Jeff Wheeldon, Green Provencher

Why do you want this job?

It is an unparalelled opportunity to make a difference. I have been active in a lot of social issues and it takes a whole lot of grassroots activism to create the same amount of change that a politician can often create with one signature.

What's the biggest issue for the country and in your riding?

The biggest issue for the world is climate change. The biggest issue in my riding is the opportunity that climate change brings, because we need to shift to a low-carbon economy in order to prevent the worst of climate change from happening. In a major economic shift like that, there's incredible economic opportunity. My riding has wide-open spaces to put up green energy infrastructure. We have more sunshine than anywhere else in the country. We could be an economicand literalpowerhouse in a green energy economy.

What would you do with the Senate?

I would love to see the Senate empowered. Most people want to abolish the Senate or limit its power. I would love to see the Senate empowered to actually do its job. I think Trudeau was on the right track when he kicked his Liberal senators out of the Liberal caucus. I think that there should be no party discipline whatsoever anywhere in government, but especially in the Senate.

The idea that the Senate could be controlled by Parliament is absurd and undermines its entire purpose. I would also eliminate patronage appointments. I would suggest that we have a two-stage selection process of senators where provinces nominate their best and brightest and then senators are appointed from a pool that the provinces would propose. That way we could ensure regional representation in the Senate but still have some say in the provinces.

Winnipeg was described as the most racist city in Canada what would you do to combat racism?

Education is a big part of that. We tend to fear and dislike things that we don't understand, and so I would say an important component of education should be interaction with other cultures and other races. I think that it would be important in any curricula to include some element of that, particularlywhen we live alongside other races. The big race issue in Winnipeg is not with people on the other side of the world, it's with people downtown. We have plenty of opportunity to break down those barriers by interacting with people. Unfortunately, school curriculum and education is a provincial issue. That is fortunate, but in this situation, it's unfortunate. There's plenty of opportunity in university education for studying abroad or for a more multicultural interaction or for anthropology classes that you can't get at a high school level, so I think promotion of that and generally raising people's education level can go a long way in confronting racism and xenophobia.

What role should the federal government play in dealing with climate change?

The federal government should put a price on carbon. The federal government should have a national strategy for disaster relief. Those are both things we propose in our platform.

I think that the federal government should be co-ordinating strategies with the provinces to ensure that whatever approaches the provinces take to combat climate change are co-ordinated so that we don't end up having trade barriers between provinces as a result of a tax or a system that another province doesn't have.

The federal government should be leading globally. When we go to [the UN climate change summit in] Paris, we should be leading the pack. Unfortunately, at every climate conference in the last decade, we have been the losers. We have been the colossal fossils. They invented a new award for how pathetic we've been at these conferences.

If there was one government policy you think is done better in another country, what is it?

There are a number of countries in Europe that have a shorter workweek than Canada. I don't think we have any particular legislation that could be improved in that. I think we would have to start something in Canada that would lead to a shorter workweek, because there are so many things that we pay other people to do because we just don't have time to do them ourselves. The 40-hour workweek, for a lot of people, stretches to 50 or 60 and we are disconnected from our families.

We are disconnected from our communities. A shorter workweek would actually create more jobs. We would be able to do more things for ourselves; we would actually find savings in it. It would take a government to do that because industry has no interest in having a middle-ground workweek like that. Industry either wants to have all part-time employees so they don't have to pay them benefits or limit the number of full-time employees that they then work into the ground.

Having a moderate workweek that people can afford to live off of, and still have a life, would take a government approach.

Under what circumstances is deficit spending a good choice?

We talk a lot about deficits, and the Conservatives love to talk about how they have a surplus this year, even after seven years of deficits. Everyone else loves to talk about how they have eight years of deficits. Really when it comes down to it, $8 million on one end or the other, deficit or surplus, doesn't make a difference in the grand scheme of things. Deficit spending is appropriate whenever we need to spend. There should be limits on that and we should be trying for a balanced budget or, better yet, a surplus so we can pay down the debt.

I think deficit spending is a problem when it's inappropriate spending. Inappropriate spending is a problem no matter how much money you have. I think it's a bit of a politicized statement to talk about deficit spending as a good or bad thing, and I think most economists would reflect that as well.

What do you believe is the single most effective way to fight crime?

