As of Wednesday Oct 2, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) still has no candidate running in West Nova, according to the party’s web site.
Chad Hudson would have been on the ballot for the October 21st election., but he withdrew after what he calls “troubling statements by party leader Maxime Bernier and others.
The 30-year-old Hudson grew up in Bridgetown, where he currently lives. and has been working in the tourism sector.
But he withdrew after what he calls “troubling elements within the PPC.
He says he was approached to be the PPC’s candidate, but had reservations from the start.
“It took some arm-twisting to get me to do it in the first place to be honest with you. But ultimately I decided that having the chance to represent my community was something that was worthwhile. We’ve seen a lot of the stories in the press about the choices made by the leaderships, by the leader Maxime Bernier, some of the values at the very core of the party. Those reservations were there from well before the beginning and I was assured that a lot of these elements within the party were no longer going to be a problem. There had sort of been a purge of these kind of toxic, dangerous and divisive elements in the party. As time went on it became very clear that was not the case.”
Hudson says, as an example, instead of having a conversation about how, as a country we’re going to be able to handle this from an economic and humanitarian point of view, the immigration debate became much more about us versus them and just really racism and xenophobia. That’s not a direction I wanted to go with that”
He was also troubled when Maxime Bernier publicly went after young climate activist Greta Thunberg, calling her “mentally unstable”.
“Frankly I think it;s sickening.”
He says he has not decided if he’ll endorse another candidate.
“In all honesty I’m weighing my options right now. When I decided to pull out of the race, it wasn’t an easy decision. I realize it will leave a lot of people without an option to vote for on the ballot that they would otherwise would have wanted. Ultimately I had to make a choice and go with my conscience. I would like to play a role to bring people back together and trying to tone down this some of this heightened and divisive rhetoric we see in politics today, including West Nova.”