Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decided to run in this election?
A: I'm from Lumsden area - my wife and our family, we live just outside of Lumsden.
I come from the resource sector - petroleum engineer by trade. I’ve been involved in the oil sector here in Saskatchewan as a producer for over 20 years.
Why I got involved in politics is I just saw just a steady decline in the province and the province’s economy. The government just growing bigger and bigger by the year, picking winners and losers in different industries, and really starting to push out small and medium sized businesses. Overregulation and things of that nature.
I saw that the Sask Party wasn't acting like a Conservative party anymore, so I figured, ‘well, we need a new party, we need a new Conservative party, we need to offer the people of Saskatchewan an alternative on the on the right side of the political spectrum’.
That’s why I wanted to get involved, because you could see it in the small towns of Lumsden – Morse, my riding, that there's a lot of hurting people - hurting economically, hurting with affordability. Basically, what we're hearing is, people are looking for real solutions to real problems. I'm a problem solver by trade, and that's just what I do, so that's why I wanted to get involved.
Q: What are some of the pressing issues in your constituency?
A: In the constituency, it does still relate to the broader province.
Definitely affordability is an issue. Healthcare is an issue - just our healthcare system in crisis of not being able to deliver the services that the people have prepaid for - that's a big thing.
But also, education and I really find that this being a rural riding, parents are very concerned about the curriculum and where that's gone under the Sask Party’s watch with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity – SOGI – that the Saskatchewan Party brought in in 2015. Parents want to get back to more fundamentals, focusing more on science, mathematics, reading, writing, that type of stuff, rather than all of this social stuff in schools. That's been a pretty big that I see in Lumsden-Morse. I’m the party leader, so I see it all over rural Saskatchewan, but it definitely is something in Lumsden-Morse for sure.
Q: What’s - even in a broader sense, the Sask United Party’s position when it comes to improving housing in the province?
A: There's two components of it - the supply side and then the demand side.
On the supply side, we firmly believe that we need to streamline regulations and permitting. It just takes too long to get developments approved. There's too many regulatory hurdles with respect to housing.
In addition, that PST is very onerous on adding costs to housing. That's very prohibitive and that's why we want to cut the PST by 3 per cent – or one of the reasons - but it would relate directly to housing construction, because that was a big change that the Sask Party brought in in 2017. That would address the supply side.
To address the demand side, we firmly believe that we need to cut immigration in Saskatchewan - It definitely needs to be cut. There's too much demand on our services and on our infrastructure right now, and we're just not keeping up.
We have long time citizens of Saskatchewan that can't find family doctors. Classrooms are bursting at the seams in our cities, and even say in Lumsden is an area where the classrooms are so full of kids.
We are a firm believer that you need to provide for your citizens first. You need to ensure that they're receiving the best quality of care and healthcare and the best quality of education within the education system first. Then if you have extra spare capacity, then you're open for immigration.
That’s what's pushing up a lot of rent - the rent prices and just the demand on housing - it's immigration. We're a firm believer that we need to cut immigration, we need to audit that system, because there's just too much demand.
I get there's a federal jurisdiction as well as provincial jurisdiction on that. There's federal as it relates to, coming into Canada, but also the province is directly involved in the process because they make nominations of X number for skilled immigrants, X number unskilled. There's a lot of programs set up at the provincial level to encourage immigration.
We know that Scott Moe is wanting to bring in another 150,000 immigrants over the next five years, because he wants to hit that 1.4 million population mark by 2030, and I firmly believe that that is just irresponsible for Saskatchewan, and it's frankly disrespectful to the existing citizens of Saskatchewan.
Q: What's Sask United Party’s plan when it comes to healthcare?
A: Basically, we want to open up healthcare in Saskatchewan. We want to open up the system to allow private service providers to come into Saskatchewan and set up private clinics or private MRI clinics and different things like that.
It still is a universal system. I call it universal private-public. It's basically the same type of system that you would see in Europe and the Scandinavian countries. It’s still 100 per cent covered by the government. The government is still the underwriter of healthcare, but the service delivery can be provided by both the public sector as well as the private sector.
It'll allow the private sector to come in and build the bricks and mortar, and then there'll be cost savings for the province that way. That's something that we're a big proponent of and that I've been pushing for in our blueprint for change.
The other part of our Healthcare is on the recruitment side, because of the desperate need we're in for recruitment of healthcare professionals. That's why we would open up more seats at the University of Saskatchewan for physicians as well as residency.
