Vernon-Lumby Libertarian candidate hopes to ‘act the jester’ to point out follies of other parties

Johnson expanded on his view of “acting the jester.”

“There’s something called ‘post-truth world,’ which in my mind is there is no such thing as the truth. You’ve got your truth, I’ve got my truth, your subjective experience is true for you. I don’t want to live like that,” the Libertarian candidate said.

“So the court jester is like from the Emperor Has No Clothes, it’s the person that tells the truth to the king, and there’s some quote from somebody that says ‘If you’re going to tell the truth, you need to make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.’ So all I’ve been trying to do for the past four and a half year is point out what’s really going on around here, and everyone that’s been doing that has been called names and ostracized and has had their lives destroyed. We’re not going to pretend that didn’t happen.”

He added he did not agree with the COVID-19 pandemic measures, stating there “were a lot of things that shouldn’t have been a conversation, nevermind something that we actually did.”

Johnson does not have any political experience, and said he is running to show that “most Canadians are pretty ignorant when it comes to politics,” and that though he said he described himself as politically ignorant as well, he felt “it seems to like it doesn’t actually matter which one of these party wins any of these elections, there’s no real meaningful difference in what goes on and things just seem to be getting worse.”

Johnson, one of just four Libertarian candidates in all of B.C., added he believes the Libertarians to be “the personal freedom, personal responsibility party” and that individuals “know better how to live your lives than the government”. He said a Libertarian government would leave people alone to live their lives with minimal red tape and less government interference.

The Libertarian candidate told Vernon Matters he believed the top issue people in the riding face to be healthcare, cost of living, and addiction, though added he does not believe the government could actually address local issues.

“I don’t see how anyone, doing anything in Victoria, is going to help anything in Vernon. That’s part of the ridiculousness of this, the centralized control and decision-making,” Johnson explained.

“Most of the people that are trying to right the ship here in Canada are focused on getting back to grassroot, community-level stuff.”

Johnson was then asked to explain his stances and thoughts on how to address a series of issues people in the riding and British Columbia face

Affordability

“I could be completely out to lunch here, but I think inflation is a product of our debt-based monetary system.

“Inflation is not actually the cost of things going up, it’s the value of the money going down. So when you have a centralized control of currency production and interest rates, and you have a government that, I don’t even know, quadrupled or quintupled our money supply in the last four years, that’s a problem. And that’s what always happen to fiat currencies, they always collapse because their intrinsic value is zero.

“We need some major [changes]. I can’t wrap my head around what that would look like. There’s lots of people who are talking about the quantum financial system, this global reset. If you look at it these bankers have been stealing everyone’s wealth for generations, so there’s got to be some way to take that back and redistribute it amongst people. I don’t have a clue what that would look like, though.”

Health Care

“They fired a bunch of nurses a few years ago, the best ones, really, the ones that understood how to do their jobs correctly. Since then we’ve had all these hospital closures and absolute nonsense going on in the hospitals.

“I think Libertarians talk about how we should have a private parallel system, people should be able to choose. Do you want to see the government-run system, or do you want [an alternative]?”

There’s a paradigm shift that needs to happen where we need to stop believing that there’s no other way of doing these things.”

Housing

“There’s people running around building tiny homes, you can buy a piece of land and build a bunch of tiny homes. People are trying to set up intentional communities and things like that.

“Obviously I think there’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape involved in just being able to build anything, so I think if you can somehow eliminate that [it would be beneficial].”

Mental Health and Addiction

“We need to have support available for people and treatment for people that want it.

“I’ve heard people talk about, for people who don”t want [supports or treatment], there needs to be a place to put them where they’re not going to be on our streets and causing harms to others. But I always run around saying I don’t like to blame individuals for systemic problems.

“I think we need to have these conversations.”

Crime and Public Safety

“I’ve heard from people, as I’ve been talking politics for the last few months, that some massive percentage of crimes are committed by very small percentage of people. They’re repeat offenders and for some reason they commit a crime and they get arrested and then they get released.

“But other cultures, they don’t put people in jail. They rehabilitate people and they do all the communal whatever.

“I think you need to look at the root causes of the criminality.

“Libertarians believe in the non-aggression principle: you’re free to live your life however you choose, so long as you don’t harm anyone else. Libertarians believe in the smallest possible government, and the only role of government is to protect you from criminals.

“We obviously need a reform to the criminal justice system if there is a bunch of repeat offenders that are never getting actually punished.”

Climate Change and the Environment

“I think most of the narrative surrounding climate change is fraudulent. As far like the carbon tax, reducing carbon emissions, transitioning to renewable energy, I think most of that green initiative stuff is nonsense.

“But, there are other environmental concerns with pollution going on, like forever chemicals and hormone disrupters and all these other things that are ending up in our waterways.

“Obviously we’ve only got one planet and we need to protect it in order to live here, but I don’t think that most of the government actions in the name of addressing climate change are a) going to be effective at all, or b) based on any reality, as far as I can tell. I could be completely wrong, but that’s what I think at this point..”

Public Education

“It seems like our education system has been kind of corrupted. When you go to university, you hear you are going to learn critical thinking skills, but if you try they are actually going to cush you.

“One of the positives of the past few years is you have a bunch of people going back to homeschooling.

“[There’s an idea] that if you want to change something, you don’t put your energy into fighting the old system, you build a new one that makes the old one obsolete. There are a lot of people running around trying to do that, but I’m not enlightened enough to do that so I always talk about how I’m going to burn the Matrix to the ground instead. You guys can rebuild the new earth, but this needs to come apart.

“I think the whole thing needs to be completely re-imagined because it’s not serving anybody at all the way it’s operating right now.”

Economy and Jobs

“Within dentistry, it’s really difficult to find staff. We need a receptionist, we need an assistant, we need a hygienist, or multiples of each of those. And it’s very very difficult to find [staff].

“I think years ago there was a shortage of hygienists and then a bunch of people opened a bunch of private colleges to train hygienists, and then there were too many hygienists and none of them could get work and their wages were going down and some of those schools closed. It’s a cyclical thing.

“My sense is it seems most businesses are having trouble finding people to work, and then there’s a lot of people who are out of work. So I don’t know what the problem is, what’s the disconnect there?”

Advance voting for the 2024 Provincial General Election will begin on October 10, with general voting day going on Oct. 19.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vernon Matters has contacted all local candidates for the Vernon-Lumby and Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream ridings, and will publish profiles as they respond. All candidates interviewed were asked the same questions.

by Liam Verster

Vernon-Lumby Libertarian candidate hopes to ‘act the jester’ to point out follies of other parties

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