Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself and why you decided to run?
A: I'm definitely not someone who would normally run, I feel. I basically decided to run because of the lack of support for people in Saskatchewan.
I see problems in the health system, I see problems in how we are completely neglecting our biosphere - anything to do with the environment.
To me that's important because if we aren't thinking about the environment that we live in, we aren't recognizing that actually all of our food comes from that environment. All of our food is based off of pollinators; all of our food comes from the ground.
We're not really paying attention to the ways that we're poisoning the ground; poisoning the air. We're killing off species, we're destroying wetlands.
I'm not under any kind of illusion that I could possibly win or anything like that. I actually feel like a vote for me and the Green Party at the moment actually might be a bit of a wasted vote.
Realistically, Saskatchewan is primarily conservative and the Green Party’s fairly left wing. I think realistically to expect that we would win a riding - especially in Moose Jaw - it's not going to happen, but also we've been financially challenged.
The Sask Party increasing the cost of new candidates applying by 500 per cent to $500 per candidate, instead of $100 per candidate - the only reason I can think of is to eliminate any kind of competition or any kind of splitting of the vote on their side - So probably, you know, Buffalo Party United, Conservative Party - those are the kind of competition they're meaning to eliminate, but it's also affected the Green Party because we're pretty bare bones and we don't have corporate sponsors because we're calling out corporations.
We don't have a lot of the same financial backing as the other parties and unions usually back NDP, because NDP has historically had a chance of winning, and so it does make sense to back them if we want any kind of progressive change.
My main reason is just to give people a voice that aren't being heard. To use whatever privilege I have to speak for the marginalized.
I don't necessarily even want people to vote for me – I just want them to critically think about these things that that we're missing.
Q: How would the Green Party address housing in the province?
A: Basically, affordability is the key issue.
There's a whole bunch of provincially owned housing that is just kind of dilapidated and in disrepair and has been neglected.
The Sask Party’s started to throw some money at it and say that they're starting to rebuild some stuff – Good, but there are still thousands of these units that are just left empty, while all these people are struggling and homeless.
We could start by repairing and investing in the infrastructure we already have, but also we could still build more homes. There's things like tiny homes that we could build for quite cheap. If we could give everyone the ability to have a roof over their head – I mean, that’s the key, right?
As rent keeps increasing, as inflation keeps increasing, we're going to keep seeing more and more people that are struggling to stay in any kind of housing. We can take some of the money - maybe some of the money that that was mismanaged, and maybe was given – like we could see in the Bypass scandal – there was almost $2 billion that was given to these corporate interests that are friends with the Sask Party that didn't need to be.
If you look at other infrastructure projects that are similar across the country, those ones only cost about 20 per cent of what it did. It's all in the costed stuff - the Green Party leader, she's quite good with math and she's quite good with economics, and she has quite a brain for numbers. She was the one that found the discrepancies in their paperwork and their numbers, and she was the one that brought it up in the leader's debate a couple of elections ago.
For me, that’s just a symptom of a greater problem, which is this kind of cronyism and the kind of corruption that we've seen in the Sask Party. They're always going to be putting those friends and those corporate interests before people, and if we can shift some of that money towards people and if we can shift that money towards things like housing and building housing, and working with cities to make better bylaws that aren't going to restrict things like small homes and tiny homes from being a possibility.
We can build those homes for like 10 to $20,000 - it's just a decent home out one of those those secan truck bins. I've stayed in those as Airbnbs. They're great.
Q: How would the Green Party improve healthcare in the province?
A: The Green Party pretty much has a consensus of doing a reset on the on the healthcare system.
I was talking to one of my neighbors the other day and we were talking about how a reset is really needed at the moment. We tried it with the LEAN system - that did not work. We're still in it. But if you talk to a lot of the nurses and the doctors and people who work in healthcare, they'll tell you that this is a very broken system, and it prioritizes this LEAN - cutting the fat. Prioritizing an organizational structure above patient care.
I think that we need to shift our focus back to patient care. There's a doctor that wrote a letter earlier this year that was talking about how our funding is focused on these 15- minute patient times. Doctors - they get paid for every patient and you can only spend 15 minutes with the patient.
If they were paid for their time as well as that, then they'd be able to actually sit with the patient and give them the time that they actually needed.
If we can shift more towards the patient needs focus instead of always going to be an economic focus, then I think that would be key.
Basically, lifting the rights of patients above that of the corporate interests and the financial interest.
