It’s in you to vote

Federal elections can be tough to filter through a community lens, which is how we strive to approach every story here at The Creemore Echo in our ongoing mission to deliver hyper local, can’t-get-anywhere-else news.
The issues on the federal stage are so wide in scope that it is easy to think of them as happening elsewhere, even though they affect us all. Pipelines, carbon tax, immigration, budgets with billions and trillions of dollars… It’s not easy to relate and too easy to tune out. But we must tune in.
We don’t need polls and projections to tell us the riding of Simcoe-Grey (and Dufferin-Caledon) will likely go Conservative but we can still take the opportunity to learn a little something about the people who will be representing us on the hill and stick a few ideas in their heads before they go off to Ottawa.
Elections are a wonderful time to get people talking, no matter what colour of blazer they are wearing. It is one of the times when people go from community to community knocking on doors and sparking up a conversation with their neighbours, and it’s considered normal.
Debates are another great way to engage. There are a few happening in the area, where people will get a chance to see all the candidates in action, hear from their own lips how they stand on the issues.
We will be covering those all-candidates meeting but to start off, in this issue, we are providing bios on each of the five candidates running in Simcoe Grey, presented in alphabetical order – Terry Dowdall for the Conservatives, Sherri Jackson for the Greens, Lorne Kenney for the Liberals, Ilona Matthews for the NDP, and Richard Sommers for the People’s Party of Canada.
We hope this brief introduction will help provide a sense of the candidates and they parties the stand for. Readers are encouraged to look up the federal parties to read their platforms. CBC has created a platform comparator by issue that can be used as a jumping off point at newsinteractives.cbc.ca/elections/federal/2019/party-platforms.
In Canadian politics there isn’t a huge divide between the left and the right, for the most part, but there are some big issues up for debate.
Our democratic system has its flaws but it is more effective with our participation.