The leaders of each of B.C.’s major parties closed the last weekend before the election in friendly ridings, touting their promises on topics as diverse as fish, housing and telecommunications.
John Horgan, the leader of the B.C. NDP, started his four-stop day on Vancouver Island in Campbell River, where he vowed to protect wild salmon.
Horgan said his party would work to double the $143-million B.C. Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund and create a watershed security strategy, including a fund to support local and Indigenous initiatives.
“Wild salmon are crucial to the success of our economy, the prosperity of coastal communities, and the lives of Indigenous peoples,” Horgan said. “The challenges affecting wild salmon stocks in B.C. are complex. It’s important that we work with people and communities to find solutions.”
The five-year salmon restoration program, set to end in March 2024, is jointly funded by the federal government (70 per cent) and the province (30 per cent),
Andrew Wilkinson, the leader of the B.C. Liberals, stopped at an orchard in Osoyoos to talk about tourism and spotty rural internet. On the latter subject, Wilkinson said his party would invest $100 million in improved connectivity for communities across the province.
On tourism, Wilkinson painted a picture of empty hotels and failing restaurants devoid of customers due to the pandemic.
“This is their winter of discontent,” as Wilkinson put it. “This is their winter where they’re worried sick if they’re going to be able to meet their bills.”
He called for bridge financing for companies in the tourism industry to ensure they could survive until visitors returned to the province.
Sonia Furstenau, the leader of the B.C. Greens, spent the day in her own riding, Cowichan Valley, where she talked up her party’s slate of proposed housing affordability measures.
“We can’t just keep promising to make life more affordable and just keep tinkering around the edges,” she said. “That’s why the B.C. Greens have set a goal of everyone having a home that they can afford and that meets their needs.”
Furstenau said her party would introduce a means-tested rental housing grant. It would apply to low and moderate earners who spend more than 30 per cent of their incomes on housing, according to the party platform.
She also said the Greens planned to tackle high strata insurance rates and tighten up laws and policies to close loopholes and reduce speculation in the housing market. The party would also work to expand supply of a range of homes and support for co-op housing.
The Green leader will spend the morning hoisting campaign signs and canvassing in the Cowichan Valley. Later in the day, she will host a press conference for an announcement about affordable housing in Duncan. She’ll finish off the evening with
: The NDP leader will spend his Sunday campaigning across Vancouver Island. He’ll kick off the day with an announcement about wild salmon at the Campbell River Museum, followed by an announcement at 12:20 p.m. about the Kus-kus-sum project in Courtenay. He’ll wrap up the afternoon by mainstreeting in Parksville before spearfishing with elders in Duncan.
GUIDES AND LINKS
• B.C. Election 2020: Stay informed with our daily newsletter, delivered to your inbox every day at noon. Sign up here.
Nowhere do the three main parties diverge more than on the environment. Getting a handle on what they are each planning means looking into their aspirations for the energy sector, too.
Read reporter Randy Shore’s round-up on where the parties stand on the issue of the environment.
British Columbia residents won’t learn the results of Saturday’s snap election for at least two weeks after polls close thanks to the need to count hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots by hand.
Officials with Elections B.C. said more than 700,000 votes have been cast by mail-in ballot, which must be tabulated manually due the timing of the Oct. 24 election. The results that would generally be available hours after the polls close, they added, will be postponed for weeks while the votes are counted.
The setup may have been different had the election taken place a year from now as scheduled, but NDP Leader John Horgan announced the surprise campaign, citing the need for political stability during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Legislative changes recommended by the province’s chief electoral officer and passed in 2019 are expected to kick in next year, allowing a large number of ballots to be processed quickly and centrally by “tabulators,” which have been used in provincial referendums.
B.C. NDP Leader John Horgan is promising further action to protect and revitalize the province’s wild salmon stocks.
Horgan says his party would double its contribution to the B.C. salmon restoration and innovation fund, a nearly $143-million partnership with the federal government, if re-elected after the Oct. 24 vote.
B.C. currently contributes 30 per cent and Ottawa provides 70 per cent for the fund that focuses on innovation, infrastructure and science partnerships to support sustainable fishing practices and protect wild salmon.
The pledge came during a campaign stop in Campbell River as the provincial election heads into its final week.
The NDP is also promising to establish a watershed security strategy and fund for Indigenous and local initiatives.
With one week to go before election day, the leaders of B.C.’s three main political parties went on the offensive Saturday, campaigning to win ridings from each other across the province.
