Cloverdale’s Mike Schouten has parted ways with the Christian Heritage Party, handing in his party membership earlier this month.
As the CHP’s candidate for South Surrey - White Rock - Cloverdale in the 2010 federal election, Schouten came in sixth out of nine, with 429 votes.
He told Black Press he did a lot of soul-searching after the campaign, wondering if his “gifts and talents were well used in a political setting.”
Schouten, a former Conservative, joined the CHP – which advocates that Canada be governed according to Biblical principles – in 2009.
He was eager to offer a “true alternative for ‘small-c’ conservative voters,” he said at the time, adding he felt the Conservative party had moved to the centre, abandoning its core social values.
Schouten says his parting with the CHP is amicable. He left because he has another opportunity to concentrate more on the pro-life cause that is his primary concern than he did within the CHP.
His letter to the editor, “Gay lobbyists forcing ideology on youth,” (Cloverdale Reporter, June 3, 2010), which lamented the “hijacking of local anti-bullying campaigns by homosexual advocates,” and referred to homosexuality as a “completely unnatural lifestyle,” drew criticism from other readers.
The CHP ran six candidates in B.C. in 2010.
– Cloverdale Reporter, with files Black Press
Follow the Cloverdale Reporter on 
Twitter and 
Facebook. View our print edition online.