If any of the 50 or so audience members came to the UNBC agora to witness Liberal candidate Peter Njenga defending his federal party’s actions 10 years in government at the Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies all-candidates forum Wednesday evening they were sadly disappointed.
Njenga was a no-show.
The Nanaimo real estate agent chose instead to attend a Liberal function in Surrey attended by party leader Mark Carney.
But in his absence, each of the four other candidates vying for the seat in the House of Commons seized the opportunity to explain why voters in Monday’s election should mark the X beside their name.
They each responded to individualized questions posed by UNBC political science professor Fiona MacDonald under broad topics that ranged from healthcare and the opioid crisis to green energy/environmental project approvals, housing and affordability, immigration and Indigenous affairs.
Each candidate was given two minutes to respond to their question followed by a one-minute rebuttal on a subject of their choosing after each had offered an initial response.
People’s Party of Canada candidate David Watson, who describes himself as a small-c conservative, grew up in the Lower Mainland but has worked in Prince George, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He moved to Bear Lake eight years ago and is the Canada Post postmaster for the area. He’s represented the PPC since October 2023 and says he’s driven 7,500 kilometres visiting residents of his riding to hear their concerns
Watson was asked what changes he would make to the medically assistance in dying (MAID) laws in Canada. He said his party favours a combined public/private medical insurance program but is against MAID legislation for terminally ill people because consent swings too far to the left and is allowed for far too many reasons.
Watson said Canada is drowning in debt and for the sake of future generations that can’t continue. ‘In 148 years of this government we accumulated $600 billion in dept,” he said. “In the last 10 years, double that. We’re over $1.2 trillion in debt, and that’s not including provincial debts. That’s just the federal government, and we need to fix it.”
He said Canada has to spur much more development of its abundant natural resources to create affluence and become more self-sustaining. He also called on the government to eliminate inflation which eats into the spending power of Canadians.
Green Party candidate Mary Forbes, a former oilfield archaeologist in the Fort St. John area who currently serves as vice-chair of the Williams Lake-based School District 27, is the Greens’ challenger to Conservative incumbent Bob Zimmer in Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies on April 28.
Asked how the federal government should pay for prescription drugs, Forbes said free medical service for Canadian should be expanded not just to drug prescriptions but also to include dental and vision care and for those who need mental health support, “and I’m one of them,” she said.
NDP candidate Cory Grizz Longley, who placed second to Zimmer in the 2021 election, is a former Dawson Creek radio host-turned-plumber/pipefitter/union activist who got his nickname, which appears on the ballot, from when he served as the morning DJ for a Fort St. John radio station known as The Bear. He said one of the reasons for running for the job is to stand up for the rights of his daughter, part of the LBGTQ community.
Longley was asked to how the government should address Canada’s doctor shortage and burnout of overworked healthcare workers and what initiatives the NDP should utilize to recruit and retain and support healthcare professionals.
“How do we tackle this? We’re going to hire 35,000 nurses by 2030 and we’re going to improve their working conditions,” said Longley. “We’re going to take them out of the private system and put them back in the public system where they belong. We’re going to issue 5,000 Canadian healthcare workers tax credits. We’re going to fast-track accreditation for internationally-educated and U.S. nurses.”
Zimmer, 56, is seeking his fifth term in Parliament, having represented his home riding since 2011, and he knows history is on his side. The last time Prince George-Peace River-Northern Rockies elected a non-Conservative MP was in 1968 when Liberal Robert Borrie won that seat.
In his introduction, Zimmer spoke of his efforts to protect northern Canada as shadow minister for Northern Affairs and Arctic Sovereignty and represent community interests in regard to firearm legislation and sport fishing.
He said too many Canadians who had good jobs with good income eight years ago are now running out of money by the end of the month rather than being able to put away savings. The Conservatives, he said, have a plan to create a good economy so people can afford groceries and housing, especially the younger generations who have started to feel that the homeownership is almost unattainable.
Zimmer responded to a query on how to streamline the flow of internationally-trained healthcare professionals to practice in Canada and how the Conservatives would to integrate them into the provinces.
He said Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has talked about a Blue Seal Program to speed up the process and avoid the scenario of too many foreign doctors and nurses driving for Uber instead of working in hospitals because their credentials are not recognized by Canadian authorities. To address the shortfall, he said, there is a huge opportunity to base employment on their ability to perform the heatlhcare services for which they were trained.
Zimmer told the forum his daughter is studying to be a doctor in UNBC’s Northern Medical program and spoke highly of the university’s medical school and how it is churning out doctors trained in the North who tend to stay in northern BC when they graduate. That prompted Forbes to mention her daughter who, she said, is smart enough but lacks the money needed to get into medical school, and she called upon the need for free post-secondary education for all Canadians.
Forbes was asked whether the federal government should declare the opioid crisis an national emergency and the Green candidate said the numbers of death attributed to fentanyl overdoses support that.
