With an election slated for Monday, CHMA reached out to candidates to get their opinions on topics of concern in Memramcook-Tantramar.
Here’s some of their response to questions about adapting to and reducing our contribution to climate change.
Green candidate Megan Mitton says there needs to be increased planning around adaptations to possible climate change-related effects like sea level rise.
She says we need to address what needs to happen with the dikes, from an engineering infrastructure perspective.
“We need to be looking at dealing with floodwaters,” she says. “And a new issue this year, it seems, is dealing with drought. There are people whose wells are running dry. There’s hay shortages, issues around farming.”
“So when you talk about climate change, there’s not one silver bullet solution,” says Mitton. “There are so many things we need to look at.”
On the other side of the coin are the measures to help reduce contributions to climate change. Mitton says a good place to start would be local procurement quotas.
“We could start with some anchor institutions in the community,” she says. “So having hospitals, schools, universities, nursing homes–and provide adequate funding to do this–but have them purchasing local food and local products, for example. Shortening our supply lines, which again, in the pandemic, we saw that not all of our supply chains were very steady. So that is something that would address the pandemic and help with climate.”
Milton also mentioned energy efficiency retrofits for businesses to help reduce consumption of energy, transforming agriculture to make it a carbon sink instead of a source, and looking at efficient transportation opportunities, especially in rural areas.
“A lot of these ideas that we have about how to adapt and transform our communities for climate change tend to be urban-centred,” says Mitton. “We need to think about what that looks like in a rural area.”
Independent candidate Jefferson George Wright draws attention to the impact of corporations on the environment and climate change.
“My platform is staunchly ecological, and ethically so. We need to set very strict rules, and corporations need to be held to account for them. I am not interested in single use plastics for individuals. I would love a world without plastic. We need to focus on the individuals who are causing the most amount of damage and inform them of the deadline for the different type of way that we need to produce goods and transmit goods around the world.”
Wright says that as an independent, free of the party apparatus, he can look at budgets and laws more rigorously. He says that politically and structurally we need to take away the impediments to new ideas and ways of thinking.
“I think we need to realize that this is the people’s land and this is the people’s planet and that we cannot allow government to be financed by corporations at the exclusion of the people’s opinion, at the exclusion of people controlling their own monetary resources.”
Maxime Bourgeois says he knows that flooding is a major concern for Tantramar area, and the Liberal candidate says he wants sustainable and long term solutions for those impacts.
When it comes to climate change initiatives, he’s a fan of Sackville town council’s approach so far.
“In terms of climate change there’s a lot of small, little initiatives that we can we can take within our communities to make sure that we are doing our part. For example, I salute the mayor of Sackville that created a committee to look at all the decisions that are taking place in town hall to make sure that their decisions have the lowest impact on the environment possible. So I think that’s a concept, it’s a gameplan that could be adapted and put across the province for sure.”
In terms of reducing our impact on climate change, Bourgeois spoke about expanding our agricultural sector into more local distribution, and boosting the local economy in general.
“There’s so many examples of great products that we have in our backyard but we tend to buy from the States, or from out of province,” says Bourgeois.
“I think we need to do a better job to help our businesses to promote the local products,” he says. “We’re very capable. We have skilled labor and people that are ready to work hard to produce what they’re producing, with great quality. And we just need to capitalize on that.”
Former People’s Alliance and now independent candidate Heather Collins did not respond to a message requesting an interview.
PC Candidate Carole Duguay declined an interview based on her schedule.
