Nathan Neudorf: UCP candidate for Lethbridge-East

For one, I love this job. I really love being able to represent Lethbridge, be a voice for Lethbridge in the government and take our unique concerns, needs, and wants to the highest level of government in the province and advocate for that. It was very satisfying to successfully achieve virtually every single ask by the City of Lethbridge, and the key team in the first couple of years and then continue to achieve further investments for Lethbridge and area. While there’s still some that we’re working towards, pretty much every request that has come in, we’ve been able to get some movement in some way, shape or form. I would love to be able to represent Lethbridge-East again in that function and continue to advocate and represent Lethbridge for the things that we need to continue to grow.

Why UCP? The principles of the founding party are things I personally identify with – making sure that the family continues to be the building block for our society, making sure that we have a free-market economy, making sure that we work towards a limited government, and by that, meaning that government growth is there to serve the community and not become the whole community. I think we need to have a very balanced, private to public province, and a lot of these principles are things that I hold very very deeply, and one of them is fiscal responsibility, having balanced budgets, governments that are accountable to the people and the taxpayer. I felt that we had to work very hard to make some very difficult decisions to be able to achieve that, and there’s still more work to do and I’d love to continue to refine that, so we can get the best, most responsive government for the people of Alberta as we can and again, I’ve really enjoyed that task and putting my shoulder into those requirements and duties and hope I can do it again.

Why do you feel that you are the best choice to represent your riding as MLA?

This time around for our nomination, I was the only one who stepped forward so, maybe that doesn’t speak very highly, but I appreciated that there was confidence to allow me to continue in this role.

The things that I bring to the table are just a wealth of knowledge, to be honest, a lifetime of having learned some tough lessons and grown through [them]. I’ve come through small business ownership, primarily in construction. My wife is a nurse and she brings a lot of that public health care service expertise to me, whether I always understand it or not. She’s very engaged in our life. We have five wonderful children that are mostly grown, and they’ve gone through every level of education here in Lethbridge through public education – elementary school, middle schools, high schools. I’ve got a daughter who has graduated from the [Lethbridge] College, and I have two daughters that have graduated from the U of L. I’m very proud of all these institutions, working and learning [about] them from the inside, so to speak. I haven’t technically worked for them, but I feel like we have worked with them, with our kids, as well as all of their sports, and music and dance experiences.

I also happened to grow up on a farm, not one in Alberta, but one in B.C., but that agricultural background also means a lot, that I can understand where farmers and agricultural food processors in the south are coming from. It’s all of those experiences together that I bring to the table, and I think people can see themselves in some aspect of that, in some way, shape or form – whether they work in health care, or whether they live in the education arena or whether they are related to some of our food agricultural community, health care, construction, small business. That touches a lot of those segments that really make Lethbridge the great place to live that it is, and I think that helps me communicate with them and the general public connect with me, in one way, shape or form.

What types of personal or professional experience do you have that would make you a good MLA?

What I’ve learned in the last four years, I’ve had a pretty broad experience and it feels like many days I’ve had to step on every single rung of the ladder to grow through that over four years, starting as a private member in the backbenches, just learning what the whole job was about, to being chair of a number of task forces, going around on MLA-led committees to do that work. I was made a committee chair and then I was elected as caucus chair and then I was appointed to cabinet and as Deputy Premier. All told, I think we did a count, I’m somewhere right around 30 different appointments and tasks over the past year, including some of the work on reviewing the Public Health Act, a few other legislative pieces. It’s sometimes really good to do all of those tasks all the way up. I didn’t go straight into cabinet and I didn’t stay in the backbenches. I worked all the way through, some were appointments, some were elected by caucus and some were appointed by the Premier, so I feel like I bring that experience, as well as my business experience, construction experience, having learned from a wife who has worked in health care for nearly 30 years, having had kids go through the public school system, learning what it means doing parent-teacher interviews, and [how to] communicate some of those responsibilities, being on a couple of volunteer boards locally, all of those kinds of things.”

Then the scrutiny that we faced as elected officials through a pandemic – being held accountable by the public and interviewed by media, and all of those kinds of things, learning transparency and accountability and responsibility of representation and all of those things, I continue to learn. I love learning, and I love meeting with so many of our incredible stakeholders in Lethbridge for whatever region they might be, some with children’s services, some with mental health and addictions. I’ve had to learn a whole lot about some of those areas where I didn’t have experience in, but I do now, and I feel that wealth of experience can still serve the community well as long as I’m willing and they’re willing hopefully, on May 29^th.

What would be your top three priorities if elected?

We do have a party platform that will be coming out through the election and there’s those objectives. There are some big, overarching things.”

But for Lethbridge in particular, there’s three things that I will really be working on to see that we get some much-needed investment and support in these areas, the first one being health care.

