Alberta Party candidate seeks student engagement in politics

Members of the Alberta Party chatted with University of Alberta students last week over food and pints in an effort to pique student engagement in politics.

Sue Huff, Alberta Party candidate for Edmonton-Glenora and former acting leader of the party, hosted Alberta Party Pints on Wednesday with the help of her campaign team. The event took place at Hudsons On Campus, and was designed to encourage students to get involved with Alberta’s political system.

“The reason why I’m particularly drawn to reach out and connect with students is that everybody says that young people are the future, but I actually really do believe it,” Huff said.

“All the consequences of decisions made today are going to be felt by your generation. You are the ones that are going to be left to pick up the pieces, if we don’t make good decisions and think long term.”

Huff, who graduated from the University of Alberta in 1988, said that hosting Alberta Party Pints was the first step in reaching students and making them want to vote.

“I’m going where students are, instead of expecting them to come to a meeting I set up in some unknown location,” she explained. “That’s why we went to the campus. We try to reach out to students using methods and means my campaign team thought would be effective.”

Huff’s campaign team is composed mainly of former Unversity of Alberta students like herself, most of whom are in their 20s.

“For us, being in a pub, there was no formal agenda. It was very informal — people could come and go as they pleased, there were one-on-one conversations — and I think that’s the way to make politics seem more accessible, friendly, and real.”

Huff’s idea of an “informal” event included leaving handwritten notes scattered on each pub table, which each held some aspect of the Alberta Party’s policies.

“My approach is always to feel like a real person,” Huff said. “That means I will tell you what I actually think, and you can disagree with me, and we can have a discussion about that.”

Huff said the Alberta Party operates in such a way that there is always room for public opinions to shape policy. Huff added that from an institutional level, the Alberta Party sees a lack of stable predictable funding for universities as one of the major educational issues.

“Everybody is on this short term, year-by-year budget cycle, because it’s actually impossible to plan long term, if you don’t have stable predictable funding.”

Huff said the current education issue is like “peeling back the layers of an onion.”

“The first layer, you might only be interested in reducing your tuition fee, because that’s the thing that’s the most important to you as a student,” she explained. “But there are many layers underneath that, like how the universities are funded, and why they’re asking students to carry such a large part of the cost. At the very root of this onion is that we don’t have a good solid handle on how we’re dealing with our money, and where it is coming from.”

Huff said that politicians need to stop playing political “hot-potato” in order to avoid issues they don’t want to talk about.

“I think we need to grow up a little bit and have (those) conversations, even if it makes us feel uncomfortable, because what we’re doing right now, in my opinion, is not working,” she said.

“What can one person do? I think one person can have the courage to say, this is the issue, and it’s what we need to talk about. And then let the slings and arrows fly, because they will.”

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