With Canadians heading to the polls on Sept. 20, 2021, the NOW has sent Q&As to each candidate listed in Burnaby South and Burnaby North-Seymour.
The same Q&A has been sent to each candidate and answers have not been changed or altered.
BURNABY NORTH-SEYMOUR - BRAD NICKERSON - PEOPLE'S PARTY OF CANADA
Question: What are your thoughts on the TMX pipeline project? Should it go ahead? Why or why not?
Answer: I have been living near the base of Burnaby Mountain since the early 1980’s and have been hiking its trails ever since. You cannot go three feet without stepping over a pipeline buried somewhere. Locals have been living with pipelines uneventfully, except for one occasion in recent memory when an excavating company needed a better map, for many decades. The plan for a vast Increase in tanker traffic in our waters once the TMX pipeline project is completed, however, is an entirely different matter.
But there is also a solution to the very real threat posed by the environmental risk of a massive increase in tanker traffic now that the TMX is a fait accompli.
In July of 2019 Prime Minister Trudeau was asked about soaring fuel costs and the ongoing debate over the new Trans Mountain pipeline (TMX), and whether building new refineries might be a good idea? Mr. Trudeau responded at the time by saying that he was open to proposals from the private sector for a new refinery in British Columbia.
Increasing our refining capacity in the lower mainland was a good idea then and it’s a good idea now, if only to help reduce the risk that we do not have a major tanker spill in our waters that would result in untold environmental damage. The good paying jobs it would bring, and the sense of security from having more sovereign control over our domestic fuel supply would certainly be a bonus.
Building the Green New Deal is going to take a lot of oil – or did you think wind farms and solar energy installations built themselves? That being the case, Canada needs to stop selling its oil to foreign refiners at a discount, who then can turn around and charge us whatever we will bear, when they sell it back to us as ‘value-added’ fuels.
Question: What are your views on a snap election being called two years since 2019 and during the start of a 4th COVID-19 wave in Canada?
Answer: I am of the view that Prime Minister’s decision to call an election in the middle of summer was the most cynical political maneuver I have ever witnessed, and I have been following politics since David Barrett was elected Premier of British Columbia in 1972.
There was no reason for Mr. Trudeau to call the election. In my view he did so purely for reasons of political self-interest. Mr. Trudeau and his army of pollsters read the tea leaves and decided that his longing for a Majority Government, and with it virtually unbridled power under our parliamentary system, would take priority over the national interest.
Meanwhile, the cost of living for Canadian’s is increasing while the economy again is in decline. Statistics Canada has revised the latest reading on GDP highlighting a contraction of 1.1% at an annualized rate in the second quarter of 2021, well below the 2.5% expansion forecast. It’s a big miss, and one that does not bode well.
And with the consumer price index rising (CPI) to the highest level seen in years, the Canadian economy is currently suffering a bout of 1970’s style stagflation. CPI inflation is currently running at a 10-year high as the Canadian economy again begins to contracts. A perfect storm is looming, and the Bank of Canada isn’t a wind farm.
Meanwhile, the: “I don’t think about monetary policy” Trudeau Government plays deaf, blind, and dumb on the magnitude of the looming crisis.
While the Bank of Canada can keep printing money to support government spending for as long as it likes, we all know where that ship must eventually dock – at the port of higher inflation.
One cannot keep expanding the money supply while the supply of available goods and services remains static, if not in decline. Investment must be in viable enterprises capable of delivering a real rate of return over time; therefore, allowing the real economy to grow.
We must also keep in mind that Canadian Households had the highest debt-servicing levels among G-7 countries, before the Covid crisis started.
If there is an actual plan in Ottawa for the Great Reset, let’s hear it, in meticulous detail, now.
Question: What are your views on climate change? What will you/your party do to address the worsening situation?
Answer: The Environment is without question a very critical issue facing us today.
But it is a crisis which appears to contain two conflicting parts: preventing a common consensus on a workable path forward.