Surrounded by trucks and excavators at Inland Kenworth in Campbell River, Wilkinson blamed the NDP for doing little to help people impacted by an eight-month forestry strike in 2019.
“The NDP simply threw in the towel and let forestry workers and forestry-dependent communities suffer on their own,” he said.
The northern part of Vancouver Island typically votes NDP, but Wilkinson seemed to be hoping disgruntled forestry workers would give him a boost.
“The NDP’s only response (to the strike) has been to offer money for people to leave the industry,” said B.C. Liberals candidate Norm Facey, a millworker who is running against the NDP’s Michelle Babchuk in the riding vacated by Claire Trevena.
“The B.C. Liberals offered a five-point plan to help revitalize the industry, to keep people working in the industry and keep communities thriving. All we’ve got is silence from Horgan,” he said.
NDP candidate Nathan Cullen is apologizing for insensitive comments he made about B.C. Liberals candidate Roy Jones Jr. Cheexial, who is Haida, before a recent all-candidates meeting.
“He’s not well-liked — he’s Haida — in his own community,” said Cullen. “The guy’s going to get bedrock 20 per cent.”
He then went on to laugh about the Jones Jr.’s supposed nickname, saying “his name is Kinkles….”
Cullen offered the apology Saturday morning on Twitter as well as at the beginning of a media availability on Zoom.
“A story recently surfaced about some comments I made… about Roy Jones Jr., which I unreservedly apologize for. They were inappropriate.”
Mounties in Surrey are investigating after receiving a report of damage to Liberal candidate for Surrey-Guildford Dave Hans’s political campaign office in Surrey.
Surrey RCMP say officers received a report at around 10:15 a.m. Saturday of a broken window at 107-15380 102A Avenue in Surrey.
It is believed to have happened overnight Friday. Mounties do not have any suspects.
WHAT THE LEADERS ARE SAYING:
Andrew Wilkinson, Liberal:
“We have an enormous economic mountain to climb,” he said in an editorial board with Postmedia. “And the job of government is to responsibly engage in that to make sure that we’re providing the environment in which small businesses can get by, thrive and prosper, because we’re going to have to grow our way out of this.”
Sonia Furstenau, Green:
“I would make the argument that had we succeeded in getting proportional representation we wouldn’t be in this election right now,” she told a Postmedia editorial board this week. “This election is about one party wanting all of the power. With proportional representation, you’re basically agreeing that democracy is about sharing the responsibility of governing.”
John Horgan, NDP:
“My approach has been where I have gaps in my knowledge or my ability to meet the needs of British Columbians, I seek out that knowledge,” he said. “I want to be as informed as I can be, to make the best decisions possible. And that’s how I will operate after the 24th of October. That’s how I’ve been operating up to this point in time.”
Two car rallies in one day, wow! Thank you Delta for having me this afternoon – I hope that I can earn each one of your votes next Saturday. It’s time to restore confidence and rebuild BC! #BCpoli#BCelxn2020pic.twitter.com/pmkincqZBy
A post shared by Sonia Furstenau (@soniafurstenau) on Oct 17, 2020 at 9:41pm PDT
These acts of vandalism are unacceptable. This is not who we are as British Columbians. No matter which party you support, this is not ok. pic.twitter.com/CPxcMXi5AO
B.C. Election 2020: Stay informed with our daily newsletter, delivered to your inbox every day at noon. Sign up here.
Forget it.
Two years ago, in a limitless and sunny August when a global pandemic seemed like an impossibility, my daughter and I knocked on doors for the Democrats in Portland, Maine.
We were using a list of registered Democrats living in a tidy West Portland neighborhood. The houses weren't terribly big, but nor were they terribly small. They were average. Middle America.
The people behind the mostly-unlocked doors were uniformly nice, and prototypically Democrat: single-Mom nurses, retired male government employees, nervous-looking new American citizens with pronounced accents and little kids swarming around their knees.
My daughter and I loped from door to door, a couple Canadian progressives intent on finding mid-term American progressives who detested Donald Trump, just as we did. What we encountered surprised us. Worried us, even.
We had thought it would be easy. Trump had been in the news two years ago, as he always is, threatening to take away American birthright citizenship. Or scheming to gut the Affordable Care Act or shrugging off allegations of Russia-Trump electoral fraud, then still a live issue.
But the folks we met on the doorsteps didn't want to talk about any of that. One elderly fellow, his grown daughter at his elbow, said he was a proud Democrat, "up and down the ticket," as the Americans like to say.
