Candidate: Peter Smith

Occupation: Retired engineer

Party: Green Party of Canada

How will your background and your past experience help you as a Member of Parliament?

“When I retired from TransAlta I was director of commercial operations in eastern Canada. And in that role I spent a lot of time working with customers and the government, negotiating contract and dealing with disputes. And that kind of experience is very useful in government, particularly when you’re trying to find common ground and resolve things without having to resort to court.”

“I also spent about twelve years on the board of St. Clair Child and Youth Services dealing with children’s mental health issues and funding issues for that and I spent another five years chairing a children’s mental health advocacy committee. So I had a certain amount of interaction with governments but also interaction with the clients as well.”

Why did you decide to run for office?

“The last federal election was the first time I stood for office and that was after my retirement. And obviously once you’re retired you have a lot more time to dedicate to the campaign because it does take a lot of work and a lot of time.”

“I ran this time because I think that we’re at such a critical point in our history, there are some issues that are really important to us and our community. Things like the opioid crisis – young people are dying from overdoses – and the climate crisis,” Smith said. “I’ve been very disappointed in watching our major parties and how they deal with these things. They don’t seem to be taking these crises very seriously, they seem to be playing political football and it’s more about ideology and using these things to get votes than it is putting forward good proposals to solve them.”

“The Green Party platform is the one platform that I can look at and just agree with it. It just looks like the best approach to these issues and it fits with my view of the world, I guess. It’s also very much based on good science and good research and I really like that, it’s not just ideologically based.”

What are the three most important issues currently facing Sarnia-Lambton and how will you go about addressing those issues if elected?

Jobs: “We continue to lose jobs in Chemical Valley, automation is coming in general across the country and artificial intelligence is taking away many of our jobs. There’s a lack of skilled trades out there so one of the things we’re looking at is returning to a more robust apprenticeship scheme where we can get the training and fit people into new jobs.

The Green Party plans to do a lot of upgrading on buildings, so there’s going to be a huge amount of demand for electricians, plumbers or other skilled trades who will be needed to bring these buildings up to code, reducing the energy demand.”

Climate Change: “The Green Party has a 20-point plan called Mission Possible, and one of the things I like about that plan is one of the first things we’re going to do is get together all of the parties and come up with a plan that we can all follow, so we don’t get into the situation where we have one party in power, they do something and then we elect another party and they go in a completely different direction. We all need to have everybody on board and working towards the same goal because climate change is a huge issue facing our country.”

Opioid/drug crisis: “It was about 50 years ago that we first heard the term ‘war on drugs’, and I read somewhere that the U.S. government has spent a trillion dollars on that war. We in Canada haven’t spent that much, but we’ve spent billions on our own war on drugs, we’ve put thousands of people into prison and sent billions of dollars to organized crime. So what we plan to do is to stop treating this as a criminal offense and turn drug dependence into a medical issue and deal with it as a medical issue.”

If elected, how will you balance your own personal views on issues with the policies of your party as well as the wishes of your constituents, many of whom may have voted against you?

“I think the first thing you’ve got to acknowledge is that typically whoever wins an election has only got about 40 percent of the vote normally, which means 60 percent of people voted for somebody else. So the incumbent usually starts off from a minority position.”

“But the first thing is to make certain you do what you said you’d do to get elected – nothing annoys people more than when you say you’re going to do all these wonderful things and once you get into power you change your mind.”

“You’ve also got to spend time listening to people, allowing them to influence your decision making on some things. An MP needs to let in some other ideas. One thing with the Green Party is that any MPs are free to vote on their own conscience – the leader cannot whip the vote. Ultimately, you have to do something in compliance with your own sense of right and wrong and your own conscience. So you’re going to upset some people because there are diverging opinions and you can’t agree with everybody.”

Why should the people of Sarnia-Lambton vote for you?

“The Green Party platform is the only one that really has answers around these big issues such as climate change, opioids and drug overdoses and transitioning our economy from the way it is today into the new economy of renewable power.”

“I’m disappointed how some of the other parties have been playing politics with these issues and I’m looking to open up the discussion a bit and talk about the opportunities that we have to change the way things happen.”

“I think the other thing is that I’m not interested in a second career. I’m not going to be in politics for the next 20 years. I see there is something that needs doing now and I want to be part of helping with that, but I’m not interested being minister of something or other and hanging out in Ottawa forever.”