Candidate Profiles - Rob Rainer - Liberal Party

Jemma Dooreleyers | Feb 20, 2025

Rob Rainer, the Liberal Party’s MPP candidate for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston, has been campaigning since September 2024.

From a saw-mill labourer to an executive director of six non-profit organizations, Rainer was first elected as a municipal councillor for Tay Valley Township in 2018 and in 2022, he was elected Reeve. As Reeve, he co-represents Tay Valley Township on Lanark County Council. Before becoming an elected politician, in 2012, Rainer was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal by the federal government, for his work on poverty issues across Canada between 2006 and 2012. In 2013, he co-founded and became chair of the Lanark Basic Income Commission, a group for research for universal basic income in the county and province. 

With a provincial election on the horizon, the News caught up with Rainer for a candid conversation about his feelings towards the current provincial government and what he believes is the right course of action to weather the current economic and political storm.

What motivated you to run as a candidate for Liberal MPP for Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston?

The main reason is that I strongly oppose what the Ford government has done and what they continue to do with their mandate and I think there are much better public policies and actions that the Provincial government should take on a wide range of issues. I am running to win this seat to be part of a liberal caucus and a liberal government that would move things in that direction.

What policies do you oppose from the Ford Government and what would you like to change about the way he governs the province?

Well, where do we start? There are so many huge challenges in this province and actions in the recent months from the Ford Government have shown that are focused on other things that aren’t nearly as high of a priority. For example, going after cities and the bike lanes that they have implemented and overriding the municipal power by ripping out the bike lanes that Toronto has. Making it so a municipality has to have the approval of the province to implement bike lanes is totally ridiculous. In terms of the major challenges, we can begin with healthcare the profound shortage of family doctors - it is estimated that 2.5 million people in Ontario are without a family doctor and that number is projected to grow to 4 million if things continue the way they are and that is a huge concern. We have underfunding of public healthcare which is resulting in a lack of personnel to work in hospitals which has resulted in emergency room closures. There is a severe lack of funding for public education. There has been some data coming in showing the decrease in funding per student over the past few years and it’s incredible. In my township, Tay Valley, the public school is underfunded by $1500/per student for the current fiscal year. This is manifesting itself in schools that are not being properly maintained, there is infrastructure deficits, and underfunding of Educational Assistance. I think the lack of support for staff and other personnel is demoralizing and morale is low. We could also talk about elder care and the province’s emphasis on larger long-term care facilities, sometimes run by profit-seeking corporations over the not-for-profit model which appears to yield better outcomes for the residents of LTCs. There has been lots of interest in my area in looking into alternative care options for seniors including trying to keep seniors in their houses longer. There are critical issues when it comes to affordable housing, highway safety, public transit. The government is virtually silent on one of the biggest threats we face, which is climate change. In fact, under the Ford government, emissions have increased again. They had been falling before but with the government’s around energy, particularly natural gas, the emissions have been rising again which is an existential threat to us all.

Would you say rural communities are more affected by these issues?

I think it is safe to say that many rural communities do not receive the attention of the provincial government that many of us would like to see, which is why the Ontario Liberal Party has formed a rural commission to help the party itself, in terms of putting appropriate attention on the specific issues that affect rural and Northern Ontario.

What would that committee focus on for rural residents?

One of the big ones of course would have to do with farming and agriculture. There has been a significant loss in farmland in Ontario over the past few years and recent data has found that about 320 acres of farmland is lost a day to development and urbanization. That’s something that we all need to be careful about in trying to stop. This land that is suitable for growing crops and raising livestock is invaluable and we have to preserve it. We also want to try to sustain our small-scale growers and help to ensure that they can continue to survive. Something I’m concerned about is that there has been a fairly rapid corporate concentration in agriculture and food production. Fairly quickly we’ve seen large corporations buying up farmland and controlling the market and we can certainly see that in our grocery prices. We don’t want our food supplies in the hands of fewer corporations. Another issue is the family doctor issue. Recruiting family doctors to rural communities and helping them sustain themselves. The funding model for family doctors seems to be quite problematic. So much so that young doctors are not becoming family doctors and the ones who are family doctors are close to retirement which adds to the lack of family doctors in our region and across Ontario. Our party has a fairly detailed plan to address the family doctor shortage.

Certainly, as the MPP I will be doing everything I can to ensure that my voice and the voice of my riding is heard in Queen’s Park and make it known that Ontario politics are pretty GTA-centric but that Ontario is a big province with many different issues and with issues that are specific to rural and Northern Ontario.

I spend a lot of time speaking with young families and the main issue they face is access to quality, affordable, childcare. What will the Liberal Party of Ontario do to ensure rural families have access to childcare?

