Affordability issues loom large on Wilkinson’s radar
Newly minted B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson acknowledged Monday that affordability is “probably” the unifying issue in British Columbia.
Not paying enough attention to this issue — particularly as it relates to housing — is one of the elements blamed for the B.C. Liberals’ loss in the provincial election last year under then-leader Christy Clark.
A longtime Liberal organizer, former party president and former cabinet minister, Wilkinson narrowly defeated Dianne Watts, a former Conservative MP and mayor of Surrey, for the leadership of the party on Saturday. Clark had stepped down last year after the NDP successfully formed a government with the Green party, which produced a razor-thin minority government.
While the Liberals were successful in the Interior and north of the province in the May 2017 election, the party lost 10 seats in the populous Lower Mainland to the NDP.
Political observers and former Liberal politicians, including former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon, had said the Liberals had also ignored transportation issues in Metro Vancouver to their detriment.
“It’s time to be tuned to what the public sentiment is. That’s going to be critical to what we do: making sure we have a broader reach,” said Wilkinson, a doctor and lawyer, in a wide-ranging interview with The Vancouver Sun and Province editorial board.
Wilkinson stressed the need to listen to the public, and particularly to be sensitive to regional needs and interests. He said affordability can be different depending where you are in the province. While affordability is focused on housing in the Lower Mainland, Wilkinson said in an Interior community like Quesnel, for example, it has to do with whether a person believes they will have a job in three to five years. The forest-based community faces the prospect of a lower timber harvest because of the mountain pine beetle epidemic and a reduction in forestry jobs.
Wilkinson, the MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena, the second wealthiest riding in B.C., noted the rising housing price issue is spilling into Victoria and Kelowna, as an outflow of capital from Vancouver pushes up prices there.
He suggested tax incentives for construction of rental housing was necessary and also that rapid-transit expansion would be needed as the Lower Mainland’s population continues to grow.
Wilkinson said a first priority is bringing the party together after a leadership campaign that he likened to a rugby game in which there are some bruises. In debates, Wilkinson had taken hard swipes at Watts and rookie MLA Michael Lee, who Wilkinson narrowly beat to get on the final leadership ballot.
He said he is talking to the other leadership candidates personally.
Responding to an editorial board question, Wilkinson declined to say directly if he would have released to the public seven pages of recommendations in a consultant’s report on the deteriorating finances at ICBC, recommendations that potentially could have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, Wilkinson noted ICBC was a 44-year-old government-run monopoly and he said he wondered whether it had outlasted its usefulness.
Asked whether his government had failed to act on alleged money laundering being carried out at the River Rock Casino, as reported by Postmedia in exclusive reports, Wilkinson did not directly answer the question. Instead, he criticized Attorney General David Eby for talking about “perceived problems” and potentially alerting the bad guys when the province should be catching and prosecuting them.
In response to the findings of another Postmedia investigation, which determined the B.C. Securities Commission had collected less than two per cent of $510 million in penalties over the past decade and that criminal prosecutions were rare, Wilkinson said Canada needs more robust prosecution of financial crimes.