Kyla Courte is the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) Member of Parliament (MP) candidate for the Red Deer riding.
Kyla is a financial advisor based in Red Deer.
With a background in anthropology and a passion for helping others, she brings a people-first approach to financial planning. After earning her financial planning designation in 2021, Kyla returned to advising in 2023, helping clients achieve their financial goals.
She’s also passionate about politics and stays active in her community.
Courte was asked a series of questions, which have been presented to all candidates in the Red Deer riding.
This is one installment of our Meet the Candidate series.
Voters head to the polls on April 28, with advance voting taking place April 18 - 21.
Here are her responses:
Tell us about yourself and why you decided to run as a candidate for the People's Party of Canada:
I am born and raised here in Red Deer. I've worked in the financial services industry for the past decade. I found myself in a position over these last few years of just questioning everything that I thought I I knew and understood, and it was a massive awakening for me. There's been a slip in the way that I was watching the government unfold and the parties present their positions, that just felt different from, 10-15 years ago, when I had initially thought I'd belong to party A or party B or party C. I found the People's Party in about 2021 and was really surprised to see that the platform echoed a lot of the sentiments that I'd always had, especially considering some of the things I'd heard about the party itself. I'm someone who's always had the value and belief that if there's work to be done and I'm capable of lending a hand, why not? So here I am. This will be my first campaign and I'm just really excited for the opportunity.
What are the most important issues in Red Deer?
The issues that are important for me and the issues that I'm hearing a lot of people in Red Deer say that are important to them are really to do with our Albertan voice, our regular voice being actually heard and respected in Ottawa. I'm hearing a lot of people just really ready for true change, not satisfied with the way that housing has been inflated over the years. Just some attention and our voices to be heard. Equalization is something that I've heard, there's always a bit of a conversation here in Alberta especially.
How will Central Alberta be impacted by U.S. tariffs? What is your party's plan to address this issue?
I see what's happening with Trump and the tariffs as a consequence of the leadership over the last 10 years. He made it clear that he has issues with how we've stewarded our borders and the way that we've allowed fentanyl to go unchecked in our system and trickle down into the United States, I think we can see evidence of that here in Red Deer and across Canada with the increase of open drug use that you see just walking down the street, driving downtown. I think that if we made some meaningful changes towards those things, then there would be more of a reasonable conversation. A tariff is an import tax, so watching our leadership and the official opposition push for retaliatory tariffs, is going to impact every single Canadian, not just those in the manufacturing and export sectors. I see an impact of that already in pricing on products that we as Canadians depend on getting from the United States, our fruit and our vegetables, things like that, we rely on imports for quite a few of those options, so I believe we will just see continued inflation as long as our government is doubling down and imposing the retaliatory tariffs that each and every Canadian will feel in their cost of living.
What is your party's plan to address healthcare here in Central Alberta?
Our policy on Healthcare is really stepping the federal government back. Healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction and we believe in allowing provinces the autonomy and the reduction in federal bureaucracy to let those systems flow in the way that the leadership in individual provinces sees fit. I've personally had quite a bit of experience in our Alberta healthcare system and noticed even here the impact of bureaucracy. So, while we wouldn't have a direct impact on the way that healthcare is stewarded in Red Deer or in Alberta, we would ensure that we were making it as efficient as possible for the government of Alberta to take care of that.
What can be done to address the rising cost of living?
The cost of living really has been one of the main issues. Even myself as an everyday Canadian, has felt especially over the last five years, we really need to pare down the size of government, being more efficient and cutting taxation and even things like tariffs are going to have an inflationary impact. So getting into these trade wars is probably one of the worst things we can do when we see the cost of living increase as it is, we do need to be mindful of money that is adding to the economy, especially at the federal level, because this is also responsible, as we saw through COVID, for increasing costs that we've seen and things tend to just go up and up and up even under the threat of these tariffs before things have actually been established. Once the allusion to them being an issue comes, we see that reflected in the pricing and unfortunately we don't see it coming down. Even these threats are having an impact there, so we need to just take a cooler approach to that, a little bit less reactionary and look at the places where we can save federally as well.
How does your party plan to support farmers?
Our party has some really interesting ideas. Our main one that sets us apart from other parties is our willingness to talk about supply management and the impact of that on Canadian farmers. We also have strong positions on removing Canada from things like the Paris climate accord and the global bodies that put regulations that impact policy that add red tape and expenses to farmers and the way that they operate their businesses. So our policies on reducing government, on providing Canadians with the place of empowerment that they can offer in a way that makes sense to them being respectful of things like environmental impact but not getting into the alarmist place of adding prices to pollution.
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