Childcare is an incredibly important issue for the province to invest in. I am part of the Lanark County Council and I have sat in on many presentations on childcare and the need for it. The childcare sector is a sector with heavy involvement from the government on all levels, federal, provincial and municipal. There are all these layers of administration for the $ 10-a-day program.  It seems the layers of bureaucracy that providers have to sift through to access is pretty difficult. But the bottom line is, in this economy both parents typically need to be working and there needs to be an option for childcare for their child and that childcare needs to be the best it can be. That includes the appropriate level of compensation for the people who work there. I’m not sure if there is an easy answer for that but people need to see a future in that line of work and compensation needs to be looked at. Putting an undue strain on a household because the parents cannot access childcare is not healthy for anyone.

I find with a lot of these issues there are no easy solutions but governments need to be at least willing to recognize that these things are issues and be determined to help in any way they can and I’m not sure if the Ford government has done a good job at this. There seems to be a lot of strain in that sector and other sectors and the Ford government seems to be more focused on making alcohol easier to access and building a tunnel under the 401 in the GTA. I’m not sure if these are high on anyone's priority list but they seem to be for the Premier. 

Many people are worried about the cost of living and bringing down inflation, with all of these plans focused on improving systems like healthcare and childcare, how are you as MPP going to balance a push for a better quality of life, while trying to reduce the provincial debt?

This question points to something that is exceedingly complex. What can governments do to reduce inflation and keep the cost of living under control is a complex question that does not subject to an easy answer and it’s not going to happen overnight. But I can tell you one of the main things that drives me into politics is the growing gap in income and wealth inequality. We have a decreasing amount of wealthy people and an increasing number of people who are struggling. This has resulted in an increased need for food banks, which at the last count of the fiscal year, reported 1 million Ontarians accessing the food bank and an increase in homeless encampments and a manifestation of issues finding affordable housing and access to mental health and addiction care. I think it’s very important that the provincial and federal governments keep the income gap very much on the radar and look at what they can do to reduce the gap. The wealth gap has been increasing in Ontario and across Canada for a number of years and it’s hollowing out the middle class. Huge challenge there, a lot of it comes from our unwillingess as a society to address this through sound taxation policies. One of the things the Ontario Liberal Party has proposed in the last few months to address these concerns is to introduce a new tax bracket for the middle income. For people within the range of $51,000 to $75,000 yearly income would drop to a lower taxation from 9% to 7.5%. If I were elected MPP for the liberal caucus I would propose a task force to look at the phenomenon of the growing income gap and the increasing unaffordability and look in to ways to combat this for the short and long term.

The other thing I am passionate about is a universal basic income as a form of long-term security. I have spent a lot of my working life since 2013 looking into this topic. I was a co-founder and the first chair of the Lanark Basic Income network and I am still active in that group. There is a lot of research and evidence on basic income due to many research pilots in Canada and all over the world, including here in Ontario.

Finally, it is not hard to sense that there is nervousness in the air with Donald Trump’s threats to put tariffs on Canadian goods.  Doug Ford has expressed that “Canada is not for sale” and has taken quite the tough guy stance, are you confident that if Bonnie Crombie is elected that she will have the same no-nonsense attitude?

I am definitely confident in Bonnie Crombie and her ability to stand tall and stare Mr. Trump in the eye and say “this is not acceptable.” The difficulty is I don’t think anyone can predict what is going to happen if he does follow through with this threat of a 25 per cent tarriff. The impact will be huge. It would beg the question of what the federal and the provincial governments are going to do to shore up Canadians, almost what they had to do with the pandemic. I think within the party itself there would be a strong desire to ensure that Ontarians were assured that the liberal government would do everything they can to protect people from what might be a catastrophic blow.

Is there anything else you would like to mention to the people of Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston that you would like for them to keep in mind as the election looms?

It is my belief is that Doug Ford is using the tariffs issue as an excuse to go to the polls. He has about 17 months left in his current mandate, he already has a sizeable majority. He wants over 100 seats but he doesn’t actually need that to do what he wants to do. He already has the mandate. He’s plunging us into an election in the dead of winter, which is not a democratic thing to do. It’s going to hamper candidates, it’s going to hamper elections workers, it’s going to potentially hamper citizens who are not going to be able to vote. Imagine if we had huge snowstorms the day of the election and people couldn’t get to polling stations. I think his move is designed to suppress the vote.  I hope that voters see that for what it is and vote accordingly.

In terms of my own candidacy, I pride myself in being very approachable, open and welcoming. I will work with anyone who wants to work with me in the spirit of constructive collaboration. We have a lot of big challenges here in this riding and in Ontario, and as an MPP I would bring the voices of Lanark and Frontenac into Queen’s Park.

My frame is healthy people, healthy communities, healthy environment. If we look at it through that lens, we can talk about how we can get there.