THE HIGHLANDS VOTES

Alison Davidson became a candidate for the People’s Party of Canada two days after the federal election was called.

She said the process so far has been “very stressful, but also encouraging.”

Davidson doesn’t have election experience. She wasn’t a party member until she submitted a candidate application, realizing there was no representative in the riding.

On the last day to apply, Davison said, “I thought ‘you know what, somebody has to do it and sometimes that somebody is you’.”

“We sit around our porch and complain and complain about what’s going on,” she said. “And then I knew I liked the PPC, I really liked that they were really standing up for our rights and freedoms.”

Davidson, who runs a log home building business and cabinetry shop with her partner in Kawartha Lakes, said the most important issue for her is “respecting our constitution” in regards to health mandates such as lockdowns and COVID-19 passports.

For Davidson, lockdowns in particular caused more damage than good. She said while COVID-19 deaths are tragic, “the suffering caused by lockdowns outweigh the risk of COVID-19.” For Davidson and the PPC party, health advice from Canada’s chief public health officer Theresa Tam (who they propose to fire) has spread fear and division.

“I’m tired of all this fear all the time,” she said. “We need to work, we need to get back to school, we need to get back rolling. And then we can start working on the economy.”

The PPC party opposes vaccination requirements for healthcare workers, as well as the recently announced vaccine passport system which will be introduced in Ontario Sept. 22.

She said “crazy spending” by the Liberal government has directly contributed to high living costs and the current housing crisis in Haliburton. She also suggests lowering immigration levels to “a more reasonable number,” to help decrease competition for housing in Ontario.

The PPC party takes a skeptical view on climate change, claiming “none of the cataclysmic predictions that have been made about the climate since the 1970s have come true.”

The PPC party also proposes to leave the Paris Agreement, a collection of 190 countries who have pledged to reduce emissions and work to adapt to climate change.

Davidson said Canada should look to what it already does well in conservation and environmental protection. “Part of it is we just talk doom and gloom instead of [saying] there are some things we’ve done that are good, and we should celebrate.”

She said if Canada commits to reducing C02 emissions, it would “devastate” the economy while high emission countries wouldn’t be impacted.

“If we really want to do something about the global environment, we have to do something about China and India,” she said.