The Liberals have tapped in Paula Shimp to carry the party's colours in the Federal Election.

Shimp wants to get the message out that there are serious issues locally that need to be dealt with.

"The first, and it's more personal, is ensuring that there's adequate support for individuals affected by COVID long haulers, reportedly they experience profound chronic fatigue, that is something with which I am intimately aware given my own health background, and I know how I struggled for over 15 years to get adequate supports in place for myself, both financially and medically and I do not want people's who's lives have been sidetracked by COVID, COVID long, to go through this alone, certainly when we can make our disability services and programs more robust, more responsive to this once in a generation challenge of the pandemic," she says.

Shimp is also totally opposed to coal mining on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

"The bigger issue in this riding is clean water and clean air," she says.

"I know that most of the dialogue in the community and the concerns have been around silica polluting the waterways, the Oldman River watershed, my concern also involves just coal dust from open-pit mining. The winds blow from the west, our waters come from the west and the last thing we need is to set ourselves up for long-term health challenges based on both water and air pollution from mines."

She doesn't feel though that it's enough to simply deny the mines because when they go they also take away job opportunities from the Pikani Nation and the Crowsnest area.

Shimp wants to see provincial and federal, and private corporate opportunities brought forward so people in the area without any hope for employment will be able to get jobs even without the mines.

She spent years working with and running campaigns for Sheldon Chumir, a Rhodes Scholar, lawyer, businessman, civil libertarian and Liberal MLA in the late '80s and early '90s.

"He was an inspiration to me, it was Sheldon's first kick at elected office, he was interested in civil rights issues in particular. He was a brilliant man, he was a very ethical man and he worked ridiculously hard," she says. "It was his ethics and his unerring judgement, as he said around contributing back."

Shimp previously ran unsuccessfully for the provincial Liberals in the Cardston-Taber-Warner Riding in 2004.

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