Forum repeats many notes from last week
By Lethbridge Herald on April 16, 2025.
Candidates vying for Member of Parliament participate in the final forum before the April 28 election, at the Lethbridge Public Library.
Herald photo by Joe ManioAlexandra Noad – LETHBRIDGE HERALD – Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
It was a full house at the final all-candidate panel held at the Lethbridge Library on Wednesday.
Tariffs were a hot topic again with Chris Spearman, representing the Liberal party, saying provincial leaders need to band together to eliminate trade barriers, adding that when Trump becomes disrespectful, Liberal leader Mark Carney leaves the conversation and works with other leaders.
Clara Piedalue, People’s Party of Canada candidate, said negotiating is the only way out of tariffs.
“Well, it’s nice to hear Chris talk about Mark Carney negotiating with the United States,” said Piedalue, “because that’s not what I’ve seen in the news. It’s been nothing but retaliatory tariffs after retaliatory tariffs. The People’s Party of Canada is the only party that has said we would sit down and negotiate with Trump.”
She added that her party would also promote free trade between provinces and that is more of a pressing problem than the tariff issue, which she believes will resolve itself shortly.
NDP candidate Nathan Svoboda said his party wants to protect the people who are working in infrastructure industries, especially when it comes to promoting inter-provincial trade.
When asked about Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to use the “notwithstanding clause” to overrule the Supreme Court and hand down consecutive sentences for multiple murderers, Rachael Thomas defended it and referred to the party’s “Three Strikes” promise.
“If the Individual would commit three violent crimes they will get life in prison.”
She added later on that the catch and release of criminals needs to stop.
Christian Heritage Party candidate Marc Slingerland said the judges are not elected and questioned why they have more authority than elected officials.
“The problem we have seen since the passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is this wholesale transfer of authority from your elected representatives to unelected judges and they are supposed to be adjudicating the law. Instead, they have been aligning the laws and not in a way that is necessarily indue with the majority of people.”
Amber Murray, candidate for the Green Party, rebutted, saying the notwithstanding clause has been used unfairly many times and needs to go.
In response to a question win child care, Spearman said many daycares in Alberta didn’t receive child subsidies.
“There were issues uniquely in Alberta where the money wasn’t reaching the daycare.”
He also blamed many financial issues Alberta is dealing with on the way the provincial government handles money.
Slingerland said it’s not a one-size=fits-all issue, and parents who want to stay home to raise their children should be supported, which was followed by an applause from the crowd.
Maria Fitzpatrick, former MLA for Lethbridge East, asked Spearman about the Alberta government receiving federal money for health care and how he would make sure it stays in the public sector. He said he thinks the money needs to be audited to make sure it’s supporting public health care.
Thomas was asked about the energy sector, which was applauded by the crowed. She said the Conservatives would focus on energy such as oil projects and scrapping Bill C69.
Murray countered by saying fossil fuels were to blame for dropping Gross Domestic Product and that Canada needs to turn away from oil and gas which was followed by applause as well.
“Liberals were the only party to build a pipeline” Spearman pointed out, which drew laughter from the audience.
With the city being a hub of research from both Lethbridge Polytechnic and the University of Lethbridge, Thomas said the Conservatives would support the agriculture-based projects and others that had tangible, economically oriented results.
But Svoboda called out Thomas out for not being able to define the term “woke” when asked about Conservatives not supporting “woke” research.
The forum was the final scheduled before election day April 28. Advance polling stations open in the city on Friday.
25-24
The forum was truly the opportunity to witness, first hand, the articulation and integrity of the Candidates.
As reported in this Lethbridge Herald article by Alexandra Noad, Liberal Candidate, Chris Spearman was practically laughed off the forum table a number of times due to his inaccurate and/or jaded responses to questions asked. The best being when he tried to convince the audience that he “really had no choice or voice concerning the location or installation of the failed “Supervised Consumption Site”. “ To his statements (obviously false) Conservative Candidate Rachael Thomas rebutted and actually reminded him (Spearman) that he was Mayor of Lethbridge at the genesis of the Lethbridge Supervised Consumption Site. That it was he that was at the helm of strongly endorsing the site and in fact officially signing off in approval of the site being initiated in Lethbridge. Cheers and loud applause followed as she (Thomas) pointed out the inconsistencies of Spearman’s comments.
The “take away” of the forum was, “Chris Spearman, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all the people all the time!”
Meanwhile, Thomas can’t even define a simple 4 letter word. I’ll take Spearman’s brains over Thomas’s lack of.
The word of which you speak is “woke” and as Rachael Thomas explained very plainly, the word is “situational” and can be used in a plethora of ways. She gave excellent examples and clearly defined them, obviously not to your liking!
‘Situational’ lol, in other words she skirted the issue. We all know damn well how the right has been using the word, so don’t play coy.