You’re going to hear me mention this a few times, but we're giving huge tax breaks to huge corporations - even in the potash industry, and the uranium industry. We're giving huge tax breaks to them, and they're making literally billions of dollars out of the resources that they're extracting from Saskatchewan lands, and we're getting nothing from it other than people that are employed.
If we can tax them fairly, maybe even just the same amount that we tax small businesses, then we could use that tons of extra money to fund more health care and to fund better systems, more hospitals, and draw in more doctors with better pay and draw in more nurses with better pay. A better retention rate.
I actually think the NDP is on the right track with those things. They're wanting to bring in more doctors, they're wanting to bring in more nurses, they're wanting to make it more competitive wages. I think that that, that the system's really broken right now and we need to do some massive changes.
Q: What is the Green Party’s stance on policing and public safety?
A: I'm learning how to be a therapist and a counselor, and there's this thing that we learn about called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow was a psychologist, and I think he wrote this paper in the 40s.
He came up with this concept - Every person has these physical needs - they need to eat food, they need to have shelter, they need to have water.
Then the next level is, you need to have companionship, you need to have friends, you need to have support - emotional support.
If we can just do that first layer - If we could just make sure people's absolute needs are met, their basic needs of food and water and shelter - If we could do that, then we're not going to have people having these mental health crises nowhere near as many.
We're not going to need as many police that need to address these situations. How many times are the police called for homeless people making a ruckus by just existing in a park or just existing on a corner. How many times are they called for things like that?
If we can actually meet people's needs, if we can send that money that's going to corporations - if we can put it towards something like a universal basic income, that can give everybody just the amount that they need. Enough for rent, enough for utilities, enough for food, and then we're going to meet their needs.
Then we're not going to have people completely stressed out and completely having these mental health breaks because they don't have any finances. They don't have jobs that pay them enough to pay their rent. They don't have support from the government.
If they're on disability, if they're seniors, if they're single parents that are just struggling to get by - they don't have support financially right now, and everybody's struggling and rent keeps going up and food keeps going up.
If had a universal basic income, then we could actually cover all those needs so that people don't have to feel like they're not going to make it through the next month, or they're not going to make it through the next year, and what's going to happen to their kids and what's going to happen to themselves.
These are things that are stressing out a lot of us, and that's adding on to our mental health issues, which is in turn adding on to our physical issues because those are inextricably linked.
The thing that a universal basic income would do would be to increase our economy.
Q: How would the Green Party improve the economy?
A: If we introduced a universal basic income and we were taxing the corporations properly - basically what we would be doing is we'd be shifting the focus away from international corporations coming in and taking our resources and taking our taxes away from us, basically causing the rest of us to pay taxes.
Some of our taxes are actually going towards these corporations to help with their profits. If we actually tax them fairly, they're going to threaten to leave our province. And then of course, we're going to lose jobs. But, if they do that, that's fine.
Then we can purchase their corporations and make them Crown corporations again and start them creating more income for the province again. That's fine.
If we were able to shift the money from international corporations into small businesses - if we were able to shift that money into small businesses - give them huge supports.
If we can supply small businesses with enough money and enough support on local products, then we can shift our consumerism that's just drawing in all these products from China, from Asia, from other countries where we're getting things super cheap and super cheap quality, and we continue to find out all of these contaminants that all these products have and how there's no oversight and the quality of the products that we're getting.
Then we're dumping it in our landfills, which is then of course continuing to spread the contamination into our food and water and air in our country. If we were able to shift that money into local businesses and give tax incentives to local businesses in order to bring the cost of goods down to maybe even below the cost of goods that you would even find at like Dollarama.
If you could imagine being able to buy a really quality good – say like a wooden spoon or a wooden bowl - something that you would need for your kitchen that was made in Saskatchewan and it had all these tax incentives on it that actually brings the cost lower than buying these really horribly made goods from Dollarama.
Yes, that would cause Dollarama to leave. Which is, in my opinion, fine, but it would allow all of us to be able to support each other and to be able to grow a self-sustaining economy instead of an economy that relies on huge international corporations to come in and rescue us and pay us off in not living wages.
Then we struggle to get by. But if we can shift our thinking back to a more local focus, back to one that creates its own goods and keeps the money in itself, and uses the tax breaks to lower the cost of things, it will increase our economy.
Universal basic income has been shown in every study to increase the amount of spending power that the average citizen has, so that when they have more spending power, they're going to put that back into the economy. The economy is going to grow way more than all of the studies show that these huge corporations cause economies to grow.
I think that we’re going more and more towards this kind of listless state of post-capitalism of these huge corporations deciding everything for us. I think that it's time to start taking the power back by shifting our focus to local goods, to local people and to local businesses.