People's Party of Canada
Charlie MacEachern is running an unusual campaign: no donors, no advertising, no volunteers, and no door knocking. He’s not posting a lot of social media messages, but he has done some podcasts.
“My focus is on the disenfranchised,” MacEachern told the Cooperator in a phone interview. “I’m not targeting the base of the Conservatives or the Liberals or the NPD or the Greens for that matter. My focus is on those who don't come out to vote because they believe that they're just voting for the same old party.”
MacEachern got his start in electoral politics working in 1992 for his uncle, who was running on the Reform Party ticket. He managed an unsuccessful municipal council election in Edmonton for a friend. He was disappointed by the evolution of the Reform Party, and in 2019, he worked for the newly created People’s Party of Canada.
As for his party’s chances, MacEachern pointed to the party’s unexpected increase from barely 1% in 2019 to 5% in 2021. “We had quite a tailwind in 2021,” MacEachern said. “The reason was because our party was the only one that was speaking out against the COVID mandates, speaking out against this forced jab. We were the only party whose leader actually went to jail for speaking out or for not complying with mandates. We’ve allowed the government to reel in our freedom. In 2021, Max Bernier fought for freedom, for individuals to have the ability to make the choice if they wanted to take the inoculant or not. And for those of us who didn't take the inoculant, it resulted in a lot of discrimination, hatred, death threats.”
MacEachern dismissed any notion that his campaign would split the Conservative vote. “I need to make it very clear to people that the People's Party of Canada had absolutely nothing to do with that change in voter support, leading up to and then following Mark Carney's anointment as leader of the Liberal Party.”
Except for six years out west, MacEachern has lived in Nova Scotia, growing up in a foster family. “My foster father and his family were fishermen,” MacEachern said. “They owned their own inshore fishing gear and inshore commercial licenses. Lobster, tuna, ground fish, that sort of thing. My father became disabled in the early 80s and had to sell his licenses. We grew up quite poor, but I wasn’t the only kid going to school then with holes in his tennis shoes.”
Although he loved social studies in high school, MacEachern graduated from the Marine Engineering Program at the Nova Scotia Nautical Institute in Oxford. But jobs were scarce, and in 1997, he and his wife and their four children moved to Alberta. With this engineering background, he first found work as a millwright in the oil industry. As he learned more about how to deal with the breakdown of all sorts of equipment, he began talking with companies about how they could improve the efficiency of the business, until finally one of them offered him a job back home in Nova Scotia in 2002.
“I now have just over 10 years where I’ve been the first point of contact for offshore commercial fishers,” MacEachern said. “When there's equipment failure at sea, equipment that's under my responsibility, my job in these cases is to help get them back to port safely. People don’t realize just how dangerous this profession is. We’re communicating with people who may be sideways without power in 25-, 30-, 40-foot seas.”
As he learned about economic conditions with companies from around the world, MacEachern became increasingly concerned about the fragility of global supply chains, and the underlying fragility of the credit markets. “If people realized just how fragile the global supply chain is,” MacEachern said, “they would work themselves towards trying to find ways in which to be able to safeguard their own interests or families' interests. We’ve planted 100 fruit trees, along with different varieties of berry bushes. We’ve got a 4-season greenhouse, a summer garden, and some chickens.”
