THUNDER BAY — New Blue Party candidate Katherine Suutari has been bitten by the politics bug.
The Thunder Bay-Superior North hopeful ran under the party banner in 2022, vowing at the time to work toward ending vaccine mandates and government overreach related to COVID-19.
Then, later that year, she put her name forward to run for city council representing Red River Ward.
Suutari, campaigning under the name Kathy, came up short in both races.
She finished sixth of eight candidates in Thunder Bay-Superior North three years ago, earning just 314 votes and 1.27 per cent of the vote share.
In the Red River race of 2022, Suutari came in fourth, with 593 votes, losing out to eventual winner Michael Zussino.
Newswatch reached out to Suutari for a candidate profile interview, but did not hear back.
One of her top provincial issues in 2022, aside from COVID-19 related topics, was hospital finances.
“There’s no accountability. Where are the detailed statements about where this money is going?”
Three years ago, Suutari said the best attribute of the New Blue Party is its candidates and leadership actually take the time to not only listen to people and their concerns, but to actually hear them.
“Representation for Thunder Bay, there’s none. People don’t have a voice. I’ve got houses on either side of me and of those two houses, people haven’t voted for a long time, because they don’t trust the system. I believe in order to have a change in the system, the people have got to have a voice,” Suutari said.
During her council run, Suutari listed homelessness, drugs and crime among her top issues facing the city over the next several years.
While she knocked on doors, the issues kept popping up.
“I didn’t win in the provincial election, and I wasn’t expecting to,” Suutari said. “But I learned a lot, and it just drove me to run at it more in this one. I think a lot of our problems start off in our region and in our cities, and we need to work on the problems.
“We have a homeless situation, we have a fentanyl situation, we have tent cities growing in my backyard and I think we need to deal with the basics and not worry about spending money on special projects. That money can be helping the situation we’ve created and that we’ve never really dealt with over the 10 years that I’ve lived in Thunder Bay.”
The right-wing New Blue Party’s No. 1 policy declaration is cancelling the Toronto Star’s gambling licence. They also want Premier Doug Ford to remove all remaining COVID-19 mandates and have a petition in place to stop Bill 67, the Racial Equity in the Education System Act, and the teaching of critical race theory and gender identity theory in Ontario schools.
