Get to know your Calgary-Lougheed byelection candidates: Romy Tittel

The Calgary-Lougheedbyelection is set for Dec. 14.

Candidates are vyingto replace MLA Dave Rodney, who stepped aside to make space for the new leader of the United Conservative Party, Jason Kenney, to run for a seat.

Advance polls closed Saturday, and the candidates are set to debate on Sunday atBraeside Community Hall at 2 p.m.

CBCCalgary's The Homestretchis profiling the candidates for the major parties.

Here's candidate Romy Tittel's chat with The Homestretch on Friday.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. You can listen to the full interview at the end of this story.

• Here's where to vote in the Calgary-Lougheed byelection advance poll

Q: So tell us why constituents of Calgary-Lougheedshould put an X beside your name next Thursday?

A: Why people should put an X beside my name is the one thing that the Green Party wants to bring forward, as you see in B.C., and that's that we're willing to work with all the governments and any government that's in power.

One of our core beliefs is that we respect the diversity of opinions that exist, and we're willing to work with those diversity of opinions to come to the best solutions that we can bring to bear.

Right now, with what we're challenged with economically, globally, we need the best people at the table. We don't need silos, we need communications between everybody.

Q: How do you do that? How do you bridge those gaps?

A: We actually start listening to people and not talking at people, we talk with people. We're getting too much into this category of us against them and we need to break that down and actually start being able to speak with each other and listen.

Q: So what would you do differently from the New Democrats when it comes to approaching the environment?

A: First of all is to strongly recognize that throughout the development of the oil and gas industry here in Alberta, throughout all of these decades we have been left with an environmental disaster. All the profits have been taken up by the multinationals, transfer payments have gone east to support Quebec and Ontario.

We're left with high prices, too much of a population that was never meant to be in Alberta for other businesses to pick up slack with all the workers, and we're left with thousands of orphaned wells and tailing ponds that are going to far outlive the life cycle of the oilsands.

These are issues that we have to address now, we can't continue to feed into those environmental disasters, we have to stand up and be strong. I know that the NDPinitially started off strong but they soon found themselves caving to the oil and gas industries.

Q: Where do you stand on the issue of pipelines?

A: We don't want to have any more pipelines. There's enough pipeline capacity in the system right now and the reality of the oil and gas industry is that it'll be lucky if it has 10 to 15 more years in its life cycle. With all the activity that's going on in the United States, our product is not going to be needed in the world, the U.S. will become the dominant oil producer here in the west.

Q: Do you believe that we're going to be fossil fuel free in the next 10 to 15 years?

A: Yes, probably 20 years.California was just saying that by 2040 they don't want to have a single fossil fuel vehicle on the road, so investing in that is not a point anymore.

Q: How do you achieve that? How do you do that in Alberta given our economy?

A: Well, that's obviously the challenge that we've sort of dug ourselves a deep hole in is relying on it and continuing to rely on it, and hoping it will come back for one more kick at the can. And we squandered many opportunities to a ready set of a much more vibrant and much more diverse economy and a much more diverse platform of our economy over all of these years.

Q: A $10.3-billion deficit. How would you tackle that?

A: So the first thing we'll be tackling is we will be putting in a sales tax. We're happy with the carbon tax. And the other part of itis 45 per cent of our budget goes to health care. So there are three things to tackle that issue.

The first is pharmacare, both provincially and hopefully federally, a program would come in place to save us literally billions of dollars across Canada on buying pharmaceuticals en masse.

The second thing would be to provide actually a government-issued healthcare card that is issued with a photo ID because Alberta is losing millions of dollars in fraud in the health care system.

And the third part is us as individual citizens recognizing that we need to contribute into that health care system by managing our own issues. So not to go to the emergency when we're really sick but to be really proactive in maintaining our health and working with health care professionals to maintain our health and not then rely on the government at the last moment to pick up the slack.

Q: You envision a future where we are fossil fuel free in the next 15 to 20 years. Alberta's economy is still largely dependent on energy. We already have a 7.3 per cent unemployment rate. How do you get there and keep people employed in the interim?

A: Well what we need to focus on is jobs and technology and artificial intelligence that can be brought to bear to maximize how we do things in the agricultural industry, in all industries.

One of the examples right now is the ring road. So here we're building it 30 years after the fact, and we're just building it as a same-old same-old type of road structure, we're not making it a smart road, we're not already preparing for autonomous vehicles to drive on it that need lane markers that can be read in snow conditions.

We won't need to drive the way we have in the past ... So there is a real tectonic shift happening and Alberta has to be really active pursuing to make sure we're ahead of that curve, and we've already fallen behind that curve so it's not going to be pretty, but we keep going backwards.

Rapid fire questions for all candidates

Q: Where do you stand on the 2026 Winter Olympics in Calgary?

A: We are opposed to any Olympic bids. The amount of money that's invested in those projects could be better spread across society in much broader ways, these Olympic facilities end up being underutilized afterwards so they do a lot of environmental damage in building these facilities. We could spend that money in much better ways. And now seeing that Russia is banned from the Olympics with their doping scandal, there is just a corruption to the whole system that needs to be dealt with.

Q: You support the carbon tax?

A: Yes we do.

Q: How much?

A: The problem when we start taking out taxes and saying that one of them is a carbon tax, one of them is going to be this tax one of them is going to be that tax, it's in this idea that psychologists have decided that when we have some sense of control over that tax it won't feel so bad.

Now, a tax is a tax is a tax. So either we say this is our rate, it'll be covering everything, or we could give you the idea that you can drive less, you can economize, you could change your windows, you could change your furnace.

The whole goal of the carbon tax is to make us aware that the price of carbon is affecting us.

Q: You also support a provincial sales tax. How much?

A: Five per cent.

With files from The Homestretch

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