With a federal election just around the corner, a national leader stopped in Prince George on Saturday night (March 2).
Green Party of Canada Leader Elizabeth May stopped in the city as part of her Community Matters Tour, which is in its second leg.
Other B.C. stops include March 4 in Kamloops and March 5 in Ashcroft.
But during her stop here in Prince George yesterday, May first paid a visit to students at the UNBC campus before hosting a public event at the Uda Dune Baiyoh Centre (House of Ancestors).
During her evening meeting, May touched on many subjects ranging from pipelines to the SNC-Lavalin affair, currently engulfing the Liberal Party of Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
"This community matters tour is a Green Party of Canada effort to see as many as Canadians possible before the campaign starts," she says."It's community matters because to the Greens, communities do matter and it's to also find out in each community, what matters to you."
One of the first things May touched on was working across party lines, something she says the Federal Greens believe firmly in compared to other parties.
"Democracy has to work well," she says. "And people yelling and screaming at each other doesn't look like a good system to me. So being in parliament has always been a challenge because the kind of work we can do the best is when we're prepared to work together and our current parliamentary structure and current culture of politics, is altogether too partisan and I think that's a thing the average Canadian feels a bit discouraged about."
Going into the federal election this fall, May says she hopes to see a minority government where parties have to work together to get things done.
.@ElizabethMay says she hopes to see a minority government that works across party lines after the next election coming in the fall @CanadianGreens @CityofPG #cdnpoli #bcpoli
— Jess Fedigan (@jj_fedigan) March 3, 2019
"No one party has all the good ideas," she says. "I would never go into an election saying we the Greens have all the good ideas. I think we have the best ethics and the best set of values for public services."
May also took time to address the current SNC-Lavalin scandal that has rocked the Canadian government and has been a headline maker throughout the world.
May says she thinks it's concerning and upsetting to see how former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould has been treated by the surrounding the controversy.
"The political controversy kind of fuels a blood in the water sense of ganging up on whatever party seems to be bleeding at the moment," she says. "I don't think that's the best thing for the country. I want to get to the bottom of whatever happened. I don't think for a minute that Jody Wilson-Raybould isn't telling us the complete truth during the public hearing but that doesn't mean we completely know what happened so we need to dig a bit deeper."
There’s the first mention of the SNC-Lavalin scandal: May said she feels bad for @Puglaas and the way she was treated was not fair, they also need to know everything that happened #cdnpoli #bcpoli #cityofpg @CanadianGreens
— Jess Fedigan (@jj_fedigan) March 3, 2019
And of course, the evening wouldn't be complete without a discussion of pipelines, in particular, the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion project in Burnaby.
"A lot of the evidence wasn't tested by Kinder Morgan," she says.
May also says that the pipeline from Alberta to B.C. includes crossing 800 streams.
The other issue she says to do with the pipeline, is jobs, saying that the evidence about jobs from the National Energy Board about jobs came from the largest union in Northern Alberta, Unifor.
"Unifor was an intervener in the National Energy Board hearings because Unifor is against the expansion," she says. "Unifor's evidence was that if you ship out raw bitumen, you will lose jobs in Canada for refinery workers because the refinery in Burnaby had already reduced their workforce by one third."
May says the NEB rejected the evidence, saying the subjects of jobs and economic impacts were not listed as issues they were allowed to address in the hearings.
"They had no other evidence except volume five of Kinder Morgan's evidence which said that we will create 90 permanent jobs, 40 in Alberta and 50 in B.C. and during construction for two years, 2,500 jobs. But the fact that the largest union in Alberta said this is a threat to jobs, never came into question because the National Energy Board said jobs aren't in our package of consideration."
May will wrap up her Western Canada visit in Portage La Prairie, Winnipeg, Manitoba on March 16.
