Hec Clouthier: Conservatives Fire Pat Stogran As Veteran's Ombudsman

I’ve been blessed, over the years, with those riches that all people deserve; good family, good friends, and good people everywhere I go.

I’ve always been a “people person,” if I may borrow that term, and I’ve never been one to shy away from the spontaneous beauty of meeting someone and chatting it up with them. I’ve been like that my entire life, and thankfully, I still enjoy meeting and speaking with people.

For ten years, this riding has been taken for granted by a candidate who cannot, or will not, stand up for the best interests of the people she claims to represent.

As an independent, I feel I can do better; defend your interests, fight for your issues, and leverage positive results for this riding.

I don't work for a party leader. I work for you.

Running is something I enjoy.

Obviously, for me, there’s a health benefit, a dividend of sorts, where I feel that I’m able to do far more things as a result of my running regime than I might be able to do without. But it’s more than just that.

I love the challenge.

Life, as we all know, is laced with challenge, from beginning to end, and how we respond to these challenges defines us as people. When we emerge successfully from these things, we gain a confidence about ourselves that helps us with the other challenges, perhaps to the point where we may begin to see challenge as opportunity for growth. And that’s one of the other crucial benefits to my running. It’s taught me, among other things, how to finish, how to persevere, regardless of what may lay ahead, and how to get the job done.

I’ve met so many wonderful people through my running; people at running events, and people along my long list of routes, whether they be the streets of Boston or the streets of Petawawa. And, of course, my family and friends, who, of their own accord, make running a part of their lives, for their own reasons, and hopefully for their own benefits.

When I’m out on my own like that, once I hit the auto-pilot, I find myself doing an awful lot of thinking about an awful lot of things. I’m like everyone else, in that I think about my family, Debbie and the boys, my extended family, the welfare of friends and their families, work, and the like. But I also have the opportunity to put some thought into how the country is run, and how those decisions made in Ottawa effect us all right here in the Ottawa Valley.

More and more I became convinced that we we're not being treated with the respect and dignity we deserve. We're told one thing, and given something completely different, or just as bad, nothing at all.

And that made me want to run.

It made me want to accept another challenge. It made me want to persevere to a successful conclusion, and cross a finish line of a different sort. And with me, hopefully, will be the aspirations, long neglected, of our home, the riding of Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke.

I’m running to win. For all of us.

Hec Clouthier

Conservatives Fire Pat Stogran As Veteran's Ombudsman

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