The federal election campaign is underway. The list of candidates will be known April 7 and finalized April 9.
Souris-Moose Mountain has become a "safe seat" for the Conservative Party. They have won the riding in all seven elections since the party's inception in 2003. Their predecessors, the Canadian Alliance Party (2000) and the Reform Party of Canada (1997) won the previous votes.
The last non-right-wing candidate to win this riding was Bernie Collins of the Liberal Party in 1993. Prior to that, the late Len Gustafson of the Progressive Conservatives was the MP down here.
You get the picture.
I understand that with so many convincing victories, it's been tough for the other parties to find good candidates. Who really wants to run, have their name on the ballot, get whooped on election day, and have the results posted online permanently? Nobody with a strong sense of competitiveness. Nobody who has any sort of political aspirations.
So we wind up with ballot fillers. Other parties in recent elections have fielded a candidate who is there so that the party will have somebody in every riding. It doesn't have to be a good candidate. The Liberal candidate in Souris-Moose Mountain in 2019 and 2021 was a farce, a total no-show. Didn't show up for the candidates' forums. Didn't return phone calls. Didn't do interviews. Didn't do anything in the constituency.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the party is better off not having a candidate than having someone like that. But I guess there's money to be made in having a token candidate who will still inexplicably get over 1,600 votes. (Apparently, there were still over 1,600 Liberals in Souris-Moose Mountain in 2021, because the Liberal candidate had that much support. He sure didn't gain traction for effort, commitment or presence).
If you're going to run, then you have to do a candidate's work. Show up for the debates. All of them. If you miss one, you'd better have a damn good reason. Get out into the communities. Knock on doors. Talk to people. Respond to phone calls. Talk to the media. Get your ideas out.
With a first-time candidate for the Conservative Party in Steven Bonk, this election might be a little closer, but it would still be stunning if Bonk didn't win decisively. Yes, there's still a lot of frustration in the riding with the process that was used for the nomination, but the battle with Michael Strachan to be the Tory nominee will likely be his biggest fight. Still, it would be nice to see someone push Bonk.
Politically, I'm an independent. I vote for the candidate – the person who I think will do the best job of representing the riding and its needs. I don't vote for the party. Not for the leader. So I want to see a healthy field of quality candidates. Make my decision on election day tough.
That's not to say we haven't had good candidates, or that everyone who has run in the past decade has laid down for the Tories. Phil Zajac put in a very good effort for the People's Party of Canada in 2019. He even brought party leader Maxime Bernier to the riding a couple of months before the election. Ashlee Hicks was a parachute candidate for the New Democratic Party, but at least she drove for several hours to be at candidates' forums and took time to talk to the media and other people. In 2015, Vicki O'Dell worked tirelessly for months to win this riding for the New Democratic Party, only to lose decisively to outgoing MP Robert Kitchen. I know Zajac and O'Dell were discouraged with their defeats.
We've had other candidates in recent elections who have at least put forward an effort.
This also isn't an easy riding, regardless of the party. After moving here in 2000, I was told Souris-Moose Mountain had more land border crossings with the U.S. than any other riding in the country. I believe it. And now the riding is even bigger with the addition of Assiniboia.
But this is also a riding filled with hard-working, honest people who are proud of the work they do and the essential contributions they make to their country through agriculture, mining, oil and gas, trucking and numerous other sectors. And so we deserve hard-working, honest candidates to vote for. If you can't bring the level of commitment that we deserve from candidates, then please don't run.
We deserve better than phantoms. We deserve better than names on a ballot. We deserve better than some token who doesn't know anything about the riding, but is running to help the party meet its quota.
It's the same story in every riding in the country.
Hopefully, the candidates who run in Souris-Moose Mountain agree, and will prove it with actions rather than words.
