Brauwerk Hoffman owner Todd Hoffman has announced he will run as the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) candidate for the Pontiac riding in next year’s federal election.

The announcement came at an event hosted at his Campbell’s Bay brewery on Thursday evening, where PPC leader Maxime Bernier was invited to speak about his party’s policies on farming regulations and gun control.

In an interview with THE EQUITY, Hoffman expressed his intention to support local farmers and producers.

He said farmers “feel that there’s a lot less government interest or support,” and that “they are really discouraged.”

One thing Hoffman said he would do to improve the situation for Pontiac producers is to remove interprovincial trade barriers.

“In the Pontiac, we’re like 14,000 people. In Renfrew County, you know, you’re pushing 100,000. So if we can tap into that market more, without these barriers, we only stand to gain.”

He wants to see greater mobility for tradespeople and certified professionals as well.

“What we had seen during the pandemic with the mandates, you know, we didn’t have freedom of mobility,” he said, adding the PPC would have a minister to deal with internal trade and mobility.

About two dozen people showed up at the event, which was . . .

hosted on the patio of Brauwerk Hoffman. Attendees drank German-style beer and enjoyed snacks while chatting amongst each other.

Hoffman’s announcement was met with warm applause. When he passed the mic to Bernier, whoops and cheers emerged from the audience, some of whom wore purple in support of the PPC.

Bernier, a former Conservative MP, left the party in 2018, accusing the Conservatives of becoming too similar to the Liberals when it came to policies around trade and immigration, and formed his own federal party.

Bernier did not win his own seat in the 2021 federal election – no PPC candidate did – but the party did gain some popularity during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic when Bernier spoke out against federal public health policies introduced at the time.

In 2022, Hoffman invited Bernier to speak at his brewery, where he addressed frustrations around what event attendees felt were federal infringements on their individual rights.

On Thursday evening, with the heat of the pandemic behind him, Bernier turned to discussing farming and gun control, topics he and Hoffman chose together because, according to Hoffman, they are of particular interest to Pontiacers.

Bernier stated his party’s position on gun control, which is to repeal all gun-related legislations made by prime minister Justin Trudeau.

“They want to take our guns. But when you are free, we need to be able to […] defend ourselves,” he said.

He also spoke for an hour about hot-button issues ranging from immigration to taxation to climate change.

He outlined the party’s environmental policy, saying they would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

“We’re the only national political party that will withdraw,” Bernier said. “We won’t impose a carbon tax [ . . . ] and we won’t do anything in line with the climate,” he said, adding that his party doesn’t believe in what he called the “climate hysteria.”

The PPC’s website says it would “abolish the Liberal government’s carbon tax and leave it to provincial governments to adopt programs to reduce emissions if they want to.”

Quebec has been running its own cap and trade program since 2013, and so is exempt from the federal carbon pricing system that was introduced five years later.

Bernier took time for questions at the end of his talk. One audience member was concerned about immigration, asking how the party plans to maintain “the homogeneity of our historic populations” in rural areas.

“English [and] French will essentially become minorities and these multicultural urban areas will have a permanent control over our democracy, basically forever,” he said, asking Bernier how he plans to deal with this.

Bernier was sympathetic to the notion that immigration has its risks for Canadian democracy, citing a recent parliamentary report outlining foreign influence inside the federal government.

“I’m open to a moratorium on immigration for the next couple years, until we solve the housing crisis,” he said, citing increasing numbers of immigrants in recent years.

“The average the last decades was 250,000 a year,” he said. “Now it’s double that — 500,000 permanent immigrants a year. And you add to that the temporary foreign workers and the international students and also the refugees [ . . . ] that is mass immigration. We cannot integrate them.”

Ralph Lang is a farmer in Clarendon and he’s known Hoffman for years. He came to the event because he’s interested in what he calls “alternative politics.”

Lang is tired of what he says is excessive government control. He said he wants “less taxes, less smoke-and-mirrors spending,” and he thinks Hoffman will provide that.

“It’s nice to see Todd Hoffman running for the PPC,” Lang said, adding he thinks Hoffman will represent the farming community’s interests. “He’s honest and he cares about the community.”

The PPC’s previous candidate in the Pontiac riding was

David Bruce Gottfred. According to Elections Canada, in the 2021 election he received 2,813 votes, accounting for 4.5 per cent of the riding’s final count.