People’s Party of Canada candidate Ron Vaillant was the first hopeful in the Prince George Peace River Northern Rockies to make it to Tumbler Ridge. He was in town during the Coal and Energy Forum on September 11 and 12.
What follows are excerpts from our conversation, presented without commentary.
I just went to a store here in town and introduced myself. The person behind the counter said, “Don’t even talk to me about politics.” I said, “well, I’ll talk to you. He says, “No, you don’t want to hear what I have to say. I’m to angry.”
And I’ve had so many people say that to me. They just they don’t trust the politicians. They don’t trust the process. They don’t like the way Canada has been heading all these years.
It’s the same thing with me. I’ve watched Canadian politics all my life. I voted for Brian Mulroney in order to get rid of Pierre Trudeau. Does that sound familiar? So now people want to vote in the conservatives to get rid of Justin Trudeau. But I got Brian Mulroney when I voted. And I got the GST and I got a whole bunch of other stuff, which I didn’t like at all. And unfortunately, that’s the way it will be again. People are going to have buyer’s remorse.
Now with the People’s Party of Canada, it’s a totally new situation. It’s an unfettered party. It’s from a man [Maxine Bernier] who tried working with the conservatives for ten years. In the leadership race, Bernier had half the votes. He had 49 percent of the votes. So why not go ahead and include ten or 20 percent of his platform and unite the whole party? That could have been done easily, and we wouldn’t even be talking about the People’s Party if that would have happened. But Bernier got completely shut down.
The only thing that’s really conservative about the Conservative Party is a word. I can’t think of anything conservative, quite frankly, they’ve racked up 40 percent more debt than the Liberals since Pierre Trudeau, $450 billion dollars versus $250 billion and that’s including Justin Trudeau and the $70 billion that he has racked up spending like a wild man.
So The first thing that I would look for Conservative Party—and this is why I voted for Brian Mulroney when I saw Pierre Trudeau spending like money like a drunken sailor—is fiscal responsibility. Why can’t the government balance your budget? They got so much money coming in, did they have to always keep spending more than comes in, by billions and billions of dollars?
If you go to www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca, that’s the key right there. People can go and look at our party platform and see the common sense revolution. It’s like every man who has been so upset with the government can look at that and say, “Finally, a new day in Canada.”
And then when you go and look at the candidates themselves like myself. I’m not a politician. I’m a pipe fitter, and a journeyman carpenter. But I’m someone who’s pretty in tune with the way things work in the world. Half the candidates have never been politically involved before. A lot of people who’ve joined the party initially had never been affiliated with a political party, but they’re gravitating to it because they see us a completely new system that can actually benefit Canada greatly.
People have to realize that just to go and vote Conservative or Liberal…we’ve done this over and over and over again. People get fed up with the one, and they go vote for the other and they get fed up with that. It just keeps on going round and round.
We also have multiculturalism that has brought in extreme diversity into Canada, which is putting Canada into little tribes all over the place, instead of trying to unite us on a common front. If you go to Japan, you know that you’re getting Japanese or if you go to Italy, you go to Italy, right? If you come to Canada, why not have “Canada values”, too?
The other thing that’s really splitting the Canada apart is the equalization formula, basically, the conservatives and liberals have had their chance to be able to make a fair equalization formula. So right now you got Quebec, they don’t have to count their hydro as part of their income as far as the equalization formula goes. And so you got Western Canada, pouring in billions of dollars into Quebec unfairly. And people are so upset with that they want to actually separate I just talked to a business owner right now, who said “All I want to do is have my own country, and if anyone comes to it, I’ll shoot them.” This is how people feel.
It’s getting to a point where Canada is so divided by the policies that these parties have had. And so what we would want to do—we can’t change the equalization formula without opening up the Constitution, which we don’t want to do—but we can change the formula, we can just sit down in the morning and come up with a nice formula that works and graduated in so that the provinces can adjust.
What we got now is a welfare state with these provinces Originally, it was designed so all of Canada could rise up to a certain level. But now what it is a welfare state. And these provinces don’t want to develop their natural resources, because they’ll be part of the formula get less money. So by reducing the formula, so it’s fair for everyone—because it’s not fair if you’re getting welfare money—and then they can go ahead and develop their own natural resources and be strong as a province.
Both sides of my family came to Canada in the late 1600s, early 1700s, so I’m very Canadian. I grew up in Alberta around Edmonton. And I’ve moved out into the country. I’ve been with the farmers, so I know the farmer mentality. I love the outdoors.
I live in Alberta. So I’m a parachute candidate. There was a [local] candidate, but he wasn’t able to fulfill the commitment due to work, so I stepped in. The Alberta boys are coming here to help you.
I’m frugally minded. I hate waste, and I like efficiency. I’m a true environmentalist. I go backpacking and go out into the back country on my dirt bike, and it’s always Leave No Trace. And that kind of a thing: respect the environment. Try and live life with the least impact as possible.
On the other hand, you know, I reject the whole notion of man made co2, creating a climate emergency. I research things, I don’t just go ahead and take things for face value, and my conclusions are all up for grabs as far as being challenged. So I may have a position on something right now. But if new information comes in, I’ll factor that in. And if it totally upsets the apple cart, well, so be it, I’m willing to go there. I’m a true seeker.
I guess that’s fundamentally what I am, I seek after truth. And where the truth leads is not always the best place. The world is a scary place, actually, when you start looking at truth.
The People’s Party of Canada is more conservative than conservatives, but I think we’re more liberal than liberals. And we’re more libertarian than everyone else. So I don’t think you can really pigeonhole us that way. Because you look at the Liberal Party, what they’re doing to free speech? They’re curtailing free speech, they’re setting up, you know, a body to be able to go to social platforms to censor people’s speech that they don’t like. They’re already censoring people with what they’re saying. And yet, The Fed, the liberals want to go ahead and censor it even more.
What we want is we want freedom of speech. Hate speech is already in the Criminal Code, if you incite violence against another group. That’s hate speech. But if you say you hate something, that’s your opinion. So we want to be able to have more freedom of speech.
The Conservatives aren’t even conservative: they’re really centrist.
With the more extreme multiculturalism that has gone on, you’ve got the government pandering to all these little groups. People who come into Canada can go ahead and can keep their culture, but to have our Canadian government funded, and promote it, and tax dollars being spent on it, and then it becomes more segregated. It is not unifying Canada.
We want to be able to make life easier for people we want to lower taxes, we’re so we’re not going to be throwing away money, like to the billions of dollars to foreign countries, and all these different things that they’re doing,
Our platform is 80 percent of the Reform’s [Party] without the social component to it. But it’s also libertarian, too. We want people having maximum freedom in their lives, We don’t want to have governments with their noses in everyone’s business. We want to shrink government and give people more freedom in their lives.
We have freedom of expression, it’s very important to have freedom of expression, to be able to talk freely and to debate anything. And we’re losing that actually, right now. You know, the political parties are broadening what hate speech is, and to the point where if you disagree with what they’re saying, it can be classified as hate speech. And that’s very fundamental to us. I mean, we’ve had our European values for a long time, too. And so we just want to be able to have it so that everyone’s equal with the law, and people treat each other with respect.
