Lichfield announces bid for UCP nomination
A vocal critic of the NDP government’s policy on off-highway vehicles and backcountry usage restrictions is throwing his hat in the ring to run for the United Conservative Party nomination in Lethbridge-East.
Bryan Lichfield is a project manager with the City of Lethbridge, has been married 37 years and has two sons and seven grandchildren. In recent years, he has been a thorn in the NDP government’s side, especially of Environment and Parks Minister Shannon Phillips. As the president of the Alberta Off-Highway Vehicle Association, Lichfield has led a grassroots revolt over the NDP’s decisions to make both the Castle and the Livingstone-Porcupine Hills into provincial parks and severely restrict backcountry usage of those areas.
“Throughout my life and career in public service, you see you can’t change things from the outside,” explains Lichfield about his decision to seek the UCP nomination in Lethbridge-East. “You can sit there and talk to your MLA, sit there and rally and do all the protests you want, and get people involved in trying to talk to them, but unless you got somebody on the inside nothing gets done. I feel I have to move to the inside to help the grassroots people of Alberta and have their voices heard.”
Lichfield says balance is the key to effective governance, a balance between economic, social and environmental concerns. He says when a policy is unbalanced the results are evident for all to see. He points to the supervised injection site in Lethbridge as an example of a policy which is unbalanced.
“Between the federal government, provincial government and the municipality, they put over $4.5 million into a supervised injection site, but the whole time they were building that they never had a plan to help people get out of the addictions lifestyle,” he says. “All they said is we are going to stop you from overdosing, here’s the stuff to go do it. But we have to get those people back into the community, and make them productive members of the community. They should have had access to treatment programs, detox and recovery.”
Lichfield hopes other grassroots Lethbridge-East residents, people who work for a living, run their own businesses, struggle to pay their bills and don’t like the way the province is going, will consider taking a UCP membership and voting for him as their candidate.
“It’s the little guy,” says Lichfield. “It’s the grassroots person that goes out and lays the concrete to build the houses. I promise to be their voice.”
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