The Battle River-Crowfoot byelection continues to ramp up. Ten candidates participated in a forum in Camrose on Tuesday night, where they spoke on issues pressing Canadians and residents of the riding.
Battle River-Crowfoot is Pierre Poilievre’s “riding to lose,” as Green Party candidate Ashley Macdonald said in his closing comments at the forum.
The byelection comes after Damien Kurek stepped aside in June to allow the Conservative Party leader a second chance to win a seat in the House of Commons. Kurek won with a whopping 82 percent of the vote, and many expect Poilievre will also win by a large margin.
It is the battle of a lifetime for Poilievre, who needs to win this election if he hopes to remain leader of his party.
Still, there’s room for doubt. Independent candidate Bonnie Critchley, a military veteran and self-avowed centrist, has said that if Poilievre beats her, “it won’t be by much.”
“Very few of my neighbours that I’ve talked to are particularly happy about the idea of Mr. Poilievre just assuming we’re going to vote for him because we voted for Mr. Kurek,” she told the Calgary Herald.
The byelection is set for August 18.
Candidates spoke to a packed audience at the Cargill Theatre.
Supporters from Sherwook Park?
Some controversy followed the forum, with Bonnie Critchley saying it looks like Poilievre padded the audience with supporters.
Conservative MP Garnett Genius organized transit from Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan to Camrose so Poilievre supporters could come and cheer him on outside.
According to the event page, the group would then “go to [Poilievre’s] local campaign office to watch the forum livestream.”
However, Critchley maintains that much of the forum’s audience was bussed in from other ridings.
Near the end of the evening, she asked for a show of hands as to who could vote in the byelection.
“That moment shifted the room,” her team wrote on a Facebook post, as she reports that fewer than half of audience members raised their hands.
What the riding needs
Candidates spoke of what they saw to be the biggest issues in the riding.
Poilievre said that “having a leader of a political party as your local member of parliament is a trade-off. The leader lives in hotel rooms across the country. The other side, though, is that the leader can bring a very powerful megaphone to the local issues of the community.”
He aims to get a pipeline built to Kitimat, BC – which he says would help the riding’s oilfield prosper.
Other candidates maintained that living in the riding and knowing its issues was essential.
“I’m from Three Hills, and I don’t want to be Prime Minister,” was Liberal candidate and farmer Darcy Spady’s tag line.
He spoke often about how he would work with Prime Minister Mark Carney to improve Battle River-Crowfoot. He’d like to see the agriculture sector and the region’s oilfields prosper, and to build up inter-provincial trade to allow this to happen.
Independent candidate Sarah Spanier spoke about listening to constituents. She would like to represent the riding through bringing in a bill to make food more affordable, and by bringing more post-secondary schools into the riding’s small towns.
“There are three very well-off areas in this riding – Camrose, Three Hills, and Drumheller,” she said. “And I’ll say it’s due to the post-secondary institutions that they house. It creates economic activity in the area.”
Bonnie Critchley said she would represent the riding by bringing in agricultural reforms. “Successive federal governments have sold off innovation to big corporations. These corporations now charge our farmers royalties for seed or they will sue your neighbor if your seed blows over into his field. This has got to stop.”
Katherine Swampy, NDP candidate, spoke of aging farmers she’d met with over the course of her campaign. “They’re lacking in hands working on their farms,” she said. “Trump’s getting rid of all his people working in agriculture – we’ll take them. They can help us.”
Vote is on
Advance voting for the election begins August 8.
It’s anyone’s guess as to who will win. The riding has been a Conservative stronghold for the last thirty years, with Conservative candidates winning by the biggest margins of anywhere in the country.
Still, many candidates affirm that voters aren’t happy to be returning to the polls just months after they elected Conservative incumbent Damien Kurek.
