Darrell Younghans, a longtime school board executive and local Progressive Conservative organizer, has been nominated as the next PC candidate for the Lac La Biche–St. Paul–Two Hills constituency.
Darrell Younghans, a longtime school board executive and local Progressive Conservative organizer, has been nominated as the next PC candidate for the Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills constituency.
Over 1,800 people voted in the nomination race on March 14. Vote totals are not being released, but party officials say it took three rounds of ranking runoff ballots in order to declare a winner. While the polls closed at 7 p.m., counting the votes took quite some time and results were not released until about 2 a.m. on March 15.
"Going into the vote today, I did figure it was close," said Younghans. "I thought it would be a close one, and a very tight race. I knew we had to get every vote out, and the results proved that, the results were close."
To win the nomination, Younghans defeated former municipal councillor Jeff Dechaine, St. Paul mayor Glenn Andersen and Westlock-St. Paul federal Conservative MP Brian Storseth.
This nomination race was more eventful than most, as the vote was initially scheduled for Feb. 21 - but the local nominating committee left too long between the close of nominations and the vote, violating the party's constitution. The provincial PC association threw out the local committee and rescheduled the vote for March 14. Storseth did not enter the race until the second nomination period.
Younghans says he believes the date mix-up and surrounding controversy brought more attention to the vote.
"I think it garnered a lot more interest," he said. "When we had 1,800-or-some votes, it's just an amazing interest in any of the nominations."
A provincial election is expected to be called in the very near future, and Younghans says he's ready to bring area interests forward as the PCs craft their platform.
"There will be some party direction," Younghans said. "It'll be the same sort of stuff I run on now -- trying to represent rural Alberta and bring rural Alberta's interests forward."
In the next election, he'll face another candidate without prior experience in provincial politics - the constituency's current Wildrose MLA, Shayne Saskiw, recently announced he won't run again, with newcomer David Hanson taking his place. Still, Younghans is gearing up for a tough fight.
"I won't take anything for granted," he said. "After this campaign, and as long and hard as everyone's been going...it's still going to take a team effort, and we're still going to have to work hard to gain the confidence of the voters of the constituency."
On the topic of the provincial economy, Younghans says he plans to pay attention to his constituents' ideas.
"I don't have all the information on expenses coming in...revenues or expenses. We've definitely got to look at both sides. I've heard some pretty clear things in this campaign that people are expecting, some pretty decent ideas about where they see we should be focusing some revenue on,” he said. "Most of them are on the tax side. I've had a few people talk about corporate taxes, and quite a few people are saying they'd be in favour of bringing back health care [taxes]."
But before he can do any of this, he said his first priority after the hours-long wait for vote results was to get some rest.
"Right now [my priority], it's get home and get to bed and hopefully sleep until maybe noon tomorrow," he said. "And then just relax for a couple days and just catch up on a few things at home, and then we'll start visiting different areas of the constituency again as invites come in, and get to know the people and specific issues in each area of the constituency.”
