Chey Craik is the People’s Party of Canada candidate for the Moose Jaw – Lake Centre – Lanigan riding.
Affordability
Well, first of all, I will be the voice of the people in this riding in Moose Jaw – Lake Centre – Lanigan. I believe that immigration is a huge part of the affordability crisis. We've seen people talking about housing and the cost of food at the grocery store, taxation overall but the amount of people we brought in last year unvetted, unchecked and then we need to use CSIS and the RCMP to actually look at who we're bringing into Canada. I mean, the numbers I've seen range from about 1.8 million to 3 million people in Canada. We're at 42 million people last year in Canada. It's just unsustainable. It affects like I said, housing, healthcare, education. We can't seem to find doctors. Yeah, I know in this problem specifically, but across Canada as a whole. So, cutting red tape, cutting the bureaucracy, cutting spending, foreign and corporate welfare across the board, we can save billions of dollars. We can get our budget back on track. We're in the hole deficit spending about $50 billion. We're looking to save $56 billion in the first year.
Tarrifs
Certainly that's not talked about enough is the tariffs from China on all of our canola products, peas, pork, that's a huge amount of agricultural output from Saskatchewan in the West as a whole. Everybody seems to get caught up in the topic of the day, the tariffs in the U.S. Tariffs are imposed on the people of the country. Donald Trump was elected as president in the U.S. and he's doing what's best for his country, trying to bring manufacturing back to the States, but we need to focus on Canada. Tariffs implemented on our side are taxes on us. We need to strengthen Canada's economy and not worry about what's going on in the U.S.. We need to focus on our spending, our cost of living and associated things in Canada. Tariffs imposed on other countries, counter tariffs on the U.S., for example, would be an additional tax on Canadians. We just don't need that. We need to negotiate with the U.S. I mean, if anybody's read Donald Trump's book The Art of the Deal, they would come to realize that it's a tactic in negotiation. We need to negotiate and not retaliate.
Carbon Tax
Completely against. We need to lower taxation overall in Canada. The pause on the carbon tax, we see it at the pumps, right? Certainly I do. But is that pause on the carbon tax enough to buy your vote? People always talk about the carbon tax, it's just one layer of taxation we experience here in Canada and yeah, no carbon tax. No amount of money that we throw into the air fixes the atmosphere, has any effect at all. Canada's emissions are about 1.2 per cent of global emissions with China and India. There's just no way. The U.S., as a whole, is 10 times bigger than Canada and they have no carbon tax. This is not a way to fix anything environmental.
Immigration
We need to have a complete moratorium of or a pause on mass immigration. Certainly, we want to bring in economic immigrants, people that are a benefit to Canadian Society, such as doctors and lawyers and other types of skilled workers. But we can't just bring people in. People I've talked to across the province are experiencing their children can't find entry level jobs. We don't need to bring in more people in Canada. We need to have a complete pause so we can reassess who's here because we don't know who's here right now and how to address all these other issues that come about because of the amount of people who brought in.
Crime
Part of it is through policing, right? We need to increase funding to policing, we need to make sure that they're doing the job, that they're not focused on DEI policies, that we're bringing in people to the police force that that are based on meritocracy programs. The best people for the job. We can't have these DEI hires that don't meet the qualifications. We can't lower standards overall, but yes, we need to increase policing as a whole through CSIS, through RCMP, through local police, and we fully support that.