We would also earmark a certain number of those seats for Saskatchewan students. We're a firm believer that if you're from Saskatchewan, [and] you can meet the requirements to enter medical school, we'd love for you to study it here, because you're more than likely to stay in the province. Residency kind of goes in line with that as well.
The other part of the recruitment strategy we have is to implement more of a Royal Military College type of system, whereby you would pay years of tuition in exchange for years of service in Saskatchewan, and that would apply to all universities and colleges across Canada.
We're a firm believer that you don't need to go and recruit from outside of Canada for healthcare professionals. We think Canada produces a lot of them ourselves. We think that this program would work well. Any university - say you would go and say, ‘we’ll pay four years worth of nursing for X number of years of contractual service to practice your profession here in Saskatchewan.' That would apply to physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses, wherever there is a need - even say lab techs and different things like that.
It opens up the pool of potential candidates for the program, because it would be right across Canada. You wouldn't even need to go and just address first years, you could say, ‘well, we need nurses now, so let's go talk to the students that are between their third and fourth year,’ and say ‘we'll pay your last year tuition in exchange for time here served in your profession in Saskatchewan.’
Q: What's your party stance when it comes to policing and public safety?
A: We're a firm believer that crime needs to be punished. We firmly believe that right now in Saskatchewan, the only people that seem to have any respect for the law are the law abiding people - Law abiding citizens.
The idea of the Marshalls, I guess, at a high level potentially makes sense. Our concern with it is that it could potentially turn into another Scott Moe bureaucratic boondoggle.
We don't think you need to go to the Marshall’s Service this quickly. We think that it's better to walk before you run, and expand regional policing and municipal policing. There's lots of communities - say Melfort, Tisdale - that you could move to more of a municipal police force.
Then when you have a bunch of municipal police forces - say like Regina, Moose Jaw, Estevan, Weyburn - that could become a regional type of police force. We think we need to move more into a regional type of police force first before going to a Marshalls.
At the end of the day, Saskatchewan produces about 100 municipal police officers through its police college at the University of Regina, so there's lots of available police officers. We’ve just got to find a place and assist them to put them in. We believe that regional policing is the way to move to, and go with it that way.
At the same time, we still have a contract with the RCMP. We can always find more RCMP officers, so that's where we would go with that.
On the crime side, we've been doing quite a bit of research, and what we've been finding is one of the biggest issues we have is our provincial jails are right now running at about 30 per cent over capacity. We believe that we should be building more jails in Saskatchewan, because a lot of these catch and release issues that is, frankly annoying, to the average law-abiding citizen. A lot of the time, the reason that it's catch and release is because there's no place for the inmate to go in Saskatchewan.
We think that we can expand our jail capacity in Saskatchewan to ensure that criminals are being punished, and we've got to bring back consequences in order to ensure that justice is being served in this province.
Q: How would the Sask United Party improve the economy?
A: Holistically, one thing to improve the economy of course is by cutting the PST.
The PST is very hard on export businesses like oil and gas for example, because you can't offshoot that PST. The construction industry as well, by lowering that PST, it has a massive effect on businesses, because it allows them to have more capital to reinvest in Saskatchewan.
The second area that we would target on that is to streamline regulations, and basically cut regulations to make it easier to do business, get things built in this province. We've just seen regulations as growing steadily since the Sask Party has been in power, and they need to be streamlined. We need to lower the regulatory burden on businesses and on industry in Saskatchewan in order to spur on investment.
The third thing is, we would institute and bring in Saskatchewan First Bank. Basically what it is, is it’s a bank within Saskatchewan, a credit creation facility, that is 100 per cent governed by the laws of Saskatchewan. It would be very similar to the Alberta Treasury Branch in Alberta. The province can have jurisdiction over it, and only the province have jurisdiction over it, as long as it's only operating in the province.
We think that a lot of the issues that are affecting investment into Saskatchewan, especially into oil and gas is due to net 0 regulations and ESG –environment stability governance requirements, a lot of DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion metrics that are now being applied to industries in order to restrict capital flows to it.
A way around that is to institute Saskatchewan First Bank. It's a financial institution that has the ability to create credit for small and medium-sized businesses. This would be targeted for small and medium-sized businesses in both the oil and gas sector, and the agriculture sector.
The best way to get the economy moving is, you need to have credit. You need to provide capital, but we want to target that to small and medium-sized businesses, because they're the largest employers. They're the ones that are in the community. They're the ones that are innovative and very entrepreneurial. We need a. We need an avenue to do that, that isn't tied to Ottawa and its overreach when it comes to the financial sector. We believe Sask First Bank is the way to do that.