MANITOBA VOTES 2023 – STEINBACH: Green Party candidate wants to give voters options

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This article was published 29/09/2023 (634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Gabrielle Simard-Nadeau knows it’s an uphill battle for the Green Party in the Steinbach electoral district.

After all, the PC Party has represented the riding since it was formed for the 1990 election from parts of La Verendrye and Emerson.

The Green Party has seen steady improvement in their numbers and in 2019, the third time a Green Party candidate took part, current party leader Janine Gibson earned 5.47 percent of the vote to finish third.

But Simard-Nadeau said it’s important to her to give people the option.

That’s why when she heard there was no Green Party nominee ready to run in Steinbach, she decided to step up.

“I offered to put my name in,” she said, explaining she is more of a “paper candidate”. “I think it’s really important that everybody has an option on the ballot, because that’s something I would want as well.”

Simard-Nadeau lives with her family on a farm near La Broquerie. Her three children attend the same French school in La Broquerie that she and her husband did many years before.

“Growing up I’ve always loved nature and the environment and animals, so I really like being on the farm and taking care of the soil and taking care of my animals,” she said.

While she has experience sitting on boards and committees, this is the first time she’s run for election.

While addressing climate change sits at the top of the priority list for the Green Party, so is addressing issues like health care.

“The health-care system really needs some more work,” she said. “We need to make sure that everybody has access to health care in a timely fashion.”

The Green Party also has a basic income guarantee in their platform, and Simard-Nadeau said that would have many benefits.

“It would help with crime and poverty issues, mental health and addictions issues as well,” she said.

The Green Party has also pledged rebates to help people buy electric vehicles, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by working with agriculture and energy sectors and shift away from industrial animal agriculture.

“That’s supporting local small farmers and also supporting all farmers to try new practices that are more sustainable,” she said. “If everyone does a little bit it will make a big impact.”

Moving away from natural gas and building or retrofitting homes to be more efficient is also important.

The Green Party has also pledged to deny Sio Silica’s application to mine silica sand through the aquifer.

“I think that our water is really precious and we need to make sure there is absolutely no risk that we would damage our aquifer,” she said.

Simard-Nadeau said education funds could be better spent.

“It might mean we need more infrastructure but it could also be just reorganizing the resources that we have already to become more efficient,” she said.

She added that there’s still a learning curve regarding climate change that must happen.

“I don’t think that a lot of us realize how severe things are going to get if we don’t make changes,” she said. “It might be too late by the time we realize we haven’t done enough.”

Simard-Nadeau said having a Green option is important.

“I don’t think the Green Party will win in Steinbach anytime soon but we still need to be having those conversations,” she said.

The Green Party advocates proportional representation. Rather than a first past the post system where the winner of each riding becomes MLA and adds a seat to the legislature, proportional representation allows every vote to count.

Seats are doled out based on popular vote, so parties get the number of seats that corresponds to the percentage of votes gained.

In the last election the PC party won 36 seats with 46.8 percent of the popular vote. If proportional representation was in effect, they would have earned 27 in the 57 seat legislature.

The NDP took 18 seats with 31.6 percent of the vote. Proportional representation would have given them the same amount.

The Liberals won three seats with 14.7 percent of the vote. Their seat total would have risen to eight with the proposed system.

Despite getting votes from 6.4 percent of Manitobans, the Green Party did not get a single seat. Had proportional representation been in effect, they would have been assigned four seats.

Simard-Nadeau said she feels the Green Party has everybody’s best interests at heart and she challenged people to consider casting their vote in a different way this year.

“I think that a lot of us can be really scared of change, but change is going to happen no matter what,” she said.