The first part is the very real environmental crisis – from cutting down rainforests to grow soybeans (forests being the greatest carbon sinks on the planet – trees need CO2 to grow), to our increasingly acidified oceans, this crisis is visceral and very real. The ongoing despoliation of the earth must be brought to heel
The second part is a political crisis. Official pronouncements are at once contradictory and incoherent; leaving in the minds of many responsible and informed people several questions, including: 1) what is the plan? 2) how to meet the challenge of the environmental crisis without doing permanent long-term damage to Canada’s economy? 3) why are the rules being applied inconsistently?
One example of the incoherence of the current plan being promoted by such luminaries as Mark Carney, Vice Chairman and Head of Impact Investing at Brookfield Asset Management, and UN special envoy for climate action and finance, is the proposition that Canada must radically reduce its carbon emissions, on its way to “net zero” by 2050, while failing to note that China’s CO2 emissions are far away the highest on the planet. At nearly 11.0 million tons annually, China’s CO2 emissions exceed the combined total of the USA, the EU, Japan, and Canada!
Canada’s annual CO2 emissions (617,000 tons) are basically a rounding error compared to China’s. Yet China has announced plans to increase its C02 emissions through the next decade and intends to continue to build coal-fired power plants. In its nationally determined contribution to the Paris Climate Agreement (2015), China has said it would not reach peak CO2 emissions until 2030.So, is “the plan” for Canada to dismantle its industrial economy while China continues to grow theirs?
If that’s “the plan”, then I don’t like the plan.
Canada has many natural advantages when it comes to clean energy, including abundant renewable hydroelectric power, while also being the world’s largest uranium producer. Our solutions should, like China, be nationally determined. They should involve and employ Canadians in both planning and execution.
Meanwhile, the plan by giant “assets funds” to use carbon trading credits as a financial instrument to allows rich countries and giant corporations to continue to pollute and despoil the environment, if they engage in some form of ‘sustainable’ investing elsewhere, is not receiving the careful scrutiny it deserves.
An alternative option that could be considered to address the situation is a carbon-price on the transport of goods, based on distance shipped, and the efficiency and carbon-density of the fuels used for transport. The closer a producer or distributor is to their market, the lower the costs of shipping. This plan would encourage more local production and bring more jobs into the area and provincial economy.
There are some things that we simply cannot make here locally, but part of the solution is to break off the dependency on foreign goods where possible and refocus on bolstering local manufacturing efforts.
In some spaces, we became overly reliant on importing goods not because we needed to, but because they were simply cheaper than sourcing local. This means some businesses prioritized quick profits over supporting other Canadian business – which hurts job creation, wages, healthy competition etc.
And with the cost of international freight already now through the roof and no with signs of that stopping soon, this should lend urgency to our response of finding more cost effective options, and that means buying local. If adopted by other countries in response, all this would mean is that we all would be reducing our carbon footprint from transport fuels, globally. Good ideas can spread too.
Question: What do you currently think of the federal government’s COVID-19 response?
Answer: It is time to admit the terrible economic ignorance behind Covid trade-offs, and phase-out the unnecessary application of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI’s) on businesses and the general economy.
A peer-reviewed study, conducted by Stanford University researchers, analyzed the coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020 and showed there was "no clear, significant beneficial effect of [more restrictive measures] on case growth in any country”. The study compared countries that enforced mandatory lockdowns, with countries that focused on voluntary responses, such as South Korea.
SarsCov2 is not the Bubonic Plague with a 50% Infection Fatality Rate (IFR), or Smallpox with a 10% fatality rate. It is a respiratory virus, and the best estimate of the IFR of COVID, globally, for those under 70 is 0.05%. This was confirmed in a bulletin released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in October 2020.
Public health care policy has been driven by black-box “models”, and morbidity and mortality data are being reported absent the context required for the public to truly evaluate their overall public health significance. Dissenting experts, including treating doctors and well regarded scientists, have been ignored, muzzled, or threatened with disciplinary action. In some cases, they have been fired.
