Candidates’ forum this Wednesday

Joe McWilliams

Lakeside Leader

The choice for voters in Lesser Slave Lake has improved. At the 2 p.m. deadline on May 11, a candidate from the Solidarity Movement of Alberta had done the required paperwork, making the number of official candidates for the May 29 election three.

The latecomer is Bert (Bertrand) Seatter, the former Westlock County councillor and Jarvie resident.

Seatter will be competing with Scott Sinclair of the United Conservative Party and Danielle Larivee, represent the Alberta New Democratic Party. Voters should be able to see and hear all three of the candidates at this week’s (May 17) candidates’ forum at The Gathering Place. It begins at 7 p.m.

As of early last week, two other candidates’ names had shown up on the scene, one of them an independent, the other representing an independence-minded party. But neither went the distance in the nomination process.

The most likely of the two seemed to be William Tufts, of the brand new Wildrose Loyalty Coalition (WLC). According to daveberta.ca, the WLC only came into existence, officially, in the first week of May. However, its leader is no stranger to Alberta politics. He’s Paul Hinman.

Hinman was once a colleague of current Premier Danielle Smith, back in their Wildrose Alliance days.

He is again running for MLA in Taber-Warner, which he previously represented – both for the Alberta Alliance and Wildrose Alliance.

The other prospective candidate for Lesser Slave Lake, according to daveberta, was Nancy O’Neill. It had her down as an independent.

But as noted, neither O’Neill nor Tufts got their paperwork in under the deadline, so they are out of the picture.

Finding out about the Seatter entry into the picture just before our news deadline, we weren’t able to come up with many details.

We hope to have a candidate profile in next week’s Leader. For now, it’s fair to say that the party he represents is on the far right-hand side of the political spectrum. Its founder is noted Calgary street-preacher, anti-COVID restrictions activist and flouter of Calgary municipal bylaws, Artur Pawlowski.

Athabasca-Barrhead-Westlock had just two candidates in view as of last week – incumbent Glenn van Dijken of the UCP and the NDP’s Landen Tischer, who is a Barrhead-area farmer as well as a pipeline worker.

That became official as of the May 11, by way of an email from the returning officer.