Ryan Schultz says Conservative supporters who are disillusioned with the way the party runs now have another option.
Schultz is the Yorkton candidate for longtime Conservative MP Maxime Bernier’s newly founded People’s Party of Canada.
When longtime Conservative MP Maxime Bernier joined the CPC caucus, it was the beginning of an ascent that would culminate his strong candidacy for leadership of the entire party. Eventually, his support within the party nearly clinched him the top job.
With 49% of the vote in the 13th round of the CPC Leadership election after leading the polls in the first twelve, missing narrowly the position of Leader of the Official Opposition as a close second to Andrew Scheer, Bernier was undeterred.
Eventually, after disagreements with Scheer’s leadership of the CPC, Bernier made the bold move to form his own Party. The People’s Party of Canada, although established in late 2018, has made impressive strides in a very short amount of time in terms of its supporters uncommon to newly formed parties. Typically, new parties fight for years to establish legitimacy in the public eye.
Bernier was determined to run candidates in all of Canada’s 338 federal ridings in the 2019 federal election this fall, a tall order for any party, particularly a new one, but Bernier, never known to be shy with his views, especially during his tenure with the Conservatives and his duties as MP for the riding, certainly had his work cut out for him.
Still, the newly minted People’s Party of Canada managed to do so - registration documents were duly submitted to Elections Canada on October 10, 2018, and the party claims to have over 30 000 registered members.
It has also managed to get considerable press from mainstream press outlets, especially the CBC -- largely as a result of Bernier’s background.
Whatever your political stripes may be, with a platform echoing what some say is more in line with a traditional Conservative policy, the PPC is definitely making some noise.
The federal candidate for the PPC in Yorkton was announced a little over a month ago, and on Saturday afternoon, Ryan Schultz held a low key meet-and-greet at the City Limits Inn on the corner of Betts and Broadway.
Despite considerable competition for the attentions of Yorktonites from the Exhibition, the turnout of the meet and greet was considerable, with donations and supporters remarkably solid.
Yorkton This Week sat down with PPC candidate Ryan Schultz in order to get more of an idea of the PPC’s platform as it evolves and, of course, Ryan himself.
“Well, my background, I’ve spent seven years so far working at the Colonsay potash mine. I do electrical drafting, and I’ve done a little bit of general contracting in between. For the last three years, I’ve been Councillor at the village of Young. That was kind of my first step getting involved in politics. But once I got into politics in Young, you actually start talking with people in your community. You get to understand where they’re coming from [with] some of the issues they’re having. Just, kind of [the] effects and changes you can make in policies or by-laws that can help them. That, you know, it lit a fire in me.
“I was always into federal politics, but not quite to the same extent as when we had the election for the leader of the CPC [Conservative] party. I voted for Max[ime] myself, I joined the membership and got a member just to vote for Max, so I was a little disappointed he didn’t win. The stories that came out afterward about the election, I wasn’t necessarily thrilled with. It put a really bad taste in my mouth, especially with Scheer and his carton of milk; he was celebrating his win. I didn’t like that. So when Max announced he was starting his new party, that’s when I decided, ‘Okay, I’m joining up right away.’
“I was a founding member right from the get-go, and then I’d kind of been on the fence about actually getting into politics, or actually representing -- or trying to represent. It was...I had a few people tell me, ‘You know, you seem to know your politics and your policies.’ They said I was a good public speaker! We’ll see about that,” Schultz said with a chuckle.
“So I was like, ‘OK. I’ll try it. Why not.’ They selected me to run for Moose Jaw, but I lost out to Jay. He’s a very, very popular man. He doubled our membership alone! Just him. So they asked me if I wanted to represent Yorkton, would I set up here. I have a friend who lives up here, he’s the director of finance for the city, so we’re really good buddies. We can talk a lot about what it takes to run a city. He comes from one side of it, I come from the councillor side of it.
Schultz says he has had a lot of support within Yorkton with a lot of locals reaching out via social media.
Asked what he’s been hearing from local residents that have reached out to him as concerns, he says a few things that have come up repeatedly.
“Cost of living,” said Schultz.
“The costs of living going up -- that really resonates with our platform that I’ve been pushing.Different policies that we can do to reduce the amount of costs of living in general for everyone. Not just the poor, not just the wealthy. It’s everyone.
“The other one has been shrinking the federal government, that’s a lot of what I hear from PPC supporters, and I think that’s a very important thing, especially coming from our province where we only have 15 seats in government right now. I think the more we can get out of federal politics and into the provinces, you’re going to see a lot more changes that will happen for the better in the provinces. They’ll be held to a higher level; you can actually hold your provincial government accountable. To even go beyond that, what I would like to see -- beyond the platform from a little bit -- is if you can take the money out of provincial politics and go back down into municipal politics. I think if the municipalities have a lot more money, they would be able to do the spending that would actually make a bigger difference than seeing it from a higher level of government like provincial or federal. They’re the ones that that deal with a lot of these problems firsthand.
Schultz says his party’s goals are simple.
“Let the people keep the money they earn,” he said.
“Let’s put more money in the pockets of all people, so we can let them steer the economy. Limit the amount of federal tax dollars that the federal government takes in, and actually push that onto the provinces themselves. So, essentially like a tit-for-tat. We’re going to cut out 2 billion of federal dollars from Saskatchewan, but we also want to see the provincial government increase their taxes by 2 billion to offset the different spending. One of the areas that we want to go into is health care. Make the provinces more accountable when it comes to health care, and also loosen up a little bit the federal rules to allow the provinces to explore more of an introduction of the private sector into the health system but still being able to offer a single payor type system.
Schultz also says that a lot of government contracts are only available to huge corporations with deep pockets, shutting out smaller firms that are qualified simply because they aren’t huge but otherwise qualified. He cites the auctioning off of CRTC wireless spectrum as an example. Rogers or Bell can afford the costs of buying spectrum from the government to start a cell phone company, but a smaller firm that could be a viable competitor wouldn’t. Schultz says he wants to change that, by changing the rules through deregulation.
“Selling Canada Post. Right now, Canada Post has Purolator. Purolator pretty much subsidizes Canada Post. So if we can open that up, we can introduce more competition into the mail sector as well, and at least we’d save taxpayers a lot of dollars.”
According to Schultz, those torn between where to cast their vote has a clear deliniation, especially to traditionally conservative voters.
“We are the only Conservative choice when it comes to the politics nowadays. Andrew Scheer has taken the Conservative Party of Canada so far into the left of centre on certain subjects now that there’s a lot of Conservatives that are disillusioned with the entire political body. All they simply need to do is hear the People’s Party of Canada and our platform, and that would be more than enough to persuade these people who are disillusioned.”
Ryan can be reached on Twitter with the handle @RyanSchultz_PPC and the party’s official website lists its platform at https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/
