Albas shows strength across massive riding
The daunting task facing Liberal candidate Sarah Eves as she campaigns in West Kelowna can be represented by one number.
Zero.
That’s how many of the 113 Westside polling stations her Liberal predecessor won in the 2019 federal election.
From unincorporated areas far up Westside Road to the southern neighbourhoods of Peachland, the winner everywhere was incumbent Conservative Dan Albas who was first elected in 2011.
His margins of victory ranged from the overwhelming, like an area of Glenrosa where he more than quadrupled Liberal votes, to the squeaky, such as a downtown Westbank neighbourhood where he came out on top by just five votes.
“If there is one thing from my perspective, it would be accountability,” Albas said Tuesday when asked why he thinks he enjoys such strong support.
“When elected officials do not return your phone calls and refuse to hear the concerns of citizens, I believe they’ve lost the privilege of being in public office.
“From day one, I’ve had a 24/7 call answering service so that I can return calls on evenings, weekends, holidays, or whenever works best for the citizens I represent,” he said. “My approach has always been to take the concerns of my constituents to Ottawa to find solutions and not accept the Ottawa-imposed ‘one-sizefits-all’ agenda that is often focused largely on catering to Canada’s largest cities.”
The riding of Central OkanaganSimilkameen-Nicola, which came into being for the 2015 election, also includes downtown and central Kelowna and a largely rural area that extends west to Merritt.
In total, there were 162 polling stations west of the W.R. Bennett bridge in the COSN riding in the 2019 election. Albas won them all.
But Albas, a former City of Penticton councillor, was slightly less popular in the Kelowna portion of the sprawling riding. He won 33 polling stations in downtown and central Kelowna, but the Liberals won 13 neighbourhoods.
Eves, acclaimed as the Liberal candidate last spring, is a special education teacher who works in Logan Lake and lives in Merritt.
She says she’s proud of the Liberal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its increase to child care benefits, and its plans for $10 a day child care, a national pharmacare plan, and a boost to Old
Age Security payments.
“The Canadian government’s COVID-19 pandemic relief is a good example of action that ensures our economic recovery is as robust as possible,” Eves says in a campaign video.
Overall in the 2019 federal election, Albas won 47.9% of the votes in the riding of Central Okanagan-Similkameen-Nicola, compared to 25% for the Liberals, 16.8% for the NDP, 7.8% for the Greens, and 2.1% for the People’s Party of Canada.
For this election, the NDP is again being represented by its 2019 candidate, Joan Phillip, a member of the Penticton Indian Band and an Indigenous rights activist.
The Green candidate is Brennan Wauters, an electrician with an interest in solar energy who ran for the party in Burnaby South in the 2019 federal election.
The People’s Party of Canada is represented by Kathryn McDonald, a Vancouverbased paralegal whose campaign invited supporters to meet her at the ‘Freedom over Security’ rally against COVID-19 public health measures that was held last Sunday in Kerry Park.