We continue our profile interviews of this year’s federal candidate by chatting with Alec Guggenmos, the Libertarian Party in the Yorkton-Melville riding.
Question 1. Agriculture is dependent on numerous factors including weather patterns, market conditions, and input costs, among others. If elected, what does your party intend to pursue in terms of programming to protect and support the agriculture industry in the province?
Agriculture is one of those industries where a lot of the factors around it are out of the control of the farmers themselves, and especially of the federal government, and farmers are getting impacted by all sorts of things. The Libertarian party would remove one of those negative factors, taxation.
Agriculture is a money in money out industry, a lot of money changing hands, and a lot of farmers are living essentially paycheck to paycheck because they're investing their money back into their farm.
Being able to relieve some of that worry allows farmers to not only invest more of their own money back into their farms, but also to maybe have a bit more of a of a rainy day fund.
We don't like taxation at the Libertarian Party already and I think personally, I would fight for getting rid of it in our agriculture industry as one of the top priorities for getting rid of taxation.
Another element is of course free trade. I'm a big supporter of free trade. It's about trying to work with other governments and cut down barriers to really allow our agricultural goods to reach the best markets and not be tied to these tight trade deals that we have where our goods have to go to one place, even if it isn't the most marketable. A free trade environment brings the most money back, and eventually it gets more money to our farmers.
Lastly, our farmers are overregulated on all kinds of things, especially on environmental issues. A lot of these environmental regulations are essentially just there to get votes, and they're sacrificing our farmers' abilities to properly do their job for the sake of these regulations that may or may not have any sort of miniscule impact on helping the environment.
We would cut these regulations; we would allow farmers to be able to focus on their farming and not on which of the dozen regulations do I have to worry about when it comes to this specific part of trying to raise my crops?
Question 2. Saskatchewan is resource rich, but it also has a well-established core of manufacturing, particularly in rural centres in or bordering on your riding. What would your party/government ensure to undertake to help small to mid-sized manufacturing and value-added ventures to prosper?
Well, a big part of it is once again getting rid of the government’s love of putting its fingers into every little thing. A big part of how small and medium businesses thrive is their ability to compete whether it's through their locality or their own advancements.
We need to get rid of government influence in that marketplace, things like corporate welfare that prop up these big companies.
We would get the government out of the market if we would stop playing favorites in the marketplace because in the end, no group understands the market better than those who are in it, especially not politicians and bureaucrats sitting in offices in Ottawa.
Question 3. Affordability and housing are of heightened concern, not only in large urban centres, but also in rural communities, some of which are poised to see expansion. How would your government help support consumers in the face of rising costs and foster an environment that promotes affordable housing?
Just like everything when it comes to cost, inflation is a huge part of it. The Libertarian Party has made cutting inflation the number one priority as our as our platform.
Cutting the deficit right now so that we can bring the budget to a safe level and not be printing all this money. That's the number one thing driving all these prices.
Thankfully, most of the supply issues were caused by all the COVID complications are starting to wane, and now it's mostly inflation causing both just the prices of already built houses to be going up and especially the goods needed to make houses, whether it's the supplies made to make the house or the gas the diesel to run the equipment or transport. Right now, housing has regulations coming from municipal governments, from their provincial governments and from the federal governments, and we would get rid of just one of those.
Housing is a is a local issue that municipal and provincial groups and businesses have are better set up to take care of than the big government in Ottawa trying to pick and choose where housing should go using a bunch of arbitrary ways to make that decision.
Question 4. What do you see as a key critical issue that you and your party, if elected, would need to step up to address in your riding?
As a resident of Yorkton, I have spent some time in Humboldt area, and I have to say the farms there do look pretty similar to the farms over here. That's why it's the same across this whole riding where we're big canola producers.
Right now, the Chinese Government just recently put up a 100% tariff on Canadian canola oil and on peas.
That’s in retaliation for the tariff that we put on the Chinese for electric vehicles which, if I'm going to be honest
in Canada is an incredibly an incredibly small industry compared to our canola and pea production here in Saskatchewan and especially here in Yorkton Melville.
Essentially, the government is sacrificing our production here, our economy here, for the sake of a very small, maybe growing industry, particularly in eastern Canada. That's another position where the federal government is inserting itself in the marketplace and making things worse for more people.
We would get rid of those tariffs. We would allow the market to properly work and see the whole supply chain be able to move our agricultural goods because China is such a large consumer of them.
The tariffs are also driving up the price of electric cars, so it's not actually accomplishing all the good that they claim it would. It's causing negative impacts on the people here in our region.