Fight poverty. People don't wake up in the morning and decide they want to be a criminal today. People steal because they need something, or they steal because they want something and they can't afford it, orbecause they are dependent on another substance, like a drug. People commit other crimes usually because they want to steal something. The proverbial crime of passion, when someone kills another person, is not the crime we're seeing day to day.

Most violent crime is a result of something else that stems from poverty, like a drug deal gone wrong, a gang retaliation, or somebody doing something stupid when they are not at their best. When you wake up and you have nothing and you struggle every day, or maybe you live in the most racist city in Canada and people won't look you in the eye, it takes its toll. Everytime I hear another story of some bizarre crime in Winnipeg on the news, I just can't help but think "There but by the grace of God go I."

What should be done about homegrown terrorism?

The first thing is to educate people, educate Canadians, about what terrorism actually is. Unfortunately, terrorism is a label that our government loves to slap on anyone they would like to deny rights to. I think most of the time when we think of terrorism, it's almost always synonymous with Islam, and I think that's an incredible slam on Islam. When we're talking about Syrian refugees, people immediately jump to the question of "Aren't they terrorists? Are they going to hide terrorists among them?" I think people need to understand more about Islam and I think that the so-called homegrown terrorists are often being attracted by fringe groups within Islam because they feel like such incredible outsiders here in Canada.

I think the next thing is to actually listen to what homegrown terrorists are telling us. The Parliament Hill shooter recorded a video of himself just before he went on his rampage and he was very explicit. He said, "I'm doing this because of what Canada is doing in the Middle East, because you're bombing our people." He was very explicit about that. I have yet to see a politician actually address that statement. Nobody's talking about that.

If there were a gay pride parade in your riding, would you go? Why or why not?

I can't imagine a gay pride parade in my riding. If there was, I would go, and I would expect my political career to be over immediately. In my riding, there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about homosexuality. There is a lot of othering people talk about "them" and "those people."

My member of Parliament, during the last election in which he was elected, went on record as saying a student at Steinbach Regional Secondary School was fabricating his own bullying for the sake of media attention. I don't even know how to describe that. It's absolutely inappropriate for anyone to say, much less a member of Parliament. Yetit's a common sentiment or approach in that area.

I think we have a lot of growth to do in our entire region regarding homosexuality. I think we have a lot of introspection to do. I don't think we are aware of how many gay people we actually know. Maybe if we had a different, more open approach to the people around us, we would become aware of how many gay people we actually know because they would feel more comfortable telling us.

Have either you or your family had a frustrating experience with the health-care system, and what would you do to fix the problem?

We had arranged through health care to have a midwife and we were going to have a home birth. It seemed to be going OK until it wasn't and we needed to go to a hospital. Midwives are great and they took us to Steinbach. We arrived after my wife had been in labour for almost a full day. We had arrived about 10 minutes before the only anesthesiologist on site was going away for the long weekend. We were transferred to Health Sciences Centre. When we transferred from Steinbach to Winnipeg, our midwives could no longer come with us because it was a different health region.

We arrived in Winnipeg and my wife had been in labour for probably a good 24 hours at this point and was in excruciating pain. We got there just in time to be told the anesthesiologist just went into a C-section, so we had a few more hours to wait so she could get the medication. Because the midwives couldn't come with us, there was nobody there who really knew anything about usor what we had already been through. There was nobody there to give us continuous care.

Every hour or so there was a different nurse who wanted to come in and perform their own exam. It seemed like every 20 minutes someone was coming in to do a manual exam, which was extremely uncomfortable for my wife. When the doctors arrived a few minutes before Sam was born, they just stood at the back of the room all masked up. We had no idea who they were. There was a doctor and three interns. They just stood at the back of the room and watched. The doctor did nothing until the last minute. When he did step in, whatever he did was excruciatingly painful for my wife. He made no attempt to explain what he was doing. I was standing right there asking him to do things like "Please wait to clamp the cord." By the time I could get the words out of my mouth he had already done it. Nobody really addressed us through most of the experience. In general, it was a terrible and traumatizing experience, even for me, and I wasn't the one giving birth.

That was a very frustrating experience because the people who actually had some sense of our medical history weren't able to come with us from one hospital to another. That really severed any line of continuous care that we had and we felt like we were just strangers in this hospital. The hospital itself was terrifying. There was a prison guard just two rooms down from ours sitting outside a room.

