WELLINGTON-HALTON HILLS POLITICAST - Ralph Martin, Green Party

So what is the Wellington Halton-Hills Politicast? For the next couple of weeks, it’s a miniseries we’re doing to profile the people running in the riding of Wellington Halton-Hills, which basically surrounds Guelph, and has a very unique and different character from our political field here in the Royal City.

This first edition of the Wellington Halton-Hills Politicast features Wellington Halton-Hills Green Party candidate Ralph Martin, who's task to become part of a new class of insurgent Green MPs is made doubly hard because this riding is home to Conservative Michael Chong, a man well liked on all sides of politics, and widely regarded as something of a maverick, and a moderate, inside his own party.

Chong won Wellington Halton-Hills for the fourth time in 2015 with over 50 per cent of the vote, and in this election he's already received the endorsement of GreenPAC, an advocacy group for environmentally-friendly politicians. So Chong is popular, he's green friendly, and no Green politician in Wellington Halton-Hills has ever broken 10 per cent? Martin's got a steep hill to climb...

He's got the right credentials though. Martin grew up on a beef and hog farm in Wallenstein, before he left home and worked his way through academia to earn a Ph.D. in Plant Science at McGill University. He's the founder of the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada, and he's the former Loblaw Chair, for Sustainable Food Production at the University of Guelph, where he still a professor and researcher.

On this edition of the podcast, Martin talks about dealing with Chong's advantages, and how he hopes to counter them. He also discusses how he covers the vast amount of territory that makes up the riding while doing so in an environmentally-friendly way. Also, he talks about the top priorities of the people in Wellington Halton-Hills, how food policy plays into discussions of climate change, and what the House of Commons might look like with the Greens holding the balance of power.

So let's hear from the Green Team on this inaugural edition of the Wellington Halton-Hills Politicast!

To find out more about Ralph Martin and his campaign, you can visit his website. The Wellington-Halton Hills Politicast will hopefully continue in the weeks to come with the rest of the riding's Federal candidates.

The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here, or download them on your favourite podcast app at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify.

Also, when you subscribe to the Guelph Politicast channel and you will also get an episode of Open Sources Guelph every Monday, and an episode of End Credits every Friday.