The New Brunswick Liberal leadership race will come to an end on Oct. 27. Young Liberals Anika Duivenvoorden, Duncan Gallant and Adam Garland are working with different candidates on their campaigns.
Anika Duivenvoorden is in her third year of journalism and communications at St. Thomas University. She’s helping her father with his campaign and travelled the province this summer with him.
“I did a lot of the social networking stuff via Twitter, Facebook. It was up to me to get in contact with a lot of people to book meetings with my dad,” Duivenvoorden said.
She thinks young people should know what the candidates stand for and get out and vote.
“I think it’s so important to know what’s going on in the political world, especially because in the past couple of years the turnout for voting has just gone down so much.”
Duncan Gallant is a St. Thomas University alumni and was the policy director for the New Brunswick Young Liberals Association. His responsibility is to involve young people and help them understand how the political system works. He says more than 19,000 people are registered to vote across the province. On election night he will ensure all registered members have voted.
“At the end of the day, when people vote that makes me happy. Obviously I have a preference for who I’d like to win but I’m most happy when people just get involved and participate in the process,” Gallant said.
Adam Garland’s role is to meet with young people to talk about his candidate’s policies and help plan events. This is the first political campaign he’s worked on.
“It’s a lot of fun working in a political campaign. It gets busy at times and there can be stress involved, but its a massive team effort and everyone enjoys the success of the campaign together,” Garland said in an email.
He became interested in politics while working as a page for the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick. Garland says it’s exciting to see the ideas that resonate with New Brunswickers, after watching his candidate speak with thousands of people about their concerns.
He says young people should get involved with politics because they’re “the best people to raise awareness of their concerns and needs.”
“If you want change you can get it, but you have to participate,” Garland said.
The three candidates are Nick Duivenvoorden, Brian Gallant, and Mike Murphy.
