By Lara Fominoff @LaraFominoff on Twitter

SACPA hosts Alberta Party leader Stephen Mandel at luncheon event

May 24, 2018 | 4:05 PM

LETHBRIDGE – Stephen Mandel was in Lethbridge Thursday afternoon, for the first time since being elected Alberta Party leader in February.

His speech, hosted by SACPA (Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs) at the Royal Canadian Legion, focused on party priorities, the economy, opioid crisis and homelessness, and the tensions between Premier Rachel Notley and BC Premier John Horgan over pipelines.

It’s something he says Alberta’s Premier could have handled better.

“I think it’s gotten out of hand, that we’re not going to take any wine, we’re not going to buy any power and then we’re going to cut off oil supply to them. You would think that in a country that’s supposed to be civil, that we could have found ways to sit down and come up with some consensus as to what the problem is.”

Mandel says B.C. has all sorts of pipelines already, including those for natural gas. And he is adamant that the Federal Government take a bigger role in helping to get the Trans Mountain Pipeline built.

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“It’s incumbent upon them to make sure that this pipeline is built. It’s vitally important to the entire country…I have great concerns if this is the only answer the Federal Government can have is to talk about going to court and not find ways to solve the problem.”

That said, he also emphasized that Alberta has the right to access ports, otherwise the prairie provinces are landlocked. That applies not only to oil and gas, but for grain products as well.

As for southern Alberta-specific issues, Mandel touched on how he’s heard that many feel alienated from bigger urban centres.

“We want to, as a party, come down to Lethbridge – to the region – and talk to people about how they can become more actively involved in building the province and building their vision….it should be about how we can bring together people from the agri-food business, from educational fields, from various technology fields that are very strong in Lethbridge and make sure they have a voice.”

Sticking with politics, Mandel also called the provincial debt a “disaster,” and said his party would work to put together a program to begin to reduce it over time.

He also suggested there needs to be more community consultation for potential solutions to the pervasive opioid crisis and that he supports the NDP’s bill to create ‘bubble zones’ for women accessing abortion services. Although he added that if safety was an issue, that should have been dealt with long ago.

Touting his party as the ‘practical solution’ to the more left-wing politics of the NDP and the further right-wing policies of the United Conservative Party, Mandel says his party will field 87 candidates for each of the ridings in the next provincial election.

“We’ve got a few candidates in every part of the province…we’ve had people contact us from all over the province.

“We like to say that we can do the best of both worlds.”