"We're Democrats. But don't keep telling me what Trump has done wrong," this man said, as his daughter nodded vigorously. "Forget it. Tell me what you're going to do."
"Forget it." After a few such encounters, my daughter and I retreated to the sidewalk. She had the best assessment: "It's not that they don't dislike Trump," she said. "It's like they've just forgotten all the millions of bad things that he's done."
The Democratic thinker David Shenk had a name for this phenomenon: data smog. Every day, via the Internet, regular folks like the ones found in that Portland, Maine neighborhood get bombarded by hundreds of thousands of words and images. It is overwhelming and relentless, and in the Trump era, it has gotten even worse.
So, Shenk postulates, people voters, in our case just tune it out. There's too much information, too often. It's data smog. So they turn it off.
And then they forget about it.
On Sunday, the New York Times filled an entire ten-page section of their newspaper with a stirring editorial about Trump's myriad crimes, political and legal. I scanned it. There were so many of them, I had forgotten about most. There are too many to list here, even partially.
The Times editorial board acknowledged this reality. "The enormity and variety of Mr. Trump's misdeeds can feel overwhelming," they wrote. "Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage."
It's not that voters are dumb. In my quarter-Century experience of running political campaigns, my conviction remains that voters are always smart and intuitive and aware. Always.
It's just that they're, well, busy: ferrying kids to hockey games and ballet practice, trying to get across town to work or an appointment, catching up on sleep after worrying all day about mortgage or rent payments. They're busy.
And in the midst of a brutal global pandemic, it's gotten even worse.
So they don't scrutinize political parties' shiny multi-page election platforms. They don't listen to speeches. They barely watch entire debates. And they forget things.
It's normal, to forget. It's human. It's a survival mechanism.
In the Trump era, we forget things even more. The terrible things he has done, in particular. Because there have been too, too many.
If Donald Trump somehow squeaks out another victory thereby throwing America into further chaos and division, hastening it's end, and further destabilizing a world in disarray it will be mainly because of one insight about voters, about humans, that he knows better than anyone else alive:
We forget.
The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.
Nowhere do the three main parties diverge more than on the environment. Getting a handle on what they are each planning means looking into their aspirations for the energy sector, too.
plan to pass legislation committing B.C. to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, “meaning there are either no harmful carbon emissions or they are offset by natural carbon sinks, carbon capture or other technologies.” New buildings will have to be net-zero by 2032. Trucks, buses, ports, airports, and marine vessels will be weaned off fossil fuels and industry fast-tracked through electrification. On the one hand, the liquefied natural gas industry will continue to expand, while on the other, the NDP will pursue “a comprehensive review of oil and natural gas royalty credits.”
is just as bullish on the future of LNG as the New Democrats, promising to expedite Indigenous-led LNG export projects and “establish accelerated review and approval processes.” The Liberals also promise a low-carbon future as “the world is moving away from oil within our lifetimes.” Expect more electrification of the transportation fleet and updated building codes. However, the Liberals want to review future increases in the carbon tax in light of the pandemic-induced recession. Wildlife habitat protection figures large in their plans with a new ministry for fisheries and coastlines.
The Greens
Expect an immediate end to logging in old growth forests and a shift away from the management of forests exclusively for timber. The Greens would apply the carbon tax to slash burning to ensure waste fibre is used for a better purpose. Expect a ban on hydraulic fracturing, a
process
widely used for extracting natural gas. Former Green leader Andrew Weaver blasted his former party for failing to halt the NDP’s LNG expansion plans when they held the balance of power in the legislature, but
“The Green platform is really clear that they would immediately halt royalty credits, tax breaks and direct subsidies to oil and gas companies,” said Kai Nagata, spokesman for
B.C. “The NDP has promised to review royalties and tax credits, but their position is confusing.”
“In opposition, the NDP railed against taxpayer subsidies to oil and gas companies being negotiated by the Liberals, but lo and behold, they take office and the subsidies go up,” he said. “In the latest budget documents, we are at $998 million a year.”
Eliminating subsidies is a “litmus test” for how seriously parties are taking climate action, he said.
“If we are trying to reduce emissions — and they are still going up — then a logical first step is to stop giving taxpayers’ money to the companies that are driving these emissions,” said Nagata. “In sorting the wheat from the chaff, they would phase out the marginal oil and gas plays, which are only profitable with the helping hand of the B.C. taxpayer.”
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