Blaine Calkins is the Red Deer- Lacombe riding incumbent for the Conservative party. We asked Calkins a series of questions here is a look at his responses. (All candidates have been reached out to and will be featured at different times on LacombeOnline.com)

How do you plan to get more money and jobs for Canadians after the challenge of the pandemic?

With Erin O’Toole’s plan to secure the future one of the primary objectives is getting people back to work. We need to come out of this recession strong. We need strong economic outcomes. Canadians get back to work. Our detailed plan is going to have four fairly major initiatives to create jobs.

We have the Job Surge Plan which is going to pay up to 50 per cent of the salary for new hires for six months, following the end of the emergency wage subsidy. We're going to use an investment accelerator getting companies, spending money, and creating jobs by providing an investment tax credit for any capital investments made in 2022 and 2023. That will do things like incent fixing up your place of work about buying new machinery, equipment, and so on.

[We will] rebuild a Main Street Tax Credit. This is going to incentivize people investing in businesses and opening up storefronts, which is a 25 per cent tax credit on amounts of up to $100,000, when Canadians personally invest in small businesses over the next few years. If we get money flowing in, we'll get those ‘for lease’ signs changed into ‘now hiring’ signs. That's the goal there. Of course, Main Street business loans providing up to $200,000 worth of loans in which a lot of it after 25 per cent of it can be forgiven to get our retail, tourism industries, and hospitality industries back on their feet.

These measures will allow us to start to draw down on the supports that are currently in place. Some of the disincentives that employers are telling me are in the way right now to hire workers but at the same time, providing the economic stimulus to the business community.

It's the business community that's been asked to take the hardest hit here during COVID-19. We've asked them to shut down. We've asked them to delay their hopes, their dreams, and their ambitions. It's only fair that we inject some of some stimulus into that into our private sector to get it going again. The public sector, of course, is fully paid for by the private sector. We need a strong, healthy, free market economy in this country in order to be able to pay for the programs and services in the future.

Canadians are saying that they care a lot about the environment, what issues do you see as having the biggest impact on our environment? How do you plan on addressing it?

Well, we have a serious plan to combat climate change. It will allow us to meet our targets and reduce emissions by 2030. At the same time, it will allow us to also repeal the onerous carbon tax. Everybody who goes to the pump right now sees just how difficult that is, and we're just at the start of Justin Trudeau's carbon tax. He plans on going $270 a tonne, which will add $0.40 a litre to things like fuel and gasoline.

We do recognize that pricing mechanisms work. Alberta has long had a price on carbon in our industrial sector. We can do things like invest in innovation and technology such as carbon, capture, utilization and storage.

We have an amazing story to tell just east of Lacombe and east of Blackfalds along Haynes Road with Enhanced Energy, which is carbon capture utilization and storage. We would incentivize companies like that using the Alberta Carbon Trunkline doing more industrial capture of

carbon and putting it down into these old formations, which also stimulates the oilfield recovery so that we can get net zero oil out of the ground. That means we're putting more CO2 now into the ground, and we're taking it out in the form of oil.

This is the most cost-effective way to sequester carbon because we get some of the revenue back from oil production. We can do this. We can fight climate change without having to kill jobs and in sectors of the economy that are very, very lucrative global demand for energy is increasing. It's also diversifying, and we need to place Canada and Alberta squarely in the middle of that.

We can continue to use our resources, they're the most ethically sourced energy in the world. We have this most stringent environmental considerations in the world and our oil and gas sector is world class and world leading when it comes to getting oil and natural gas out of the ground in the most efficient, effective, and the least carbon intensive way possible for the carbon that we actually have.

How does your party plan to address reconciliation with indigenous people in Canada?

Reconciliation is an important thing as we've seen over the last little while. Finding the graves at residential schools has been a very serious matter that I noticed on the hearts and minds of a lot of Canadians, including my own. It's a sad chapter in our history.

I was proud to be in the House of Commons back in 2008, when Prime Minister Harper apologized for the residential school policy that the Government of Canada had incorporated for decades and for years. We fully expect that we will be able to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action 71 through 76, which is funding, investigating, remembering all of those unmarked grave sites, adding that to the story of Canada's history, and ensuring the proper resources are allocated for communities to commemorate and honor any of these individuals that were discovered through these investigations. It has to be according to the wishes of their next of kin, and of course, the indigenous communities.

We're also going to work with organizations across the board. Reconciliation means bringing indigenous people fully into entering society on their terms, bringing them to the table. Erin O'Toole and the Conservative Party has a great plan about bringing First Nations groups to the table on major projects, get them at the table right from the beginning, and making them part of moving forward. I think that's the true spirit of reconciliation.

So, when it comes to major projects, we will support things like an Indigenous Opportunity Corporation. We have one here in Alberta. We will model it at the federal level and based on that Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation. We will provide funding and loans for Aboriginal groups so that they can participate in the processes but also give them an opportunity to access capital and borrow capital so they can be full partners in projects moving forward, adding to the economic security of Aboriginal Canadians.

