Valerie Powell had no intentions of running for the Greens in this federal election.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she admitted.
However, when Erik Schomann was forced to resign after a 12-year-old Facebook post was unearthed earlier this month, the party’s options were few, and Powell, who has run for the Greens twice provincially and twice federally, stepped up.
“I’m passionate about the party, but I want to turn it over to younger, enthusiastic Greens, and we had that in Erik,” she said. “Trying to get another candidate vetted in time — it just wasn’t happening.”
Powell filed her papers Monday and received confirmation the next day — while she was in Niagara-on-the-Lake, celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary.
There hasn’t been time for her to get signs and campaign literature out with her name on it, so she’s relying on her performance in candidates meetings and name recognition.
“There’s the recognition, but I’m at a disadvantage of getting my name out for people who don’t know who I am,” she said.
Still, “it’s better than having no candidate or a paper candidate,” she added.
She’s happy to be the alternative to those options, but she is upset about the situation involving Schomann, whose Facebook post from 2007 shows him at a pig roast, with the caption reading, "We sent the leftovers to Denmark in support of the protesters of the Muhammad comic."
“All this mudslinging takes away from the issues,” Powell said following Thursday’s candidates meeting at St. Paul’s Centre. “Sure, he did something stupid, but he’s not a racist or an Islamophobe.”
