Questions too old for Tory candidate

Questions posed during a Kelowna election forum earlier this week didn’t much interest Conservative candidate Chuck Hardy.

The forum was sponsored by teachers and seniors and, not surprisingly, mainly dealt with education and social issues.

“It’d be nice to have some new questions,” Hardy told forum moderator Sharon Shepherd, a former Kelowna mayor and city councillor who entered local politics in 1996.

“These questions were being asked when you were running 20 years ago,” Hardy told Shepherd.

*** Obviously anticipating a pro-teacher crowd hostile to the Christy Clark-led Liberals, Kelowna-Mission Liberal Steve Thomson had some quick education facts at his disposal.

Since the Liberals took power in 2001, he said, the Ministry of Education budget had risen to $5.9 billion — a 44 per cent increase — and per-pupil funding was at record-high levels.

But audible groans greeted Thomson’s assertion the six-year contract signed between the Liberals and the BC Teachers’ Federation in 2014 will give the “longest labour peace” on record between the two oft-warring sides.

*** Green party candidate Robert Mellalieu slammed the Liberals’ plan to shorten surgical waiting lists, saying the governing party was responsible for the problem in the first place.

“The problems were predictable, and this is the situation we’re in,” Mellalieu said.

*** NDP Kelowna-Mission candidate Harwinder Sandhu, a registered nurse, told the crowd she would bring considerable expertise to the challenge of helping caregivers.

“Being a health-care provider for 14 years, nobody could understand this problem better,” Sandhu said.

*** British Columbia is the only province in Canada without a poverty-reduction plan, Kelowna West NDP candidate Shelley Cook said. If elected, she said, the NDP would develop such a plan with specific targets and timelines.

Thomson countered that child poverty rates are in decline, and he listed a variety of benefits and subsidies that are available to the less-well-off.

“We have the most comprehensive support program for low-income people in Canada,” Thomson said.

*** At the same forum, Independent candidate Brian Thiessen drew perhaps the biggest applause of the night when he said the government could find billions of extra dollars simply by cancelling the Site C dam, under construction in northern B.C.

Thiessen also said at one point he favoured “less slogans and more solutions.” A jaded newspaperman we’ll call Ron Seymour, because that’s his name, told a Green party volunteer: “That sounds like a slogan.”