How do you plan to manage the shifting needs of the healthcare system following the pandemic?

Prior to Justin Trudeau becoming the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives that previously served government and allocated six per cent to transfers of funding every year to the provinces. That has somewhat been diminished under the Trudeau administration. So, administration would ramp that back up to a six per cent per year increase in health transfers to each and every province so that they can have the money that they need.

We're going to have some pretty significant mental health issues coming out of the pandemic. We know that it's been hard on families, it’s been hard on business owners, it's been hard on seniors who have been isolated, it's been hard on everybody. We're going to ensure that an additional million Canadians can receive mental health treatment going forward by encouraging employers to add mental health coverage to the employee benefit plans, and offering a tax credit 25 per cent of the cost of additional mental health coverage for the first three years.

[We will] create a pilot program to provide about $150 million every three years and grants to non profits and charities that deliver mental health and wellness.

One of the things that we were working very hard to do in the opposition was create a nationwide 3-digit suicide prevention hotline (988). We're hoping to get that off of the ground. I think that's something that enjoys the support of everybody in the House of Commons.

For those who are suffering from addiction, we'll invest some money over the next three years to create 1,000 residential drug treatment beds and to build 50 recovery community centers across the country. This will provide spaces for those who do suffer from addiction, also supports their families, and those who have recovered with the help they need to support each other.

Also, palliative care is obviously a very serious issue. We will double the direct federal investments in palliative care. We've seen some absolutely horrific things going on in our hospitals and in our long-term care facilities as well. We need to protect those vulnerable seniors. Some of them were left to fend for themselves as COVID swept through some of these long-term care homes. Those who abandoned or neglected their seniors need to be held to account for that. We are going to provide some stronger protection for seniors. We're going to amend the Criminal Code so that people who failed to provide the necessities of life to our most vulnerable seniors will have a legal duty and an obligation to provide that care.

We will also help seniors stay in their own homes with amending the Home Accessibility Tax Credit. This is a great thing. Right now, the limit is $10,000 per dwelling, but if you have several people in the same dwelling, each with different needs, we should be basing that accessibility grant on the person. We're going to move it from a $10,000 a house to $10,000 per person. [We will] allow seniors or their caregivers, including their family members, their children or grandchildren, to claim the medical expense and tax credit for home care instead of only allowing them to claim attendant care, if they live in a group home.

We're going to put about $3 billion into infrastructure for long term care facilities as well to renovate some of these older long term care homes in all of the provinces and territories across Canada. This will not only create jobs, but also increase the ability to provide care and service to seniors. We will encourage a lot of partnerships with private, not-for-profits that have historically provided significant amount of long-term care.

We need to boost the number of personal support workers as well. COVID-19 has been awful. It's made it clear that Canada lacks the personal support workers. Those who do the hard work every day looking after seniors and long-term care homes. We need to make sure that we support those personal support workers by providing priority and immigration programs for those who can work in long-term care and promoting those careers through immigration and refugee resettlement programs. We got lots to do on that front.

What services do you think can be created or enhanced to address major social issues such as poverty, addiction, homelessness, and unemployment?

Right now, there's a housing shortage in Canada as well. We've seen the prices of housing [increase]and with the printing of money and the massive amount of cash that's been injected into the economy through these programs, we've seen inflation. We see the price of everything going up—price of energy, our vehicles, to heat our homes, the price at the grocery store has gone up and the price of homes. [Which is] making it unaffordable for certain people on fixed incomes or low incomes right now to make ends meet. We've got a number of programs that will help people get over that wall, such as increasing the Workers Income Tax Benefit, making sure that the lowest income earners in Canada have the help and support that they need to get them over that hump so they actually have such a little bit of paycheck leftover at the end of the month.

We're also going to build a million homes in the next three years in Canada. We're going to incentivize and work on projects, releasing government land, and properties, etc using the whole host of government resources in order to get enough homes built. We're also going to clamp down on people who are speculating from other countries buying houses here simply to catch the inflation rise with no intention of ever living here and thus denying Canadian citizens who live here an opportunity or pricing it out of range for them to live in some of our urban centers which is happening right now in Vancouver and Toronto.

We will also not punish the rest of Canada at the same time. We're going to have to make changes to the mortgage rules and so on, so that we can actually get young people and first-time homebuyers into the marketplace. If it takes a longer-term mortgages, or if it takes changing some of the initial entry conditions so that Canadians can purchase their first home that's the plan that we have that will provide. It will increase supply and reduce the barriers so that people can get into a home.

How do you plan on supporting Alberta core industries such as oil and gas tourism, forestry and agriculture?

I'm the guy that is born and raised in Central Alberta. I grew up on a farm and I worked in the oil patch. I have seen the energy sector take an unfair hit in the last six years from the policies of the federal government whether it's Bill C-69 the no more pipelines bill. We're going to repeal that. Bill C-48 which is the tanker ban of exported oil going off of the West Coast—we're going to repeal that. These things are not fair at all.