I think the pandemic showed us that there is a lot of parts of the system that don’t work as well as they should. The people, our front-line health care professionals, from EMS, to police and fire, obviously nurses and doctors, but so many health care [professionals], they’re working really, really hard. So how do we help the system support them, because I think there’s some bottlenecks in that.

Getting more family doctors – we’ve got 17 hired, apparently, as of April 12^th of this year, we’ve got 14 of them working in the city, so we look forward to seeing that begin to meet that need. We’ve got more to go because we’re a growing city. We have obstetrics and gynecologists; we have a need there. A couple of them are on maternity leave. We’re looking forward to them coming back and hiring new positions to expand that. We’ve got funding for our surgical initiative, our renal dialysis and the new [catheterization] lab. That’s great, but those services need to be put in place and continue to develop, as well as them all working together so that we are getting the best bang for the buck and people are getting the most effective health care system possible for all those people working so hard.”

“The second one is water, wastewater treatment infrastructure. We are a growing community, we’re a growing region and we have a lot of needs, one of them being water and wastewater treatment. That water is, quote on quote ‘recycled’. It’s taken from the river and put back, so we need to manage that system well, we need to make sure it’s environmentally appropriate, we need to make sure that it grows, so we can continue to grow. We want people to move here and experience the great life of Lethbridge and area. We want our industry to continue to diversify and grow. Our agri-food sector in particular, with the Agri-food Tax Credit we’ve got in there is going to grow even further and with Exhibition Park [Agri-food Hub and Trade Centre] coming online, that’s going to expand that whole area as well. So, I look forward to very practically meeting a real need with some real work to make a difference that we can build more homes, we can build more schools, we can build more industry in an environmentally sensitive way, that’s responsible, ethical, making sure our water is clean and making sure that we’re using it effectively as possible. That’s number two.”

“Number three would be that continued economic development and regional cooperation for growth. I think there’s been times, and we’ve seen it across the province across different jurisdictions, where one jurisdiction would have a disagreement with their neighbour and that hurts all of us in Alberta. I think we’re a terrific province and I think we all succeed when we work together. I look forward to Lethbridge and region, [working] with our regional partners, the County, obviously, encompassing Coaldale and Taber and Picture Butte and Warner and Raymond and Magrath, and all the way into the Crowsnest Pass and Pincher Creek. All that they do for us to attract people here for tourism, for our great ski hills and our lakes and rivers and hiking trails, all of that, Lethbridge is a bit of a hub, sometimes for health care services and sometimes for justice and policing services and sometimes for hotels and accommodations for great conventions, those kinds of things. If we can keep doing that as a regional focus, we in the south, we’re going to do really well because we’ve got a great place to live. I look forward to continuing to develop those things.

Those are three things as well, just in general, that collaborative approach that encompasses our municipal government, our university and college, our school divisions, our big drivers down here working together so that we have a great future for our kids and the next generation to have any job that they want and fill the needs that we have as a society and continue to see that grow from generation to generation.”

What else should voters know about you and your campaign?

“It’s been an interesting four-year term. Probably one, without exaggeration, unlike any other. I can’t remember one that’s had to deal with a pandemic and what that did to governments across Canada, to each province, the challenges that we faced, the things that it’s highlighted, and it’s shown areas that we need to work on and continue to have to meet those needs. Yet in that time, I was very honoured and very proud to have been voted by all the members of the legislature as hardest working in 2020 and the MLA of the Year in 2021 and then in 2022, being appointed Minister of Infrastructure and Deputy Premier. I hope that people see that as a responsible, hard working chain of events, that they can be proud of their representative, whether they voted Conservative or not, whether they voted for me or not, to know that their representative is doing everything that he can do to represent them well.

Even with the pandemic, I can recall going to hundreds and hundreds of events over the four years. We’ve had thousands upon thousands of meetings with constituents, all [for] good reasons, both for positive outcomes, and sometimes areas where we’re still seeking a positive outcome, and then answering tens of thousands of emails. I know I still get concerns and complaints that we haven’t answered somebody’s particular email. I just ask for a little bit of grace in that we literally get a thousand-plus emails every single week. The people in Lethbridge are fairly active and vocal about their viewpoints and we have a limited budget for our office and sometimes, we just can’t keep up to the volume there. I will continue to work on that and continue to serve, and I hope that they see that reputation that their representative has worked hard for them and wants to continue to work hard. I want this to be something that they’re as proud of their representative as their representative is of them, because I am incredibly proud of Lethbridge and this community in what we do in our philanthropic efforts, in our education sector, in our health care sector. I constantly meet incredible people doing just incredible things, changing peoples’ lives. I can’t believe how many things that we’re known for across Canada that have come out of Lethbridge and area, and look forward to hopefully seeing that continue in the future.”

Full election coverage: Alberta Votes 2023

by LNN Staff

Nathan Neudorf: UCP candidate for Lethbridge-East

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