HUMBOLDT-WATROUS — Jim Ternier said that if he is elected as MLA for Humboldt-Watrous, his focus would be on supporting the local economy, public transportation and moving away from fossil fuels.
Ternier, who's running for the Green Party, owns Prairie Garden Seeds, where he has been growing and selling garden seeds since about 1985.
Ternier had moved to Humboldt with his wife in 2005, after receiving an invitation from St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster to grow his seeds on their land.
Before Humboldt he lived on a family farm north of North Battleford.
“Being Green, the whole thing is about climate change, so anything that can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re producing is something I’d support,” Ternier said.
“It would definitely mean using less fossil fuel, using our energy supplies smarter and getting more benefit out of it.”
Ternier advocates for federal and provincial grants for solar panels on homes.
“Our daughter has put solar panels on her house, on the farm, and it’s off grid and producing enough of her own electricity to supply her own needs,” he said, adding that his own home was retrofitted with social panels from a grant that was available at the time.
“The government should be doing the same kind of thing again.”
Ternier said that if elected, he would fight to bring back the Saskatchewan Transportation Company (STC), which was closed in 2017.
“I would certainly encourage the bus line to be reestablished,” he said. “I’m a senior, I drive but I prefer not to. Opportunities for traveling in Saskatchewan to go see our children have been limited by our government. I think that’s terrible for a government which has all of the rural seats in this province.”
To support funding the system, Ternier said they could acquire financial supports through freight cargo contracts throughout the province including government bodies, hospitals and libraries.
“The present government sold off everything, which makes it very much more difficult to bring it back. This tends to be what happens when a government disestablishes something.”
Ternier said even if the provincial government doesn’t make money from the reformed STC, it’s this service that he feels is important to have available to the public.
For the local economy, Ternier said he would like to see more local producers of food.
“Is there tax changes or easier accessibility to land, what would it take? I don’t know,” Ternier said.
“There are some initiatives, people producing local food. I’ll have to visit them all and see what they need for them to succeed in doing what they’re doing presently.”
Ternier said one of the things he would look at is if changing the tax-structure could better support local food producers.
“We have local food produced, and it’s often without agricultural chemicals. We have animal products, we have vegetables, sprouts, these are all good initiatives because the local people are buying them, the money circulates locally rather than just being shipped off to urban centres.”
Other things he said he would advocate for are included in Green Party policy including a guaranteed annual income, and more childcare accessibility.
“These things are talked about by a number of parties now. Whether the Green Party actually achieves more power, there seems to be an influence from the party extending to other parties. This is maybe our greatest strength now is we can influence people, like Saskatchewan making the idea of universal Medicare coming through.”
