Ontario and the weather here is very extreme, in all seasons. But I like all of the different seasons because there are different things to do. I participate in all kinds of outdoor activities. My favourite season has to be… Fourth spring, when you know the snow is finally gone. which I think is coming next week. It’s the two weeks of the year, where it’s approximately 20 degrees, it’s not humid, there are no, or fewer common allergens, and I can ride my bike outside without being too hot or too cold.

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Jenna Sudds, Liberal candidate in Kanata. Photo by Jordan CollacuttArticle content

Jenna Sudds, Liberal Party candidate

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How do you plan to improve Canada’s economic competitiveness?

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Ooh, that’s a great question. First of all, I would say we can’t control President Trump. I certainly have seen a lot of anxiety in my community here as to what tariffs will look like and what that will mean for our economy.

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Mark Carney has already made some bold steps as far as the economy is concerned. The first thing he did was to remove the consumer price on carbon, which people across Ottawa are feeling already in a decrease at the pumps of on average 17-18 cents a litre. So those are real savings that are helping folks in the face of affordability challenges. We’ve also seen a one-point decrease in middle-income tax, that’s one more step that he’s taken.

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I think one of the most important steps that we are taking right now as a Liberal government is removing internal trade barriers by Canada Day. We are really focused on building one Canadian economy instead of 13 separate ones, frankly, between the provinces and territories. That opens up some tremendous opportunities here in Canada. I’ve spent some time in the technology park here in my riding, speaking with some of our tech leaders. That one move alone, they’re quite excited about what it can mean for their companies, which of course translates to jobs and security for people working in these companies.

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Two last things I’ll say on the economy.

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We’ve also made some changes to EI supports, trying to make it easier, particularly for those who are impacted, or whose jobs are impacted by tariffs, to be able to access EI supports and ensuring that our tariff proceeds will support the businesses and the workers that will be most implicated by the tariffs.

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And lastly, I’ll just say, obviously there are still a lot of unknowns, when we think of what the road ahead looks like, the implications of tariffs. When I’m speaking to people here in my community, the conversation often goes to who is best fit to lead us through this, who has the experience, both within Canada, but also international experience, business experience. And that person is Mark Carney, frankly. The alternative in Pierre Poilievre is someone whose sole occupation has been in the House of Commons as a member of Parliament, not having that other experience to lean on to lead us through these challenging times.

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What is one locally-focused campaign pledge that you would implement as MP?

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When I’m going to doors right now, what I’m overwhelmingly hearing is anxiety, people are worrying about the impact that Trump and tariffs will have on them in their day-to-day lives and their own financial security. One way that I can help to address that is by fighting for their jobs. In a local context, that means first of all a focus on our technology park, which has over 30,000 incredible jobs, or careers. It’s the second largest employment hub in our city, I have already brought in significant investments as the member of Parliament over this last term into this technology hub. If re-elected, I absolutely commit to securing further funding. That’s a top priority because, of course, we need a strong economy, we need these companies to be doing well. But ultimately it’s about people, and these are amazing jobs that we need to ensure are there, here in our community, in Kanata, Stittsville, Bells Corners, in Carp.

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What are your thoughts on the current size of the federal public service?

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I will always fight for jobs in my community, whether that is in our technology sector or whether that is public service. In the current climate, when in a trade war with the U.S., it is critically important that we have a strong public service that is there to help us, to serve Canadians. As we move forward, we will need to develop new approaches, new policies and new programs. Those public servants are valued, and we need to ensure that they’re well supported.

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I am deeply concerned that the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre have said that they will cut 17,000 public servants a year. Those are predominantly jobs in Ottawa. It is completely reckless to think that this is the approach we would take in the midst of a trade war, and frankly, he doesn’t care about the people in this city, about their jobs or their families.

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How do you propose helping fix the housing crisis in Ottawa?

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Undoubtedly, it’s time to focus on building, and our Liberal government has what I believe to be the most ambitious housing plan since World War II. That means that we are committed to doubling the pace of construction to almost 500,000 new homes a year. We’ll do that by getting back into the business of building houses like we did during the Second World War.

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That means creating Build Canada Homes, a new organization that will lead these efforts, acting as a developer to build affordable housing at scale, including on public lands, of which we have a tremendous amount in Ottawa. We’ll also make the housing market work better by catalyzing on private capital, cutting red tape and lowering the cost of home building. And then lastly, really focusing on first-time home buyers who are struggling to get into the housing market. We have a made a commitment to eliminate the Goods and Services Tax on first-time home buyers’ purchases up to $1,000,000 and that will save them up to $50,000 on the purchase of their first home.

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In a very local context, what does this mean? We have a lot of public lands, federally owned lands that we have been taking stock of and making available in the public lands registry for housing development. That is a massive opportunity here in Ottawa.

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Here in my community, in Kanata proper, we’re seeing some developments underway. There’s a new building going up currently on Kanata Avenue that has hundreds of units that will soon be available. There’s also a project on Penfield Drive, which is affordable housing for seniors by Ottawa Community Housing that’s in the development stages.

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Lastly, we fought hard, myself and my Liberal colleagues from Ottawa, to secure housing accelerator funding for the City of Ottawa. That was a commitment of just over $176 million to help the City fast-track the pace at which they’re able to support new housing applications and developments.

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What’s your favourite season in Ottawa? Why?

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I like all the seasons. Which one do I like best? Probably fall. I love the beauty of fall in our city. I live in Beaverbrook in Kanata. We have walking paths that I love. I’m a runner, so I’m often out on the paths in our community, out to the beaver pond, which is just a beautiful location, hiking in South March highlands. The beauty of fall, the lovely temperatures, but fall colours I really enjoy and I really enjoy getting outside.

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