Earlier this year, the Communist Party of Canada celebrated its 100th anniversary as a political entity in Canada. The party organized in a barn on Metcalfe Street in 2021, which was, at the time, on the outskirts of Guelph, so in this centenary year it was pretty important that the Communists have a candidate in this Federal Election. Tristan Dineen is that candidate, and he’s ready for you to help him put “people and planet over profit.”

“I have run before in 2015, and I’ve been part of the Communist Party for about 10 years now, so it’s not like I’m coming into this fresh or anything,” Dineen told Open Sources Guelph in the most recent episode. “This is  definitely something I’ve been committed to for a long time.”

In this election, you have heard, and you will hear again, about a post-pandemic recovery, an economic plan that will not just return things back to normal, but attack pressing issues like climate change and inequality that have been affecting Canadians for years. Dineen said that this is an idea that the Communist Party has been working on since the last global crisis.

“This is something we’ve talked about, a people’s recovery, and I think we started using that term around the time of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 when the economy was in free fall,” Dineen said. “We were talking about coming back from that, and what we need to come back in a just recovery for the needs of working class people. What do they actually need in terms of policy?”

“In the context of the pandemic, the devastation has affected so many people and that fallout goes beyond simple body counts, even though that’s still 26,000 people in Canada,” Dineen added. “That’s absolutely terrifying, but beyond that tens of thousands of people got sick, people lost their jobs, there’s economy downsizing, and all that sort of stuff is compacted into one nightmare situation. You can’t deal with that using a piecemeal kind of changes, you have to have a kind of a systemic approach.”

So what would that look like under a Communist Party government?

“Basically, a planned economy that revolves on democratic input, and that is crucial in a country like this where colonialism is still very much entrenched, and it needs to be uprooted and destroyed if we want to have real progressive change here,” Dineen explained.

“Of course, we are also talking about respect for Indigenous rights. You can’t just go in and dictate to people how they run their economic and political sections, especially when you’re dealing with people who have been here for thousands and thousands of years, and have their own way of doing things,” Dineen added.

So why vote Communist? Dineen said that his party says what it means and is not play acting progressive politics just because it’s an election.

“Strategic voting has not gotten us where we need to be, and we know where that leads us. We know it’s led to some pretty incredible acts of deception, and we saw the Liberals promise all kinds of things in the last election,” Dineen said. “That kind of deception, and that kind of politics, takes people for granted, and takes voters for granted. We really need people to hold politicians accountable, and if you’ve got a Communist Party member in Parliament that’s exactly what you’re going to get.”

You can learn more about Tristan Dineen and his campaign by accessing his website here.

You can hear the whole interview on Open Sources Guelph, download the episode on your favourite podcast app at Apple, Stitcher, Google, and Spotify.