YASMIN ON ISSUES

Community Safety

Everyone deserves to feel safe and supported. Senator Trudeau believes in creating a system that prevents and reduces crime while ensuring that law enforcement is properly trained and held accountable. We should be able to expect law enforcement to show up when a crime occurs and use effective community based peer support and behavioral/mental health supports to assist when folks are in crisis.  Senator Trudeau will focus on sustainable solutions that are informed by people who are directly impacted. She knows that to truly ensure that every person feels safe in their homes and neighborhoods, we must take a comprehensive and informed approach that brings everyone to the table to work on sustainable solutions that are both responsive to current issues and proactively center opportunities for prevention. That is why she is proud to support legislation to address issues like catalytic converter theft and introduce legislation that would creative a comprehensive criminal legal system integrated data system that will help address the root causes and contributing factors that lead to violent crime.

Supporting Working Families

Washington must do more to invest in working families, especially childcare, food security, and education. Too many of our community members are born into financial instability that leads to cyclical financial instability passed on generationally. Senator Trudeau knows it is time that we rely on more than luck to help lift each other up. She was proud to sponsor the WA Future Fund, in collaboration with the State Treasurer’s office in the 2022 session that would act as a savings and investment account for babies born into poverty. She also sponsored and passed legislation that now requires health insurance providers to cover donor human milk for parents with new babies that responds to the recent recall of baby formula and helps to pull all our newest Washingtonians on the best path for a healthy future.

Housing & Homelessness

Senator Trudeau believes in common-sense, sustainable solutions to Washington’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis. During the 2022 session, she sponsored and passed legislation that will empower young Washingtonians experiencing homelessness to seek and consent to healthcare that meets their needs in response to youth shelters having to turn some of our most vulnerable youth seeking housing away over the past two years. She also sponsored and passed legislation  requiring landlords to accept both electronic and non-electronic forms of payment, removing a barrier to for many transitioning out of homelessness, low-income renters without access to bank cards, and seniors on fixed income that were not familiar with internet portals. This bill also removed the requirement that accompanied these portal payment options because they often subject a renter to separate fees just to pay their rent. Another bill she sponsored and passed will help to build affordable housing, both low-income and workforce housing, by creating a sales and use tax deferral incentive for building on unused surface and parking lots around the City of Tacoma.

She was also a fierce advocate for many of the legislature’s  historic investments in affordable housing and homelessness services, while recognizing there is still a long way to go. Having experienced the foster care system and housing insecurity, Senator Trudeau brings her lived experience and her skills as an attorney and policy expert to lead on these  issues.

Behavioral Health

Senator Trudeau has a history of advocating for increased investments in behavioral health services. She has navigated these broken systems for herself and her family throughout the years. She believes that expanding these services and making them more accessible is critical for the health and well-being of every single person in our community, especially as we emerge out of the current pandemic. During her first legislative session, Senator Trudeau successfully passed legislation off the Senate floor that would support behavioral healthcare professionals and patients, and make Washington’s juvenile court system more compassionate and efficient.

The Environment & Climate Change

We know that we need to act now for the sake of future generations when it comes to our natural environment and climate change. Already, many majority BIPOC neighborhoods are negatively impacted by pollution with childhood asthma rates constantly rising. She grew up in these neighborhoods and had childhood asthma herself. Her mother’s home country of Bangladesh is also vulnerable to the direct impacts of the rise in global temperatures and sea levels so it is an issue that she knows connects us all on a global scale. That’s why Sen. Trudeau was proud to advocate for and vote yes on Move Ahead Washington, a legislative package that will prioritize reducing carbon emissions, expanding public transit access, and addressing harm caused by past transportation policies. She will continue to champion the need for environmental sustainability while ensuring that we couple these opportunities with sustainable, family wage jobs that lift us all up together.