Excellent examples? All I heard was a word salad. But hey, keep rolling with your bias.
This
Rachael Thomas IS NOT a “Progressive Conservative” candidate. The Progressive Conservative Party of Canada formally dissolved on December 7, 2003, when it merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the Conservative Party of Canada.
This is certainly a unique take. I was there and I spoke with several people who said they had been specifically asked to attend en masse by Rachael’s team – which is a tactic implemented to influence the room. You’ve always had a problem with the guy Harold, but you can’t argue that he didn’t handle the room and the comments with tenacity and make people question. People keep saying a lot of untruths about the SCS and you’ve never supported it. If spearmen could single handedly control the opioid crisis like you allude to, then he should be running the world as some super power. At the core all he showed was he cared about people not dying. We all should. The fear mongering and blame is disgusting and inhumane. Shame.
IF you were there, you missed Spearman continually caught in his lies, go back and watch the video!
By the way, yes, Conservative members received an email advising of the dates and times of all forums. Is there a problem in your mind with that?
Nice spin. You sure are obsessed with Spearman and spinning him to be some villain and failure. He’s a dad and grandfather just like you. Maybe you can start looking for more what you have in common with him than criticizing him.
Yeah, failed marriage, poor relations with former employer, terrible mayor….. no thanks! Furthermore, now that he now longer resides in Lethbridge, why didn’t he run in his new Constituency?
Sir… are you ok?
Failed marriage? Poor relations with former employer? Terrible mayor? You are quite the gossip! Do you know these people personally? Did they share this with you? Or are you just a keyboard warrior who thrives on character assassination?
As for being a parachute candidate – that’s a completely legal and active methodology of provincial and federal parties. Why didn’t Danielle smith run where she lives? And why don’t you seem to have an issue with that? Spearman lived in lethbridge for 40 years and i see him around town all the time still.
You really have a personal axe to grind with the guy. Maybe take him for coffee and then get on with your life. Or think about seeing a therapist. Must be awful to be filled with so much bitterness for someone and let them take up real estate in your head for so many years. Hope you find the peace you need.
Wokeism has divided Canada, causing our once great country to crumble and it roots go back to the over 150 years when things were much different.
Canada was always regarded as the best country to live in worldwide and we saw prosperity and freedom, including multiculturalism, but those freedoms were taken for granted and not appreciated and people who enjoyed the most freedom than any other country, people who got spoiled from those freedoms now demanded more. This new movement has destroyed a once great nation!
https://witness.lcms.org/2023/a-brief-history-of-the-ideas-behind-wokeism/
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These words, penned by the Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), capture the spirit of modern revolutionary thought. It argues that institutions and standards, even notions of goodness and truth, enslave people by binding them to a political system, social order and moral and theological tradition. True freedom can never be realized within these structures. Neither can real equality — where all are equal in every respect. Achieving these lofty (though undefined) goals of freedom and equality requires liberation from the institutions and standards of the past. Individuals and society must move past them and create new ones — ones that avoid the oppressive and exclusionary nature of those being replaced. How? In the past, force and even violence was the strategy. Think of the French and Russian Revolutions. There is, however, another way. Over the last century, revolutionary thinkers have also advocated for a quieter, more intentional approach, one that seeks to change institutions from within in what was described in the 1960s as “the long march through the institutions.”
Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was the chief protagonist of this view among American academics. He was described as a militant intellectual. He took his ideas to their logical conclusion even in his private life where he experimented with some of the most deviant sexual behaviors, which biographers continue to expose. Nevertheless, as an atheist he believed that freedom knew no bounds. That is the very definition of freedom; limits to freedom regarded as sin or standards to preserve a civil and moral order were, for him, mere arbitrary constructs imposed on society by institutions and traditions. They needed to be deconstructed. That was, in many ways, the main point of Foucault’s academic work. He critiqued everything from standards of normalcy to the way discipline and punishment was conceived in penal systems. He went so far as to deconstruct normative standards of sexuality — whether between the same sex or between adults and minors. His ideas comprise the gamut of what are many of the main concerns of woke culture today.
Wokeism is the result and perhaps the marriage of these social and academic trends. They began to coalesce and surface in the 1980s and ’90s on college and university campuses. There were plenty of warnings about it.
Wokeism is not new, but it was not meant for a society that was already free, but mankind often never appreciates what they have.
About 20 years ago after some studies the results showed that 97% of Canadians were better off than 86% of the world!
This movement, the progressive woke movement has destroyed Canada and divided the people.
No, modern day populism has divided our country. Pierre is slinging that mentality left, right, and centre. He doesn’t care about you or anyone else. He cares about his job security and his populist ideology (which he learned from his bff Trump) is what is creating problems. Can’t wait to see him lose his seat.
Wow, what a cherry picked pile of crap from say what!
Pfffffft!!!