Federal election 2025 candidate Q&As: Graham Lettner (Independent)

This article is part of The Gateway’s Q&A series with the 2025 federal election candidates for the Edmonton Strathcona riding.

Graham Lettner is running as an independent candidate in the Edmonton Strathcona riding for the 2025 federal election. Lettner sat down with The Gateway for an interview about student issues in this federal election.

Lettner studied engineering at the University of Alberta and was involved with The Gateway and the U of A Students’ Union (UASU) during that time. He now has two kids, which he and his wife home-school, and is self-employed.

Why are you running in this election and in Edmonton-Strathcona specifically? 

Graham Lettner: I live in Edmonton Strathcona so that’s why I’m running here. I’m just so enthusiastic about how life would be if we had a better way of electing our [Members of Parliament (MP)], because we have such a miserable [electoral] system that gives us such little choice. People are pushed to the margins, and everyone’s ignored. Then there’s this weird contest thing that goes on to pick whoever people like. And there’s lots of great places in the world to do it differently and they just get this far superior feeling and engagement and political life. I’m politically interested. Just generally, politics is just people working things out. So I just think we’d have a much more healthy, vibrant political life if we had a better way of choosing MPs. 

If elected, you would be responsible for representing many of the students who attend the U of A. What would be your priority in representing those students to the government at large?

Lettner: If I was elected, then the priority would be to work on building support for changing our electoral system to improve it. So that probably wherever there’s overlap, or wherever there’s student interest in doing that. If there was, that’d be a great place to start. But then I think if we had a better way of electing MPs, I think that would have a lot of benefit for the students and for students’ other issues. So I think it’s worth it for students to start building out. If we get to elect MPs in such-and-such way, a more accurate, more reflective way, then what would that do for student issues? And then start getting those issues kind of like top of mind, so that there’s motivation for changing [the electoral system].

Affordability is a big issue for students, whether that’s the price of groceries or housing. How would you work to address this issue?

Lettner: I mean, 20 years ago, when I was president of the [UASU], affordability was an issue, and affordability is just a bigger issue in general, in society right now. So I don’t know. Are we doing anything different? Is it just that life is expensive? I mean your life is just expensive. What’s to do when life is expensive? People scrimp and save. People try to make more money. There’s all the thousands of ways. My mom worked a job while she was at university. I didn’t have to, I got lucky. I’m not sure that might just be life, because I look at tuition and I think it was about $4,000 for me versus now it’s roughly $7,000 for a general arts degree. So that’s a bump with inflation that has gone up since 22 years ago when I was here. So it’s not, it’s not wildly out of line, but it’s just 20 years ago, life was expensive. Sixty years ago, when my mom was here, life was expensive.

I think there’s a more fundamental way of like, why do we even pay tuition for university? We don’t pay tuition for grade school, but then once you turn 18 all of a sudden you have to start paying for it. So why do we do that? If you really wanted to make it more affordable, I think actually asking fundamental questions about why all of a sudden, is it expensive to educate people in situations? In fact, it doesn’t really make sense. Why do we want Albertans to be highly educated, we want all these talented people to do all these things, but now we’re going to make money an issue. Frankly, I think you need to ask those questions to actually make it more affordable for yourself and for students. 

How would you approach financial support for students and post-secondary institutions through things like student loans, grants, or research funding?

Lettner: Let’s be a little bit more fun than the usual stuff. Why don’t we make it free? We make [kindergarten to grade] 12 education free. So why do we start charging people as soon as they come to university? I’ll tell you. This is part of the reason why, I think we do it, like it or not, universities are kind of an elite thing. As soon as you get to university, you kind of get a couple rungs up the social hierarchy. And any hierarchy doesn’t have infinite spots at any level, because then it’s not a hierarchy. You don’t keep some people out. So part of the whole function of keeping people out is making it restricted, making only limited spaces, making it expensive, all that stuff. 

University is expensive by design, in a way. You don’t get to have all the white collar jobs if everybody has access to doing the white collar things. So when you first say it’s expensive, I’m like, well, it kind of speaks to the university’s purpose. Only certain families can afford it and it’s not like anybody because there’s always [those] on the margins. There’s margins, but in general, more wealthy families can afford to send their kids to universities to get jobs that usually make more money. Well, that’s by design. It’s not a flaw in the system. That’s how the system works. So if we want to make it more affordable, it’s kind of about saying, do we want to keep all the high-paying jobs for ourselves, or do we want to open it up?

The U of A has a French speaking campus, which does receive federal funding. What would you do for French speaking post-secondary students?

Lettner: I go there, and my friend works there. We go for lunch at Cafe Bicyclette. But I don’t know if there’s something different. I mean, there’s a lot of international students, and they’re purposely recruit[ing] a lot of international students. I’ve lived out of the country, I don’t know, bringing in a bunch of people from West Africa to come to the icy cold, it always kind of seemed a little bit bizarre. But we know that international students pay a lot of money. We know that’s why the [university] likes recruiting people internationally. So is there anything different to do? I don’t know. Over there, it’s so lovely. Everything over there is smaller, nicer, quainter, cuter than the campus here. In fact, I love living near that. I go over to that area all the time, or the cafe or the bar. It’s just nicer. But that’s probably because it gets a lot of federal funding, federal funding helps you make things nicer, but there’s only so much federal funding.

How would you define academic freedom and how would you protect it?

Lettner: Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s a lot of academic freedom. We just have to look socially, is it permissible to say things that people don’t agree with? Well, remember that whole [COVID-19] pandemic response thing that happened. Some of the most strict things that you could not say were around universities. Universities were very tight about all that stuff. What I’m saying is just look at the results.

But in universities, professors know this, there are things you don’t say because it jeopardizes your funding. Well, that’s a form of infringing on academic freedom, or students know there are things you don’t want to say in class because you know you might get labeled as such-and-such, or your professor might not be so favourable to you on your final exam or whatever else. So after 22 years out of this place, when I look on it, the university ecosystem is so tightly wound, and what you say has so much gravity that I think here there’s probably the least amount of actual freedom. And that includes academic freedom to actually have people speak their mind and disagree and come into conflict and let that be resolved in some kind of way that doesn’t involve some third-party arbitrator. It doesn’t look that way. But out there, people looking in are like, wow, that place is high strung. And it’s because all those words have so much weight, and it’s so everybody’s so attuned to it. If you’re working in different jobs, like different things carrying different weight. [The university] is the world of words, right? So all the words are very like, tightly policed and watched.

How would you support Indigenous communities and students?

Lettner: I think it’s so fascinating. I think there’s [an idea that] we need to do something to support Indigenous communities. Whereas, I know people [in] Indigenous communities, I know Indigenous people from university that are still friends, my wife does work with a group of midwives that are Indigenous. A lot of times what they’re saying is, could you just stop helping us? Like we’ve had help from you since day one, and we never really wanted help. We just kind of wanted to do our own thing. So if you could just back up a little bit and just make space for us to run our own affairs. We didn’t really want your money, per se, or the rest of the resources. We just want to be able to do what we’re doing.

So I think that’s a dynamic that often feels that as the university, as politicians, we’re supposed to do some to help. I think oftentimes, if you ask not just Indigenous people, but any people that are pushed down the social hierarchy, you could just stop helping. That helping is the most miserable part. So I think if we approach it in that sense, they’re not asking for help and they’re just asking for their space and to be left alone to their own goals, I think that would maybe be a lot more positive.