Jeffrey_bogearts

Jeff Green | Jan 19, 2006

Feature Article

Please send a note to The Frontenac News and your e-mail address will be added to our notification list.

Jeffrey Bogearts:Bringing back the Progressive dream

by Jeff Green

While the marriage of the Progressive Conservative and Alliance Parties has been an unqualified success in electoral terms, vaulting the parties into 99 seats in the last parliament, and almost certainly more than that come next Monday’s election, it did leave a certain amount of Progressive Conservative (PC) supporters without a political party to call their own. Jeffrey Bogearts, of Carleton Place, was one of those people.

“I tried the new Conservative Party for about six months, but I realised it wasn’t working. Riding Executive members from the Progressive Conservatives felt the same way, mind you, and got so fed up that they just walked away.”

Bogearts found some other like-minded former PC’s, and the Canadian Progressive Party was established a couple of years ago. In the last election, 17 months ago, there were 16 candidates nationally under the Progressive Canadian banner, and this time, there are 25.

“We were looking at having 30-33 candidates across the country this time, but when the election came so early, we weren’t able to have that many,” Bogearts said.

He has been pleased, however, with the response he has been getting from people during the campaign. “People have been saying ‘we thought you guys were gone; thank god you guys are here’”.

Jeffrey Bogearts was born in Carleton Place, and has lived in the Ottawa Valley for most of his life. He was a policeman in Toronto for several years, returning to Carleton Place in 1986. He has been working in the high tech sector ever since. He worked for Lee Instruments (DRS Flight Systems) until the company downsized its local employee base and has been a consultant ever since.

While Jeffrey Bogearts supports a conservative political philosophy, he does not hearken back to the Mulroney years. He looks at the way the taxation system has been developing in the country for the past 20 years and is incensed by it.

“I think it is fundamentally wrong to have a tax on a tax, the way GST is charged on gasoline. The government calculates GST on the excise tax it charges, and neither of the major parties sees anything wrong with that. They are also willing to tax people, put the money through a bureaucracy, and then give the money back to people. That’s what the Conservative daycare proposal amounts to. Why don’t they just not tax people in the first place?”

Another issue that concerns Bogearts is the national debt, which is currently over $500 billion. He says that the Conservative Party expects to pay $3 billion towards the debt each year. “It will take 200 years to pay it off at that rate,” he said, and even under the Liberals, who have paid $8 billion a year for 8 years, it will take 75 years to pay of the debt. That’s too long.”

It all comes down to how the Liberals and the Conservatives treat taxpayers’ money as their own, according to Jeffrey Bogearts.

“They play with taxpayers’ money, trying to gain an advantage by it, instead of doing what should be done for the country,” he concludes.