Marlen Spruyt - Green Party Candidate Running Again

Jemma Dooreleyers | Feb 13, 2025

Dr. Marlene Spruyt, Ontario Green Party’s MPP candidate for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston is a retired family physician and public health consultant. She was the 2022 MPP candidate for the party and is a North Frontenac local. She has been a part of rural communities for her whole life and is passionate about the quality of healthcare in rural communities.

Why did you feel drawn to run for Lanark-Fronteac-Kingston’s Green Party MPP for this election?

I am not happy with the current government and the action they have taken either on climate change or any other issues that are critical to Ontario residents like health care and cost of living and housing. The Green Party resonates with me because I think poverty and climate change are the two biggest risk factors for the health of Ontarians and we need to work in both of those areas to reduce harm to the population.

What has the Ford government done that has made you dissatisfied with the current state of Ontario?

Ford has done very little to improve health care in the past few months. His government has promised chunks of money to build a hospital here and a bit of a hospital there and all of a sudden the night before an election they were promising everyone a family doctor. Quite frankly,  they promised to end hallway medicine several years ago and they haven’t moved on that. I  the past year more emergency rooms have closed and less and less people have been able to get a family doctor. I don’t trust their promises. We hope that with more Green people in Queens Park that we will be able to influence to improve the delivery of health care.

You are a doctor, has your work informed your decision to run for MPP?

Of course it has. I was a family physician for 25 years and then a medical officer of health for another 10. I’ve always been concerned about the health of individuals and then I went into public health because I was trying to work upstream in terms of policy and doing advocacy work in terms of helping the population remain healthy. I worked during the pandemic to try to help Ontario residents and sat at the table then to give advice to the Ford Government.

Have you noticed a shift in the healthcare system since you began as the system moved through different governments?

Healthcare has been under funded for a number of years, not just under the Ford government. The Liberals before him did not do much to “beef it up”, they let things stagnant. However, when I was first a family physician, I would be able to phone up a home care nurse and ask them to individual patients and I would know that the nurse would be able to do that and I would get a report back. When I left Family Medicine you had to fill in a form, I wasn’t sure if anyone would be able to go and the patient would call me up and say that no one had visited them, so the system has deteriorated and it needs major re-investment to function again. We have the lowest per capita health care funding in Canada. If you take all of the provinces in Canada, Ontario is at the bottom.

What re-investment ideas do you have?

We have spoken recently about getting more primary care physicians and nurse practitioners in team-based settings is absolutely the way to go but we have to push it out. We have to make sure the funding is there, we have to make sure that the family doctors and nurse practitioners are getting proper compensation for the work that they do and that they feel supported in those positions. Currently, municipalities are buying clinics, renting clinics, and paying recruitment fees for new doctors to come to their towns. That shouldn’t be a municipal responsibility, that’s the provincial government's job to get healthcare to all of its residents and that includes rural residents.

Do you think the healthcare system will come under more strain as Earth’s climate changes?

Climate won’t necessarily affect healthcare but it will affect health. As more storms, wildfires, heavy rains, floods, and heavy winds occur, more people are going to be injured from natural disasters but also people are stressed. People are anxious about what is going to happen it’s not just affecting their physical health, it’s affecting their mental health. When we have long periods of heat waves, we saw in Vancouver, that there were 600 additional deaths due to excess heat. People with heart problems, circulatory problems, respiratory issues, seniors and young children will be physically stressed due to the rising temperature on the planet.

How are you feeling about the election Doug Ford called with such short notice?

It’s appalling. There was no need for him to call an election. He has a majority, he has over a year left in his mandate. He’s using the tariffs as a distraction and he’s trying pretend that he’s the federal government because really it’s the federal government’s responsibility to respond to international affairs like that. Ontario jobs will be affected but Doug is trying to make it seem like it’s his problem to fix and that he’s the only one who can fix it. He’s distracting us and he’s not paying attention to the issues that face our province like healthcare, housing, education and provincial cost of living.

Are you worried that the tariff conversation is going to overshadow the other issues?

It already has. Ford is just using it as a platform and getting extra attention by putting himself out there. Going to New York when he’s not even theoretically the sitting government because he absolved it, he’s artificially getting extra media attention for himself and I don’t think that is appropriate.

How do you feel that rural Ontario is being affected by the attention that the Ford government gives to urban issues?

Ford likes to think he understands rural people but he simply has a cottage in Muskoka that he visits occasionally and doesn’t live in a rural area to understand their issues. We still have inadequate cell coverage and inadequate internet connectivity, He has not pay attention to that. In small municipalities like the ones we have in our riding do not have the benefit of the economy of scale that you get in a big city so for them to each do things like maintain a library or to maintain roads with a low density, costs them a lot of money. In addition to that they’re supporting other things like recruiting physicians to the area, like Northbrook and Cloyne. The local government put money toward that recruitment package and that shouldn’t happen. Ford is not appropriately funding municipalities. Look at highway 38, that is maintained by the municipalities that surround it but it is a highway that people use for the transportation network who are not necessarily residents of this riding. The whole province uses the highways and the municipalities pay for it. We have to upload some of that financial responsibility to the province.

How will you ensure that this rural riding is heard and seen in Queens Park?

I’ve spent my entire life (except for university) in rural communities and I understand them well. I love them and I know how they feel. I know that I can speak for those people and keep them front of mind wherever I am.

This is a historically conservative riding, do you feel like this is a time of change for this riding?

I have been hearing more that residents are unhappy with this current government. Ford has been in government for a long period of time and people get tired of a government after awhile. People are ready for change. There are a lot of people who have moved to this area from away so this historically conservative riding will be negated a bit by the other thinking folks. It’s not inconceivable that someone other than the conservatives will win.

Is there anything else you’d like to mention as the Green MPP candidate?

When we were talking about rural healthcare I didn’t mention that rural hospitals are underfunded. To have an Emergency Room running 24/7 they have to have  established funding and they get that funding from the province, if they can’t get that funding they have to be c,osed for days on end. We have seen several of our emergency rooms close over the summer. It’s just lack

 And my last question, people are concerned with rising taxes on top of the rise in the cost of living, what can you say to mitigate those concerns?

Inflation is affected at many levels of government and much of it is governmental financial policies and that is stabiliizing. What I will say is that we have no intention of raising taxes to deliver those benefits that we think people need. We feel like this government has been wasteful with the taxes that Ontarians have already paid to him and if he hadn’t spent billions of dollars breaking a beer store contract and supporting a spa and doing other somewhat dubious contracts, there is plenty of money in the public coffer to pay for a better healthcare system without raising taxes.