After that, our son was tongue-tied and nobody caught it for a few months. Everyone kept saying, "You're not producing enough milk." We were sure that's not the case. Finally we saw a lactation specialist and she took one look inside the mouth and said, "Oh, he's tongue-tied." It's a simple procedure to fix that, but he was old enough by that point that it didn't make a difference. We went through a lot of extra work, pain, expense and frustration over just trying to feed our son. He was underweight for the first several months. If anyone had taken the time to look in his mouth, they would have seen it.

What I appreciate about the Green Party is our approach to medicine is more holistic. We're not just concerned with pumping more money into acute care and chronic care. We want to empower and fund more things like nurse practitioners and midwives who are trained to actually look at all of those things and have the time to have an ongoing relationship with the patients so they can check into all of these things. Unfortunately, because of that break where we no longer had our midwives there, we didn't really belong to the people in Winnipeg. We missed out on that. I think increased funding to more holistic approaches like that would make a big difference.

What would you do to get more people to vote?

Any time a Green gets elected, the voter turnout is way higher. An argument people make is that the Green Party is just stealing votes from the so-called progressive parties the Liberals and NDP and that if Greens didn't run, then all those people would vote for the Liberals or NDP and would be able to beat the Conservatives. Butwhen Elizabeth May won, she handily beat a sitting Conservative cabinet minister. In that election, her riding had over 70 per cent voter turnout, considerably higher than the national average. The same has been true everywhere when other Greens have been elected. There are Green MLAs in P.E.I. and New Brunswick and B.C., and they saw the same thing in their ridings as well.

Greens are better at voter engagement and getting people to vote. We do it by refusing to participate in the negative advertising, in the sign spamming, and in all the typical tricks of politics. We do it by having good enough ideas that we don't have to rely on outspending our opponents. We can out-think them. We do it by spending our time and our money actually connecting with people, and casting a vision for a better Canada, rather than participating in the somewhat cynical approaches of the other parties.

Politics seems to largely be about exposureand just having people be familiar with your name. Inspiring people to actually look into the issues, you need a platform where they're listening to you before you can inspire them. Getting them to listen is the hard part. I feel like decades of negative politics in Canada have undermined our ability to do that.

What's a better use of federal dollars: fixing roads or building rapid transit infrastructure?

It can't be one or the other, but I think the rapid transit is a far better investment in the long term than having excellent highways or city streets. Canada is a massive nation that needs to have functioning highways. Increasing our use of rail, both in cities and the vast distances between cities in Canada, would reduce a lot of the wear and tear on roads. Once you get used to having a car-based transportation system, you have to always be reinvesting in roads, because if you're investing in that level in highways, you're probably not investing in many other options, so more and more people are depending on cars. The more they use their cars, the more you have to repair the roads. The better the roads are, the more people are going to want to drive on them. Having actual alternatives would reduce wear and tear on roads so that we could actually maintain roads at a much cheaper price tag because there would be less need for constant repair.

It's better to invest in rapid transit and even rail transit across the country. There's maintenance costs involved in that as well, but it's a much more efficient method of travel. It can accommodate a lot more people, a lot more goods, with less wear and tear.

Would you support legalizing a small amount of marijuana? And have you ever tried it?

Yes, I smoked pot when I was a teenager. I stopped because I was no longer interested in it.

I don't believe that marijuana is addictive in the way that other drugs or alcohol is, and so I have absolutely no problem with legalization.

Now, I want to clarify this point because I recently said this on Facebook and had some people very upset by that. Marijuana legalization is not about promoting marijuana. I don't think that recreational marijuana use is a wonderful thing that everyone should try. I do think that legalizing marijuana would make it easier to regulate and therefore easier to keep out of the hands of kids. It is easier to score weed than it is to buy cigarettes.

The current prohibition system is not working. It's incredibly expensive, and it's criminalizing people for something that is actually a relatively petty offence.

I believe in legalization of marijuana not because I want to promote marijuana in any way, but because legalization and regulation will not only make it more difficult for kids to get, and produce tax revenue for the government that we can use for things like health care and education, but it allows us to treat drug addiction as a health issue rather than a crime issue. You see other countries, like Portugal, that have had excellent success in decriminalizing drugs and treating it as a public health issue, so that if people do have a problem with drugs, they can actually seek help without fear of incarceration.If we look at the end result of different drug policies, do we want to see drug addicts in jail,or do we want to see drug addicts? Do we want to see people able to kick their addictions with the help of the government rather than just being punished for it?

I am absolutely for legalization of marijuana for all the right reasons.