If you’re familiar at all with the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), you’ve probably heard the major talking points: the human-caused effects of climate change are overblown, COVID-19 is akin to a seasonal flu, and Canada’s reliance on immigration has ballooned out of control, among others.
It’s an ideology that earned PPC candidate and Whistler resident Doug Bebb a small fraction of the total votes in the 2019 federal election—the semi-retired mechanical engineer garnered 1.6 per cent of the ballots cast in the West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country riding—and in an election cycle in which COVID-19 recovery and climate change have been among the most pressing issues, Bebb is hopeful voters will seek out a perspective that differs from the mainstream narrative.
First and foremost, in Bebb’s mind, is “rescinding all these COVID-19 lockdown [and] vaccine mandates and [getting] back to business,” he said.
“The push for this vaccine now, when the case count is down, when the hospitalizations are down—I know they say things differently in the press, but if you look at the stats, we’re not at the peak at all and we may get back there for various reasons, but right now there is no pandemic.”
Bebb, who said he is not vaccinated, takes particular issue with B.C.’s recently announced vaccine card, which will require British Colombians to provide proof of vaccination status to enter certain non-essential public spaces, beginning Sept. 13. He sees the program, and related COVID-19 lockdowns, as an infringement on Canadians’ rights given the mRNA vaccines administered to millions “were never intended to prevent the disease.” (The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have been shown to reduce the risk of infection by 91 per cent in fully vaccinated people and 81 per cent in those partially vaccinated, according to a June study by the U.S. Centre for Disease Control.)
“It’s no surprise that people spread it, so carrying a piece of paper with you as a vaccine passport, or an electronic equivalent on your smartphone, really doesn’t have any benefit for public health,” Bebb added. “All these forced vaccination plans, the lockdowns, we reject all this as pretty much useless for public health and a serious infringement of our rights.”
Climate, or what he calls “this carbon dioxide disaster [people] think is happening,” is another major element of Bebb’s platform. While he acknowledges global temperatures have risen and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, he believes the human-caused impacts of climate change have been massively overblown by groups such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, whose latest report declared it “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.”
“A lot of these things are simply scare-mongering stuff to drive people’s behaviour and to enrich the likes of Al Gore and others who are basically what we call crony capitalists,” Bebb said. “So I would encourage people to look at the other side. This is not a fait accompli. We do not have any emerging conditions that require the destruction of our prosperity and our way of life, unnecessarily. It’s a monumental blunder to do that.”
If elected, Bebb said he would also push for a slowdown of immigration into Canada, one approach he sees reducing the demand on housing.
“We have I think 450,000 immigrants a year that are slated to come into this country on the Liberal slate. It’s equal to about the population of New Brunswick every two years,” he said. [Canada is aiming to bring in 401,000 immigrants in 2021, and 1.2 million in the next three years. In 2020, that number was roughly 184,000.]
“In the meantime, a lot of these immigrants are homeless, on the street in major centres like Toronto. So we need immigration and we need immigration to match our demand for the economy to grow. But we don’t have the capacity right now to import another province every two years,” he added.
“I’m speaking right now of the Eastern European people I know from Czech, Poland, Ukraine, Hong Kong, that came to this country because they saw a free country, and now they’re the ones seeing our slide into what is going to probably become a Marxist dictatorship if things continue the way they are. That will be the end of it. A Marxist dictatorship is pretty much the end of civilization in Canada.”
Canadians head to the polls on Sept. 20.