We're going to partner with indigenous organizations on these energy projects so that rather than solving these things in court, we can have a collaborative approach right from the get go and get these projects built and approved more quickly.

We've got a lot of work to do in diversifying our economy. Here in Alberta, we're rich not only in oil and gas with hydrogen and other things. [We will] implement hydrogen energy strategies so we can increase the use of hydrogen.

To build our export capacity, we need to make pipelines so that we can bring in oil and natural gas to markets. We need to make these things a priority. We need a federal LNG export strategy. The world is looking for replacements for coal. We have trillions of cubic feet of natural gas right under our feet here in the in the west and we need to get that to the ports as well.

[We will] introduce a tax credit to rapidly accelerate the deployment of carbon capture utilization and storage, which is the technology I was talking about a little bit earlier. This is really important here for central Alberta because we have a lot of older and more mature oilfields here in central Alberta that this type of technology would rejuvenate that, create lots of jobs, and opportunity right here in central Alberta, for central Albertans.

On agriculture, we're going to, of course, always continue to look for new markets for our livestock, grain and oilseeds producers, in our free trade negotiations, within our first 100 days in office. We're going to finalize the compensation program for supply managed processors in response to CPTPP and the seating arrangements, and negotiate a compensation package for farmers and processors impacted the noon after the CUSMA agreement. We're going to work with the provinces to adopt a grocery supply company. With retailers abuse of pricing, and contracting prices against farmers and producers.

We need to protect our family farms by ending with unfair tax treatment. We will ensure that the sale of Family Farm—this is important—we actually passed this bill. When you sell a family farm to a family member or if you sell a family farm to somebody else who is not a family member, it's actually in your financial interest to sell it to somebody who's not in the family. This is completely unfair. We had legislation that already passed on this. For some reason, the government is choosing to ignore the will of Parliament on this, but we're going to make sure that this gets implemented properly. It shouldn't be more costly to hand the farm down to your family members then it is to sell it to a different person.

We going to work towards greater harmonization also of farm product regulations. With our major trading partners, particularly the US. We shouldn't be lagging behind them. It creates an imbalance of opportunities. When the United States gets their products to market a lot quicker than we do and gets their technologies approved in the marketplace a lot quicker than we do.

We need to make sure our farm safety net programs are predictable, bankable, and manageable. We need to reform the business risk management programs right now, particularly agri-invest and agri-recovery. We're going to actually bring agricultural stakeholders together for summit with our new Minister of Agriculture once we win the election, to develop a way forward on insurance programs like agri-stability and manufacturing--also, a very serious issue right here in central Alberta.

We've had a scramble to secure everything from personal protective equipment to vaccines. It's a reminder of the importance of the domestic manufacturing capacity that we have. When we outsource jobs, particularly in countries, we can't rely on in an emergency, we put the health and safety of Canadians at risk. We're going to pursue free trade agreements with free countries that respect workers rights, maintain high environmental standards, and bring manufacturing of critical equipment like VPE Pharmaceuticals back to Canada by ensuring that the government and government funded procurement can release essential products that favor Canadian producers and rebuild our domestic vaccine manufacturing capacity. It's absolutely ridiculous that we didn't have the ability within Canada to create and produce vaccines for Canadians.

What major infrastructure projects do you see is high priority for this region?

Each Municipal Council has their list of priorities when it comes to infrastructure—getting our roads, bridges, and infrastructure built so that we could move about more freely and get our goods and services going.

We obviously lack some services when it comes as I mentioned earlier, with our long-term care facilities. We're going to be investing in that and creating programs where, for example, when municipalities apply for them, the billions of dollars is set aside in the Canada Infrastructure Bank none of it is specifically targeted to smaller or rural communities. This is something that we did when Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister. Because that money is also taken out of the pockets of people that live in smaller, rural communities, we're going to make sure that that money is set aside for those smaller communities, right now.

I know in Rimbey, Eckville, and Alix there's always a plethora of projects that need to be done. These communities don't have the fiscal capacity to do it without help from both provincial and federal governments. I'm going to stand up for these communities and make sure that they have money whether it's replacing storm sewers, resurfacing roads, or repairing sidewalks. [We will be] making sure that these communities have the same standard of living and ability to meet their environmental requirements with their storm sewer with their wastewater management systems and so on.

I want to make darn sure that these communities have the resources that they need. Everybody in Alberta works hard. We all pay our fair share of taxes and we deserve to get these services back in return.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I know a lot of people weren't looking forward to this election and Justin Trudeau still hasn't fully answered why he called this election. We are entering the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. We've had massive forest fires burning up in British Columbia. We still have many burning in British Columbia, right now. Many people still displaced from their homes and communities. We had the situation in Afghanistan where we still have 1,200 Canadians trapped there now. The Taliban has made it virtually impossible for them to leave. But, Justin Trudeau wanted to call an election just to advance his own interests, instead of working on these issues that were important to Canadians.This isn't an election that Canadians wanted, but I do believe it's an election Canadians needed. I'm looking forward to a new Prime Minister on September 21st.