Michael Fark, the Municipality of Jasper’s Director of Recovery, has been selected as the 2025 Liberal candidate for Yellowhead.

While as of March 27 the party hadn’t officially announced his nomination, Fark confirmed to The Jasper Local that he is the expected candidate.

The writ was dropped on Sunday, March 23 by Prime Minister Mark Carney, signalling a federal election on April 28.

Fark, a political economist and operations/crisis manager, has stared down plenty of significant challenges in his career, but this will be his first foray into politics. 

“The work we are doing at the [Jasper Recovery Coordination Centre] is consequential,” he told The Jasper Local. “I wouldn’t step away from it lightly.”  

Fark was seconded to lead the JRCC in part because of his experience helping build Canmore back after floods devastated the community there in 2013. 

Fark’s 20-plus years with Médecins Sans Frontièrs (Doctors Without Borders) have landed him in crisis zones around the world, including Libya, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Syria. 

And his work with the Alberta Human Rights Commission and Light Up the World has given him experience on multiple development fronts, helping vulnerable people and communities create positive change. 

So while flipping a perennially Conservative-blue federal riding to Liberal-red might not be the most urgent challenge Fark has ever faced, his, and the Liberal electoral district association’s (EDA) task at hand, is nevertheless formidable.

“It’s certainly going to be a challenge in this riding,” he said.

Prior to being headhunted by the Liberal Party, entering politics was not on Fark’s radar. When the email came through from the Liberal EDA, he was at a MSF board meeting in London. 

“I did not go looking for this,” he said.

But after discussions with Jasper CAO Bill Given, Mayor Richard Ireland and his team at the JRCC—and considering the issues of significance currently agitating at the local, provincial, national and international levels, he said—Fark decided he couldn’t refuse.

“If you’re offered an opportunity to try to win a seat at the table where important decisions are made at a consequential time such as this, I don’t know how you say no,” he said.

Fark knows the odds are stacked against the Grits in rural Alberta. But with newly-drawn electoral boundaries in Yellowhead, no incumbent to face off against, and geopolitical norms being turned upside down seemingly every day, Fark believes there is a path to Liberal victory in this riding.

“Political factors suggest it is a potentially-winnable seat,” he said. 

Fark specializes in geopolitical analysis and global risk management. His style is straight-ahead, action-oriented and outcome-focused. He admitted is not accustomed to working in the wheel-greasing, power-brokering arena of politics. 

“I understand how the political machine works. If I am successful, I acknowledge that [working in it] will be frustrating,” he said.

However, instead of viewing his lack of political experience as a liability, Fark says he is looking to bring his no-BS approach to his candidacy.

“My intention is not to change my style,” he said. “If anything my motivation is to bring that style to government.”

Having worked intensely in emergency management and with extensive experience in strategic planning and policy analysis, Fark says he is deeply familiar with the issues that communities deal with. He says he hopes that local perspective will help cut through the Liberals’ biggest hurdle in rural Alberta: the Liberal brand itself. He plans to talk to voters directly and demonstrate he’s the candidate who will relate to them on a real level. Moreover, the Liberals will be looking to tap into demographics who typically don’t show up at voting booths, he said. 

“The strategy is to optimize the get-out-the-vote in locations more likely to be aligned with our vision of the Liberal Party,” he said.

Different conservative parties (PCs, Alliance, Reform, CPC) have dominated the vote in Yellowhead since the riding was established in 1976. Before that, when Jasper was part of the Rocky Mountain riding, it also went to the Progressive Conservatives. One has to go back to 1968 to find a Liberal MP (Allen Sulatycky) elected here. Sulatycky was defeated in 1972 by Joe Clark, who went on to become Prime Minister in 1979.

Still, Fark said the current political climate is calling for change.

“I think a very strong case can be made that the Conservative Party is not in the best position to look after Canadian’s interests right now,” Fark said.

“I want to see if we can find some common ground with voters.”

Fark will take a leave of absence from his position at the JRCC while he campaigns. 

He will be running against CPC candidate, Carstairs-based chartered accountant William Stevenson, as well as Canmore’s Avni Soma, a scientist and community leader who is campaigning with the federal NDP. 

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com