While all the major parties can be expected to run a candidate in the Yellowhead riding for the upcoming federal election, the first formal announcement came from a different source. Todd Muir will be on the ballot as a representative of the newly-formed Maverick Party.
Muir is a high school teacher in Drayton Valley, where he lives with his wife and two children. He says he is running in the election because of “the fear he has for the future of this country.”
“I went to a Maverick Party meeting and I really liked what they were offering for the province and for Western Canada,” he says.
The Maverick Party, formerly known as Wexit Canada, was established in 2020. Its aim is to run candidates across the four Western provinces. Any Maverick Party Members of Parliament will focus their efforts on advancing the interests of Western Canada. That’s in keeping with the party’s mission statement “to achieve greater fairness and self-determination for Western Canadians through (a) constitutional change or (b) the creation of an independent nation.”
Muir says that the party’s aim is to fix Canada, with separation an option only if a solution to the country’s problems can’t be found. For Muir, those problems include barriers in natural resources to market, the current equalization formula and the carbon tax.
“If we were to leave Canada I’d be sad, but it would be leaving a relationship that wasn’t working out,” he says.
Muir says constituents shouldn’t be concerned about splitting the right wing vote in a constituency like Yellowhead. At the last election the Conservative majority here was so high it could be cut in half and still comfortably surpass the number of votes for either the Liberals or the NDP.
“I’m a passionate Western Canadian,” he says. “If people want change, the Maverick Party is the way to go.”
While it currently has no representation in parliament, the Maverick party’s interim leader is former Conservative MP Jay Hill.
