Patzer wants rural voices heard louder in Ottawa

Incumbent Cypress Hills Grasslands Member of Parliament Jeremy Patzer hopes to bring a louder rural voice to Ottawa as part of a majority Conservative Party of Canada government.

Patzer, who won his seat in Parliament after capturing a landslide 81.1 per cent of the popular vote during the 2019 federal election, would like to make a return to Ottawa as a strong voice for rural issues.

“I want to go back to Ottawa because I would say we’ve got unfinished business,” Patzer said during an interview last week.

“We know Western Canada by and large it’s the rural heartland of our country, so we really need to prioritize what’s going on here in Western Canada in our rural areas. But there’s a lot of rural areas of Ontario and even Quebec that have the same feeling that we have about how they just aren’t being heard, they just not being represented by this current government.”

“All our decisions in government have to be based on having that rural lens looked at on every decision so that we don’t lose focus on the areas of the country that quite frankly need the most help.”

Patzer noted that the Conservatives were rallying behind a series of rural important issues even before the election call.

“There’s a few initiatives, like broadband. 2025 is our timeline that we’re moving for to get broadband access to all of rural Canada. Trying to prioritize infrastructure dollars too into rural communities. We all know it’s real easy to spend money in Toronto…but what about our small communities. There’s other infrastructure needs that we have, like our roadways our highways, there’s partnerships with the provinces for that.”

He pointed to aging infrastructure in rural communities who are simultaneously in need of water treatment improvements, waste water upgrades, and landfill expansions and environmental upgrades.

“That’s something that a Conservative government definitely will be focussing on, is how can we support our rural communities better going forward.”

“Even prior to the election some of the early messaging from our campaign was on our rural viability, talking about policing. Talking about some changes to sentencing for people who commit crimes in rural Canada, but based on how far away somebody might be from a service area. That’s going to be something that we’re going to look at changing sentencing to, so that if you’re targeting somebody out in a rural area, someone who’s vulnerable, there’s going to be a greater sentence that’s going to come with that because we need to take serious what’s going on in the rural areas.”

Patzer said the Conservatives have both a short term and long term strategy of dealing with a ballooning federal deficit.

“It needs to be top of mind for a lot of people. Obviously there were a lot of spending measures that needed to happen as people needed some security as we went through the last year and a half. There’s a lot of spending measures though that are preventing people from hiring employees. I’ve talked to a lot of businesses looking to hire three, four, five, even 10 people, and they’re not even getting applications,” he said. “So we’ve got to start focussing on how do we get the economy, because you look at the debt we’re over a trillion dollars. Then you add into the mix the provincial debt that has been growing over the last number of years. So how do we change course on that? So that’s why our focus is to focus on jobs, getting the economy going again, and making sure that we prioritize getting to a balanced budget. It’s going to take time. It’s not just going to be something that’ll happen instantly. But we’ve got a commitment over the next 10 years to balance the budget so that we can do so in a proper manner but also in a way that we can still focus on building jobs and supporting the creation of jobs in our economy.”

“One of the main points we’ve focussed on is restoring one million jobs that were lost during the pandemic over the first year. So that’s something that’s going to take a lot of hard work to be able to do that, but that is a focus.”