Coercive vaccine mandates, especially the recently released “vaccine passport” Public Health Order, are at best unnecessary, and in my view could be unlawful.
Claims of an ongoing pandemic are demonstrably not in accord with the actual data – but are supported nonetheless in the public’s mind due to the misuse of a Covid PCR test that is demonstrably not-fit-for-purpose.
According to the CDC’s own user-guide for the “Emergence Use” COVID PCR test: “detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of an infectious virus."
In addition, BC like most Canadian Provinces have been running the PCR test at too high of a cycle count to have much clinical meaning. The CDC’s Dr. Anthony Fauci himself stated on July 16, 2020, during an episode of “This Week in Virology”, that if you run the test at 35 cycles or higher:
"All you get are dead nucleotides."
Witting or unwitting abuse of the PCR test by governments let to an asymptomatic casedemic – which means that “case” numbers had become detached from actual morbidity and mortality data. Is this a function of all of the false-positives generated by a test that: “may not indicate the presence of an infectious virus"?
Question: What will you and your party do to address the housing situation, especially in the Metro Vancouver area?
Answers: The challenges faced in Burnaby and in the Lower Mainland generally, concerning available and affordable housing for the people who live, attend school, and work here, are not truly resolvable. At least not until we face-up honestly and courageously to the elephant in the room.
Money laundering.
British Columbia has become a global hub for money laundering by transnational organized crime syndicates - some with which appear to have essentially working relationships with host governments. Investigative journalist Sam Cooper's recent book "Wilful Blindness” offers an in-depth look on how massive international crime networks are targeting democracies worldwide and how authorities in some cases appear to be looking away.
How many empty homes are there on the North Shore and in the Lower Mainland? Do we even know? What’s the point of greenlighting massive new housing initiatives if the increased housing stock will be either obscenely unaffordable, or simply unavailable to the average buyer?
We cannot wait for the outcome of the current Cullen Commission Inquiry into Money Laundering in British Columbia, well intended though it may be.
What I propose is the establishment of a dedicated inter-agency federal task force, made up of resources and personnel gathered from various agencies, including: RCMP, Border Security Services, Fintrac, and the Federal Prosecution Service.
We also require the Canadian Parliament to enact laws relevant to law enforcement in today’s globalized and integrated world of organized crime. These new laws would likely need to be similar in construction and purpose to the Rico Act in the USA.
Question: Why should voters vote for you? What would you say to those undecided and debating not voting at all?
Answer: I would tell voters who might consider voting for me a little about myself, why I have entered politics, and why it is that I am running in this particular election.
I was born and raised in a small city on the north coast of British Columbia, set picturesquely in what is known to many as the Great Bear Rain Forest – one of the largest remaining temperate rainforests left on Earth.
The name of this city is Prince Rupert. It is also located in the traditional lands of the Tsimshian Nation – whose name for the island on which it sits is Kaien, which comes from Sm'algyax, for "foaming waters", in reference to the tidal-driven Butze Rapids on the northern edge of the island.
In addition to its astonishing natural beauty and being adjacent to the largest population of Grizzly bears anywhere in the world, Prince Rupert is also conspicuous for two things:
- It gets more rain than any city in Canada, averaging about 100 inches a year.
- Among Canadian cities with a population of 5,000 or more, Prince Rupert has the highest percentage of residents who identify as First Nations. Nearly 40% of Prince Rupert’s residents are First Nations.
While I settled permanently in North Burnaby in my early twenties, having first moved into this area to attend Simon Fraser University, Prince Rupert and its people have always remained close to my heart. And not just because it was such an amazing place for me to grow up. But also, because it is a place with a deep history, and no small amount of sorrow because of this history. Flawed government policies have left a deep wound on the people who first in habited this northern land of wind, sea, and forests. I knew this as a boy, I know it now.
History is also happening to us, now. Our nation is going through its greatest crisis at least since the 1930’s and 40’s. Duty calls.
To those undecided or debating not voting at all? I would say, a monumental historical moment is upon us. Duty is calling you too; your nation needs to hear your voice.
