Grade 12 Chestermere High School students received a special lesson in politics on Tuesday, April 28 when they held an all candidates forum in their social studies classroom.
All six local candidates in the Chestermere-Rocky View riding attended the event and answered questions prepared by the students themselves.
The questions included thoughtful topics such as education and taxes; the future of Alberta jobs and wealth distribution; the energy industry and diversification of resources.
Tessa Rokosh is the teacher who organized the forum for her class and said that students had been preparing for this event for about a week, “The students have really been looking forward to this” said Rokosh. “There is a lot going on in Alberta politics and especially Chestermere right now and the kids are excited and very passionate. It’s something I have never seen in a group of kids before so it’s very interesting to see their level of excitement.”
Candidates had the opportunity to open with a 3 minute speech describing themselves and their desires to become the MLA to represent this diverse riding, followed by the opportunity to answer a couple of questions each.
One of the first questions was answered by Dr. William Pelech, the Alberta New Democratic Party candidate regarding education, and large class sizes. “Alberta has the absolute lowest taxes by far in this country and they spend per capita the least amount of money by far. If we had even close to the same tax regime as other provinces we would have an additional $11 billion,” said Pelech to the crowded classroom of 36 students.
“Let’s get serious and look at your classroom, this is the consequence of not investing in education, this is the consequence of keeping taxes low to benefit the wealthy and to benefit corporations, many of which are foreign corporations that take the profits out of this province. So let’s get things straight: no new taxes means continuing with this and in fact it’s going to get worse.”
Running as an Independent, Jamie Lall had the chance to answer the same question regarding education. “I would advocate on behalf of the teachers and students,” said Lall, “I think if there’s any ministry that should essentially have a blank cheque, it should be education and if you invest heavily in education right now, sure you might not see the return on investment right away but that funnels into everything else.”
The Wildrose Party candidate, Leela Aheer was asked about how her party would close the wealth gap. “The biggest issue that we have here is taxation. I know that may not impact you right now but it does impact your parents and the funds that they have available” said Aheer to the students, “The Wildrose will not raise your taxes. The main aspect is to make sure that anybody that is under that certain portion of the gap, we need to protect those families – at this point to over tax and to throw money at this problem is the last thing we should be doing – we need to trim from the top.”
Matt Grant is another candidate running as an independent. When asked about the wealth gap in the province he answered, “One of the biggest problems right now is the flat tax system in our province, where no matter what you do you pay 10%. If we moved to a progressive tax system were people making under $50,000 pay 8% and people making over $250,000 pay 13% – it helps people who are low income, people like yourselves who are just getting started. That 2% matters to you.”
Coral Bliss Taylor of the Green Party was asked about the role of the oil industry in Alberta. She answered that one of the things she would like to do is to stabilize the economy by diversifying. “We hear all the time that we are an energy rich province and that is absolutely true, we have the best solar energy in the country, we get the most sunlight hours and we should be taking advantage of that using our existing knowledge in the industry to grow into that type of direction,” said Taylor, “The role of the oil industry would tend to diminish because we would be adding other kinds of industry and stabilizing our economy.”
Bruce McAllister, the current MLA for Chestermere-Rocky View and PC candidate spoke about the status of education in the province. “We (government & schoolboards) are going to work together and do it together, for the betterment of you guys. This is about education and making sure that we are properly funded and it’s also about financial responsibility but it’s a shared responsibility, between the government and school board to get it right,” explained McAllister. “If the balance isn’t right, it will be revisited but the main thing is that we are at a point in time in Alberta to make some changes to get the spending under control.”
McAllister was also happy to address the question of how he would explain his reasons for crossing the floor. “We had an administration that was off course and we held them to account – and now I believe that we have the leadership that we need. I’m certainly going to stand up for this constituency as I have for the past three years.”
All the candidate’s encouraged the students to stay involved and to get out and vote. They expressed their appreciation about getting invited to speak about politics. Afterwards, the students were buzzing with excitement about what they had learned and perhaps the opportunity helped those that are old enough to vote to make a ore informed decision next week at the polls.
