In the second installment of questioning to the candidates running in the Foothills riding, we asked if candidates knew what the drawing concerns are from residents.

 

Members of the Green, Liberal, NDP and Conservative parties were asked the following question:

 

What do you believe is the main issue in the Foothills riding?

 

Romy Tittel, Green Party:

 

"I think the main issue that we're facing, not only in this constituency but in Alberta in genera, is another bust cycle in the Alberta economy. Our dependence on the oil and gas industry is such a driving force in our economic engine here in Alberta. I think how we can start turning that around is by the federal government really setting the tone and facilitating the change and the transition to renewable energies and a much more sustainable and more diverse economy."

 

Alison Thompson, NDP:

 

"My top priority is to really kick start the industry by job diversification. I don't think we have to agree on the issue of climate change, obviously I'm a strong believer in climate change, but I'm also pro-oil, pro-natural gas, pro-anything that doesn't burn the hydrocarbon. These things, the environment and the economy, they're not two separate things, they're actually an enabler. One of the big reasons that these pipelines have not had the social license to get out of our province is because the stakeholders that would buy that oil, that buy that natural gas, don't believe we're doing our part in the world economy to make the environment as good as it can be and to stop things like climate change."

 

Tanya MacPherson, Liberals:

 

"I don't think there's just one issue. I think when I'm on the doors I find that there's some people interested in the economy and tax breaks. Instead of tax breaks for the wealthy, tax breaks for the middle class and people trying to join the middle class, but there's other people who are also thinking about the environment and are concerned about the closure of environmental labs and atmospheric science labs and are thinking about greenhouse gas effects."

 

John Barlow, Conservative:

 

"Infrastructure is a big issue. These towns have a tough time maintaining and building new infrastructure as they need to do that if they want to grow and that's something that myself and many of the local councillors have been working on. I was really proud to see last year we had more than $260 million in infrastructure spending committed to this riding. Another issue that has come up quite a bit is high speed internet and a lot of the communities and small businesses really want to expand opportunities to access high speed internet and they want to market their products, not only small businesses but our agriculture sector now that they've been able to opt out of the Wheat Board they're able to market their own products worldwide but in order to do that you need access to high speed internet. Of course the number one thing people talk about is the economy, they want to make sure our economy continues to grow. We had a very difficult global recession in 2008, there's still uncertainty in the global markets today."

 

Marc Slingerland, Christian Heritage:

 

"The economy is always top of mind. I think that most of the major parties are quite interventionist and even the Conservative party, which again claims to believe in small government, has been going much too far in terms of picking winners and losers, specific tax credits for this, that and everything, where as evidence shows very clearly that the most effective federal government stance is non interventionist. The federal government can't possibly know the priorities in every part of the country so for a politician to decide 'this is worth a billion dollars' or 'that town'... the people on the ground, the councillors, the mayors, the social organizations in the towns in the Foothills and throughout the country know best what their needs are. We would get government out of the business of actually deciding what needs support and instead create a framework by which any level of government or municipal organization would be able to access infrastructure funding through interest free loans through the Bank of Canada. This has been done before after World War II, it set off the longest lasting boom in the Canadian Economy in history so we'd like to go back to that proven method of giving the tools to local municipalities and organizations to meet the needs of their own people."

 

Other candidates in the riding were contacted and unavailable for comment.