Photo submitted/Grant Abraham.
Grant Abraham is the United Party of Canada’s Member of Parliament (MP) candidate for the Ponoka-Didsbury constituency.
Abraham was inspired to get involved in politics after becoming frustrated with the federal government’s response to key issues.
He is a lawyer, author, humanitarian, and small-holding organic farmer, and had a career in International Development.
Abraham was asked a series of questions, which have been presented to all candidates.
This is one installment of our Meet the Candidate series.
Here are his responses:
What are the main issues you’ve heard from constituents?
The main issues would be sovereignty, equalization payments, and tariffs.
Along with unleashing our energy, family value issues, and ensuring Albertans can defend themselves and their property.
How do you plan to address inflation, and the cost of living?
We need to do an audit on our financial infrastructure in Canada and find out where our money is going.
We need to get our energy sector going again, drill oil, get gas moving, and open up routes to the shores of Canada. We need to get pipelines built so we can move our hydrocarbons and develop the infrastructure for mineral extraction.
We need to repatriate the industry to Canada. We offshored it all, we need to return it, and reward entrepreneurship. When we get the economy going, and push money back down to families, homes, and communities, then Canada starts to become resilient again.
One of the challenges that we have with inflation is the constant printing of money, and we don't know where a lot of our money has gone because it's undisclosed or lost.
Once we do an audit and get a real sense of where the country is then we can start to deal with inflation and the cost of living.
One of the reasons that we have massive house prices is that we’re not carefully monitoring foreign resources that are coming into the country. We have plentiful wood and land, and it shouldn't be difficult to remove the impediments to actually building houses.
A lot of our food costs have gone up because of the carbon tax. There are multiple layers of carbon tax that have been built into the cost of goods.
Those are compounding taxes, which really accelerated the cost of living in Canada. We should be removing the tax that makes Canadians pay more and getting what we should be selling to the countries that pollute more.
How will Central Albertans be affected by U.S. tariffs, and how will you mitigate the impact?
Central Albertans, and particularly a lot of ranchers, and farmers are going to be impacted by the tariffs. We need to fix that and protect those industries.
We need to protect our farmers because it's not just food, it's food security. Our nation needs to ensure that we have a quality food supply. We have excellent producers, but they need to be protected.
I would begin to deal with the organized crime behind the reasons that the Americans are putting the tariffs on because we’re allowing essentially cartels to produce fentanyl and human trafficking.
When you fix those issues, the economic ones will be repaired.
With a push to purchase Canadian-made goods, are you considering any type of support for local businesses?
We have a very strong policy in terms of incentivizing entrepreneurship to build family and community strength.
One of the things that we're not doing in this country is giving equal opportunities to all Canadians. We’re running affirmative action programs that are incentivizing different groups in our nation to have an unusual and unfair advantage.
We need to return to a more careful thought about how we're incentivizing our nation.
Every Albertan in the riding needs to have the same kind of opportunities to incentivize entrepreneurship and allow people to chase and build their dreams and financial security.
Right now, we’ve created a governmental infrastructure that's working against certain sectors of our nation. The family business, the family farms, and small businesses are what built this nation.
We need small business owners dreaming again, producing, and getting back to the amazing industrious and creative character that we have in Canada.
What is your plan for healthcare?
One of the things we've seen in recent years is that some of the payments that come from the federal government to support healthcare come with conditions that drive policies that create the death cult that we're seeing in this country.
We really need to look at some of the value judgments that we're making about Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) and get the value of life built back into our hospitals.
Hospitals shouldn't be the place you go to die; they should be a place that you go to get healed, and it seems recently that we've taken a very dangerous turn. A lot of that has to do with the correlation between funding coming from Ottawa being dependent on policies being implemented at a provincial level.
We need to tidy that up and move back to valuing life again, and let the provinces properly control their health services.
There needs to be a curtailment of MAID. We need to have a strenuous review of it, in relation to people not being counseled into a state-sanctioned suicide.
I'd like to see it severely restricted and curtailed, if not stopped. I believe in sympathetic care, I believe in Hospice care, and I believe in alleviating pain and suffering, but I don't believe that a tax-paid health system should be hastening death.
How will you support seniors?
We've been sending so much money overseas for foreign aid and for bizarre things that we don't even understand what we've been sending money for.
Ultimately, we need to take care of Canadians first.
We need to help older people with their pensions, and we need to take care of our veterans, just by simply reallocating funding that should be used to care for Canadians.
How do you plan to support Alberta’s oil and gas, and agriculture sectors?
The real challenge right now in Canada, looking at both energy and what's going on with the U.S. tariffs is that there's an ideological hijacking of what Canada is.
We need to liberate our energy market, we need to get our energy out to the markets, we need to get pipelines going, and we need to be selling our energy.
We want to protect our farms, and ensure there's clear and strong food security in our ability to get it to market and have it be quality food.
We want to allow farmers to not just produce raw food, but move into diversified products, strengthening our supply chain systems.
We should be incentivizing Canadian food manufacturing to produce food for us and not just have it owned by foreign multinationals.
There's a lot that can be done to incentivize and grow that industry.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
We really need to deal with sovereignty, the equalization payments, and look at the real issues that are driving the tariffs with the U.S.
Getting into a retaliatory tariff war with the Americans is insane, especially when they're asking us to clean up the value issues of organized crime-producing fentanyl and human trafficking.
I'm yet to be in a room full of Canadians who are OK with those things going on from a value level, they want those things fixed, and that's why we're in a trade war, because we won't deal with those issues.
We need to clean up our backyard and build a better fence because we're bad neighbours.
The federal election is on April 28.
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