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Thursday, October 22, 2015
Volume 11 Issue 16
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Stubbs wins Lakeland by Jaime Polmateer jaime@lloydminstersource.com
The more things change the more they stay the same, at least for the riding of Lakeland. The Liberals may have walked away with a majority government in the 2015 election but Conservative candidate Shannon Stubbs walked away with the majority of votes in the Lakeland constituency. According to results obtained from cbc.ca, Stubbs finished with 73.6 per cent of the electorate behind her while Liberal candidate Gary Parenteau followed with 13.7 per cent. NDP’s Duane Zaraska came in third with 9.2 per cent of the voters marking his name on the ballots. “It has been a long campaign,” said Stubbs after the votes were in. “I’m just so proud of our campaign and the hundreds of volunteers that have worked their hearts out for hundreds of hours right across Lakeland.” Stubbs says her first moves as Lakeland’s representative will be to focus on logistics, being that Lakeland is a new riding, but once the logistical issues are addressed, she will begin advocating for the same values and principles she ran on during the electoral race. These include lower taxes, free trade, human rights and what she considers to be “Canadian values”. Safety and security are also part of those values and she says she
will also be advocating for changes to the justice system to put victim rights first. “Those are the areas that I focused on in the campaign and those are the areas that I’ll continue to focus on on behalf of the people of Lakeland.” When it comes to the best interests o f
Alberta, and more specifically Lakeland, she says “we will have a fight on our hands now”, referring to the Liberals having advocated for a carbon tax, which Stubbs says will up the costs of everything for every consumer. She also says this tax may hurt the energy industry a n d
File Photo
New Member of Parliament, Shannon Stubbs
Shannon Stubbs
73.6%
Garry Parenteau
13.7%
Duane Zaraska
9.2%
Danielle Montgomery
2.3%
Robert McFadzean
1.1%
the workers and businesses in the riding. Another point of conflict between her party and the new federal government involves payroll taxes that will be harmful to small businesses. “I don’t think that’s the right plan for protecting Canada’s economy in a fragile global context. We know the volatility of the global economy better here in Lakeland than almost anywhere else because we’ve seen losses in the energy sector due to low oil prices and international market crisis, but also due to uncertainty in potential government changes to the taxation in regulatory and royalty frameworks,” Stubbs said. “So these are the kinds of concerns I have for our constituency given our key economic drivers of agriculture and energy and I will work hard (for) both to represent our constituency but also to hold to account the new government.”
Ritz heads into another term by Jaime Polmateer jaime@lloydminstersource.com
Conservative incumbent Gerry Ritz reclaimed his seat as the Minister of Parliament in the riding of BattlefordsLloydminster for the seventh term in a row. But with a majority win by the Liberal Party, he’ll now have to surrender his spot as Agriculture Minister, creating
a situation he describes as “bittersweet”. “It’s always great and I give a lot of credit to the great constituents of Battlefords-Lloydminster and of course, my election readiness team have been fantastic,” Ritz said of his win. “It just proves that you can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” The Liberals winning a majority, however, left Ritz in a state of disbelief.
He thought there was a chance at the Grits forming a minority government, but as the numbers came in, it became evident that a different scenario was taking hold. Though this scenario was hard for him to grasp, Saskatchewan stayed true to its Conservative traditions with no new Liberal representatives voted into the province. See “Ritz,” Page 3
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