Stone expected to enter B.C. Liberal leadership race
Former transport minister Stone kicks off campaign Tuesday in Surrey
British Columbia’s Liberal leadership race is expected to expand to eight candidates, with former transportation minister Todd Stone scheduling a campaign-style blitz Tuesday that sees him visiting Metro Vancouver, Vancouver Island and the Interior.
The Kamloops-South Thompson member of the legislature has stops in Surrey and Victoria, then finishes the day with an event at Thompson Rivers University in his hometown of Kamloops.
An email statement Friday from former Liberal cabinet minister Peter Fassbender says B.C. needs a fresh vision to keep the province on track and Stone will make a special announcement about the Liberal party’s future.
“This is an incredibly important time for our party and our province,” says the statement, without making an official announcement about Stone’s candidacy.
Stone released a YouTube video in September saying he was considering whether to run, then added that if he were to be leader, the B.C. Liberal party would not accept the taxpayer subsidies that are being proposed by the minority NDP.
Former Surrey mayor Dianne Watts announced her intentions for the party’s top job last month, along with 38-year-old Terrace businesswoman Lucy Sager and five current provincial Liberal politicians: Sam Sullivan, Mike Bernier, Andrew Wilkinson, Mike de Jong and Michael Lee.
The first of six candidate debates is set for Oct. 15 in Surrey, with party members electing a new leader to replace former premier Christy Clark in early February.
Stone’s likely candidacy brings with him the potential to appeal to urban and rural voters and his experience as a high-tech entrepreneur will help separate him from the former Liberal government’s largely ineffective attempt to develop a liquefied natural gas export industry, said David Black, a political communications professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria.
Stone is the founder of the Kamloops-based software company iCompass Technologies Inc. But Stone, the former transportation minister, could be dogged by a New Democrat government review of debt at the Insurance Corporation of B.C., the Crown-owned auto insurance agency under Stone’s watch for years, Black said.
“I think he has the profile of someone who, both with his relative youth, he’s 45, and with his new economy bona fides, has an ability to speak to Vancouver in a way some other candidates, Mike Bernier for example and others, may not be able to,” said Black.
The Liberals lost votes and members in Metro Vancouver, including four cabinet ministers, and won only one of 14 seats on Vancouver Island.
Clark resigned as premier and as the member for Kelowna-West in August following last spring’s tight election result that did not produce a clear winner.
The Canadian Press
Former cabinet minister Todd Stone is poised to become the eighth declared candidate for the B.C. Liberal leadership Tuesday, having booked a venue in Surrey as the launch point for his bid.
He’s making a statement by venturing on to the home ground of Dianne Watts, the former Surrey mayor and recently ex-federal MP, who launched an outsider campaign several weeks back.
Geographically speaking, there’s more to the choice than in-your-face Dianne. Stone will make a campaign stop on Vancouver Island later in the day and finish with an evening event in his home base of Kamloops.
But the B.C. Liberals already hold most of the seats in the Interior and they are far from breaking the NDP’s grip on all but one seat on the Island.
The electoral shift that cost the Liberals their majority in the legislature and delivered them to the Opposition benches was the loss of nine seats to the NDP in Metro Vancouver.
The road back to power starts there. But so do the post-mortems on what went wrong, and on that score Stone has some explaining to do, particularly in Surrey.
For it was Stone himself who raised and then failed to deliver on the issue — tolls — that would cost the Liberals many a vote with the commuting public in Metro Vancouver. Early in his tenure as transportation minister in the Christy Clark-led government, Stone conceded to a Surrey audience the provincial tolling policy was onerous, unfair and in need of a major makeover.
The Port Mann crossing of the Fraser was already tolled. Likewise TransLink, the regional transportation authority, tolled Golden Ears, its upriver crossing. Pending replacements of the Pattullo Bridge and George Massey Tunnel would get the same treatment.
Then the Alex Fraser would be the only major toll-free crossing west of the Mission bridge and, as Stone conceded, the province would be facing “pretty big questions” about tolling policy.
“To me this then becomes an issue of fairness and equity for the hard-working people south of the Fraser,” said Stone in the November 2013 speech to the Surrey Board of Trade.
“I will commit to everyone in this room that one of my goals high up on my to-do list is to bring forward B.C.’s tolling policy for a vigorous discussion and debate.”
It was a good beginning for a rookie minister and drew favourable notices of the “it’s about time” variety from Surrey and other communities dependent on those crossings.
But it was all downhill from there. The promised review never materialized. The Liberals did not want a no-win debate about fairness in a region with conflicting transportation priorities and expectations.
Besides, Clark wanted tolls: that was how she was planning to finance her prized 10-lane replacement for the Massey.
Her reluctance left Stone making excuses for failing to deliver on the promised fairness and equity review.
“There is plenty of time to have that discussion,” was his latest dodge, uttered at the outset of this election year. “The George Massey replacement won’t be up and in use for another five years and assuming the mayors do move forward with a replacement of the Pattullo, it will be probably five to seven years before that crossing would be in place and tolled as well.”
In the interim commuters, many of them living in B.C. Liberal-held ridings on both sides of the Port Mann, would pay and pay and pay. But in the end it was the Liberals who paid.
On the eve of the formal start of the four-week election campaign, they finally admitted that maybe there was a fairness issue after all and announced a $500 tolling cap for regular commuters.
A few hours later, New Democratic Party leader John Horgan blindsided the Liberals by announcing he would abolish tolls altogether. He even included Golden Ears in the pledge.
Rubbing it in, he made the announcement at a rally in Surrey in words that could have been borrowed from Stone’s pledge 3½ years earlier.
“It’s not fair to people living south of the Fraser,” declared Horgan. “It’s not fair that you pay the price … the B.C. Liberals have caused.”
Not affordable, fumed the upstaged Liberals. And how were the New Democrats going to pay for it?
Fair questions, the latter of which has not yet been fully answered.
Plus the region is already experiencing some unintended consequences in terms of congestion. As the NDP’s partner in power-sharing, Andrew Weaver put it this week: “It was a great election promise and bad public policy.”
Still, it did the deed where it counted on election day, as Liberals themselves admitted when they included abolition of tolls in the desperation throne speech they tabled in June.
That was then, this is now, as the leadership candidates say. But Stone in particular owes folks south of the river an explanation for why he never kept his promise on tolls.
He might also be challenged by Watts. Back when Stone pledged the review, the then-Surrey mayor was on record as deploring the unfairness of the tolls. Had he listened, they and the Liberals might be in a much different political situation this fall.
CORRECTION: Chris O’Riley is B.C. Hydro president and chief operating officer, not CEO as I wrote Friday. I regret the error.
I will commit to everyone in this room that one of my goals high up on my to-do list is to bring forward B.C.’s tolling policy for a vigorous discussion and debate.