Cass Romyn is looking to win the Parkland-Sturgeon riding for the Green Party in the upcoming Federal Election.

Romyn said she has always been an activist but realized no matter how many petitions she signed or rallies she yelled at the real power appeared to be political power.

She applied to run federally in 2018, but the provincial leader asked her to run provincially so she dove into Alberta provincial politics and while she lost in her riding she said she ended up learning quite a bit about how things work and what steps to take when it comes to campaigning.

She says she is now better prepared to run in the Oct. 21 election.

“I also learned a lot about the community and many people told me, ‘uh oh you’re in rural Alberta, you’re not going to find Greens out here,’ but there’s actually quite a few Greens,” Romyn said.

Romyn is aware of the challenges ahead, she said her biggest hurdle is going to be educating people about the fact that the Green Party is not a single-issue party.

“The Greens offer quite a few policies that help the lower and middle class get affordable help, reduced taxes, things like that,” she said.

She added their stances on issues can be found in a document called Vision Green on their website, but it should be considered the pre-platform of the party since a full platform has yet to be released.

She said while the Green Party does focus on issues beyond climate change, it is part of their six key values and people in the riding are noticing the effects of it.

Alberta suffered a decrease in agricultural net income of 68 per cent due to changing climates and wild fire smoke said Romyn. A number released by statistics Canada.

“It’s kind of frightening when you think about it as it opens a whole new conversation about food security.”

She added with the amount of rain and not as much sun it has been detrimental to farmers already this year.

Romyn also said on the local front the coal phase out was something that needed to be done and there are easily transitionable jobs to be had in the energy transition. She said there are a large number of orphan wells that need to be cleaned up and many of them could be converted to geothermal wells and could provide energy, income and jobs.

“The Greens have always been advocating for free post-secondary tuition so that along with trimming oil subsidy’s and I think would able us to pay for a lot of that transition and training.

“A lot of the other parties, I feel like, aren’t doing enough I think at this point we have to be kind of radical because we have less than 10 years they say. We’re already seeing the effect pretty strongly.”

The other candidates announced for the Sturgeon-Parkland riding are Tyler Beauchamp of the People’s Party of Canada and Dane Lloyd of the Progressive Conservatives. Currently the Liberal Party of Canada and the New Democratic Party have yet to elect a candidate for this riding.

Dferry@postmedia.com

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