Election campaigns head into final week
Liberal and Green leaders go on the offensive with attacks on NDP's handling of forest industry
With one week to go before election day, the leaders of B.C.'s three main political parties went on the offensive Saturday, campaigning to win ridings from each other across the province.
Surrounded by trucks and excavators at Inland Kenworth in Campbell River, Wilkinson blamed the NDP for doing little to help people impacted by an eight-month forestry strike in 2019.
“The NDP simply threw in the towel and let forestry workers and forestry-dependent communities suffer on their own,” he said.
The northern part of Vancouver Island typically votes NDP, but Wilkinson seemed to hope disgruntled forestry workers would give him a boost.
“The NDP's only response (to the strike) has been to offer money for people to leave the industry,” said B.C. Liberals candidate Norm Facey, a millworker who is running against the NDP's Michelle Babchuk in the riding vacated by Claire Trevena.
“The B.C. Liberals offered a five-point plan to help revitalize the industry, to keep people working in the industry and keep communities thriving. All we've got is silence from Horgan,” he said.
The NDP also took heat in another northern riding Saturday after insensitive comments made by the party's candidate in the Stikine region were posted online. During an all-candidates meeting earlier in the week, Nathan Cullen was caught by a microphone saying North Coast B.C. Liberals candidate Roy Jones Jr. Cheexial, who is Haida, was not well-liked in his own community. Cullen then laughed about Jones Jr.'s nickname.
Cullen apologized at the beginning of a Zoom conference Saturday, saying his comments were “inappropriate,” before going on to attack Wilkinson's past involvement in a lawsuit against the City of Prince Rupert. As a lawyer, Wilkinson represented Sun Wave Forest Products when the company sued the city in a dispute about its mill site.
Green Leader Sonia Furstenau also took the chance to talk forestry on Saturday, with a stop in Metchosin, where she pledged to make major changes to the industry, including tenure reform, ending logging of old-growth trees in high-risk ecosystems, and generating more jobs and revenue from what is harvested.
“We are overdue for a fundamental shift in how we manage our forests,” she said. “The NDP tinkered around the edges, but refused again and again to make the muchneeded changes to forestry in B.C., instead continuing with status quo policies that are disastrous for communities and the environment.”
NDP Leader John Horgan was in the B.C. Interior, where he announced a cancer treatment centre in Kamloops to eliminate the need for some patients to travel to Kelowna.
On Saturday morning, Horgan spoke with a cancer survivor who recounted how she had to get up at 6 a.m. to catch a shuttle from Kamloops to Kelowna for a 10-minute treatment before waiting three hours for the shuttle back to Kamloops. She would arrive home late in the afternoon and “collapse” from exhaustion, she said.
Horgan said the new cancer centre, which would receive $450 million in funding in the first three years, will “save countless hours and a countless amount of stress.”
The B.C. Liberals are also promising to improve cancer care in Kamloops.