Arsh Dhillon, the PPC candidate for Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee (image courtesy of X)

By Liam Verster

Election 2025

PPC candidate believes Canada should allow U.S. to renegotiate trade deal

Apr 2, 2025 | 1:00 PM

A local federal candidate believes Canada should cave to the U.S.’s trade demands.

Arsh Dhillon is the People’s Party of Canada candidate in the Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee riding.

Speaking with Vernon Matters Dhillon said Canada should sit down with the United States and rework the trade deal in an effort to stop the tariff and annexation threats.

“The tariffs is a business deal. I’m by no means an economist or an international relations expert or anything like that, but just common sense, when you want to do business you want a fair deal from both sides,” Dhillon said.

“All [U.S. President Donald Trump] is saying is ‘Hey, it’s not a fair deal, I want a fair deal.’ All this with him calling us the 51st state and the governor and all that, that’s just a little bit of his style.”

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“What he wants is a fair deal, and the People’s Party has said ‘You know what, we’re willing to do that.’ Let’s talk about it, we don’t need to wait to 2026 to renegotiate, let’s renegotiate right now. We don’t want Americans suffering, we don’t want Canadians suffering, let’s get the talks in, let’s make a deal happen with fair negotiations on both sides so we can move forward and progress how we should be in a free trade environment.”

The trade deal Dhillon referred to as was the Unites States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which was developed in 2018 as a replacement to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Despite the deal being written and agreed upon during Trump’s first term in office, Dhillon said it should still be renegotiated.

“We’ve had some benefit from this past trade deal that Trump put in, and if he wants to try to renegotiate, they have leverage, they are the economic superpower here, so we have to kind of follow along,” the PPC candidate told Vernon Matters.

“I would love to see Canada in a better position so we have more leverage to talk more firmly at times like this but, what the Liberals have done in the past 10 years, we pretty much have no leverage.”

Dhillon was born in Surrey B.C. but he and his family moved to Kelowna when he was in middle school. He currently lives in Lake Country and is involved with natural gas fracking in northern B.C. and Alberta.

He said he leaned conservative growing up, but found the Conservative Party of Canada was too near centre, and when the PPC emerged he felt more aligned with that party.

Dhillon believed the party could make a difference in “restoring Canadian sovereignty” by withdrawing from “globalist” agencies such as the World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, and the Paris Climate Accord. He also stated both the federal Conservatives and Liberals were a “uniparty” in that they wanted to remain involved with those organizations.

Dhillon also noted there were a few key issues in the riding he would like to address if elected.

“The number one thing that I’m hearing from everyone is the housing affordability,” the PPC candidate said.

“We need to bring housing affordability down. I myself was not able to buy a house in this riding, I had to look in to Alberta. That’s not my primary residence but when it was time to make a home investment I couldn’t do it in this riding because I was priced out.

“A normal Canadian working at a normal Canadian life cannot afford normal Canadian things,” he said. “There’s a big issue for affordability that I’m hearing, and [a big issue with] wildfires.”

“[Wildfires] is something that needs to be brought up as a federal issue. Our region deals with so much wildfire mismanagement that affects all industries. It affects agriculture, and it affects tourism, which are two big contributors to our riding.”

Dhillon also said more needs to be done to improve health care services in the riding, noting that must come from Ottawa.

General voting day for the 2025 Federal Election will go on April 28.