Winning last vote easy for Letnick
Lake Country is Letnick country. Norm Letnick won all 65 voting areas in the District of Lake Country in the 2013 provincial election.
He also won all the polling areas in the Glenmore area of Kelowna and virtually all of the voting areas in north Rutland.
Of the approximately 150 voting areas in the riding of KelownaLake Country, Letnick won all but five for the Liberals. The NDP prevailed, by a handful of votes, in two trailer parks on Okanagan Indian band territory and in a few pockets of Rutland.
In 11 voting areas of KelownaLake Country, it wasn’t the NDP that finished second to the Liberals, but the BC Conservatives.
The right-wing party headed into the last election with great hopes but collapsed as voting day approached. The Conservatives are a non-factor in this election, running only 10 candidates provincewide and no one in Kelowna-Lake Country.
With the absence of a small-c rival on the ballot, it’s conceivable Letnick could increase the 57 per cent share of the overall vote he won in Kelowna-Lake Country in 2013.
The economy appears strong in Lake Country, where house prices are the second highest in the Okanagan after Kelowna, and the town is in the midst of an unprecedented building boom.
“The community continues to break historic records for economic growth,” the District of Lake Country trumpeted in a press release last week. “The booming Okanagan community continues to set the pace for both residential construction and new commercial activity.”
Building permits last year totalled $92.8 million, the second consecutive record year, and this year’s values are already ahead of 2016 numbers by 18 per cent.
However, Lake Country is not immune to social pressures like those affecting other communities in B.C.
The town’s food bank moved into a 2,600-square-foot building, built at a cost of about $700,000, last year to cope with a rise in demand. More than 600 of Lake Country’s 12,000 residents rely on the food bank each month.
Residential break-ins also rose last year, with 33 homes burgled between January and May, compared to 45 in all of 2015. Last week, Lake Country RCMP warned of a spike in thefts from vehicles.
Erik Olesen, the NDP candidate in Kelowna-Lake Country, told an election forum this week a key party promise is to help “make life more affordable” for British Columbians.
The party will do that, he said, by freezing BC Hydro rates, rolling back ICBC premium increases, boosting the minimum wage to $15 an hour and eventually introducing $10-a-day child care.