Three days before the Elections Canada deadline, the last candidate for the West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country riding put his name forward.
Terry Grimwood, the founder of the yet-to-be-official Canada Fresh party, is running as an independent.
"I started Canada Fresh because I wasn't happy with any of the parties. I feel we need to be non-partisan. Everybody has to work together," Grimwood said.
He previously ran in Burnaby South against the NDP's Jagmeet Singh in February's by-election. He also attempted to run in the Outremont, Quebec, by-election and the 2018 Leeds–Grenville–Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes by-election.
"I assumed that I would participate in three by-elections before I got back to the Sunshine Coast," Grimwood told The Chief. But Outremont and Burnaby South were called on the same day. He wasn't able to get his name on the ballot in the other riding, he said, due to a clerical error.
Politics started early for Grimwood.
At 20 years old, while at UBC, he ran for and won a council seat in North Vancouver. Then he was re-elected. This period in municipal politics, Grimwood said, showed him "The country's actually being run by the civil servants. It's not being run by the government," Grimwood said.
"After being there for four years, I realized I could do more as an individual than I could on that council."
Last year, Grimwood embarked on a trip — crossing the country three times in the last 12 months. This is where he got many of the ideas for his policies.
His concerns for cross-country travel include gas prices, lack of washroom and shower access. Much could be fixed, he said, with a transportation hub or pub every 50 to 100 kilometres throughout Canada. Grimwood talks about when he used the Greyhound bus, and passengers would disembark in the middle of the night, he said, with nothing around. This raises another concern of Grimwood's — safety.
"If in British Columbia, we had a transit hub open 24 hours a day, every 50 kilometres or 100 kilometres in some areas, a lot of young people would still be alive today, because there would have been a place for them to get on and off public transit."
When a member of the audience at Squamish's All Candidates Meeting on Oct. 2 asked Grimwood how much this network would cost, his answer was "billions." Where would he get the money? Pensions.
Grimwood himself has been receiving his pension for two years. He wants to see pension funds go toward housing for staff, students, seniors, low-cost and rent-to-own.
The transit hubs aren't Grimwood's only grand idea.
"I'm proposing in the Arctic to build six underwater small pocket cities and ports. Nobody's talking about the Arctic," Grimwood said. When asked how these cities would be underwater, he said, "In the Arctic, the warmest place is actually in the water and there's people right here in British Columbia that design and build submarines and that sort of thing, the submersibles. We have the talent and the knowledge to do that."
Submarines would be used to monitor what's happening in the Arctic, where Grimwood said our presence is lacking.
He also proposes floating building bridges to Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast, referencing the Confederation Bridge in Prince Edward Island. These proposed bridges, he said, would help save costs on the ferry services and meet climate goals.
"I think people should vote for me because I have ideas, and it starts with dental," Grimwood said, before talking about healthcare and wildfires.
At the end of his appearance at the All Candidates Meeting in Squamish on Oct. 2, Grimwood declared he will be Prime Minister in four years.
Until then, in the current election, Grimwood is running against six other candidates: the Conservative Party's Gabrielle Loren, the Green's Dana Taylor, the People Party of Canada's Robert "Doug" Bebb, the Liberal's Patrick Weiler, the NDP's Judith Wilson and the Rhinoceros Party's Gordon Jeffrey.