“It is a national emergency, 51,000 Canadians and 15,000 British Columbians (have died) and here in Prince George it’s second to Victoria in callouts for (overdoses),” she said. “There needs to be second-stage housing for treatment and recovery. Men and boys are over-represented in deaths — 14,000 of the 51,000 deaths in Canada were women and girls, and 37,000 of the 51,000 were men and boys, and this needs to be addressed immediately. A dose the size of a grain of sand can kill. We need every child to know the risks.”
Zimmer also waded in to the opioid crisis, saying he recently spoke to a Prince George mother who lost her son to fentanyl poisoning. He said 534 people in Prince George have died of overdoses in the last nine years and it’s not getting any better. BC deaths jumped from 807 in 2016 to 2,325 in 2021, to 2,410 in 2022,and to 2,608 in 2023.
“Instead of supplying drugs for addicts, we’re going to build 50,000 recovery spaces across Canada to address the real issues and that to provide treatment for addicts,” Zimmer said
On the question of increasing the federal share of healthcare costs to 35 per cent, Longley said the government has to go after rich people and giant corporations that have absorbed businesses and take their profits to other countries without paying their fair share.
Longley was asked how to reduce the country’s record-high consumer debt. He said he supported a redistribution of the way Canada taxes people so to close loopholes that allow money to be transferred to other countries without penalty.
Switching to the environment, MacDonald asked Longley how his party would streamline the approval process on major projects while still protecting the environment and shortening the approval time for global investors. He said the NDP would make sure projects would get done while also maintaining due diligence to protect the environment. Unlike the Conservatives, he says he’s not in favour of building more oil pipelines to serve coastal tankers that could potentially wipe out fish stocks in a spill. He said rather than send crude oil to United States, Canada should be investing in refineries to keep that energy in the country. He’s in favour of building an energy corridor to get that commodity to other provinces.
Forbes was asked is she supports or opposes resumption of the consumer carbon tax. She admitted she was thrilled when the Liberal government finally dropped the unpopular tax for consumers that made it more expensive to fill gas tanks and heat homes, but was dismayed when she learned the electricity generated by the new Site C team will be used to liquify natural gas for export to Asian countries.
“We have all the people and the skills we need to electrify Western Canada instead of pushing it into a pipeline so we can send it to somebody else and it doesn’t negate the use of coal in those countries,” Forbes said. “They’re still burning coal.”
Zimmer jumped into that topic, reminding the forum that the tiny community of Groundbirch, between Dawson Creek and Chetwynd, produces all the natural gas required by LNG Canada at its Kitimat processing plant.
“What I’m getting at is we produce 1.2 per cent of global (greenhouse gas) emissions in Canada and we can actually dramatically reduce global emissions if we sell natural gas to countries that need it,” Zimmer said. ‘If we sell it to China and eliminate coal in energy production we eliminate 30 per cent of global emissions and if we sell LNG to Korea, China, Greece, countries that need it, it’s a great thing for Canada.”
On housing and affordability, Zimmer was asked how to reduce Canada’s poverty rate. He said record inflation and the carbon tax combined with an under-valued dollar, has driven food costs through the roof. The key to reversing those trends is to rein in government spending and dropping the income tax rate for low-income earners by 15 per cent.
To try to entice home builders to construct smaller and more affordable houses, Watson says Canadians need to change their way of thinking so they develop a sense of community living in less-spacious surroundings for the long term and there’s less risk of those areas being turned into slums 10 or 20 years after they are built. He’s seen tiny house villages work well in Germany.
Zimmer jumped in as the next speaker and said it was unfortunate Liberal candidate Njenga wasn’t at the forum, “because we could talk about the biggest tax evader, Mr. Mark Carney, who has billions in the Caymans and places around the world.”
To reduce the number of working poor in Canada, Forbes proposes reducing income tax barriers. Instead of the current $15,000 annual threshold beyond which a worker begins to pay tax, the Greens would raise that threshold to $40,000. As a mother of two she experienced times when the cost of day care exceeded what she brought home with her paycheque.
The topic switched to immigration policy and Watson was questioned about what he would do to encourage immigrants to settle in the riding. He mentioned the number of student visas issued by the Liberal government before they cut immigration rates last October and said there were half a million students who came to Canada on visas, people who he says have disappeared from Canadian society.
“We have a lot of people who come in, generally refugees, who want to adapt to our culture, they want to learn our language and do things with us and we want more people like that,” said Watson. “Those people will do anything they can do. Most of the problems in this country, though, stem from immigration and economics right now.”
Watson wants a moratorium on immigration for two and possibly three years, which would not apply to refugees, who would be treated on a case-by-case basis.
Forbes pointed out that there are 14.7 million Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24, but there are also 12 million in the 55-and-older age bracket getting close to retirement age and that will create further shortages of skilled labour. With a growing number of Americans unsatisfied with their government, Canada should try to entice skilled workers to move from the U.S. to fill positions in healthcare and the trades.
Longley reminded the audience it was immigrants who largely built Canada’s infrastructure and we will need them to provide that work and fill job vacancies. Zimmer said immigration numbers need to be tied to available jobs, housing and access to healthcare. He pointed to the success stories in his riding for Ukrainians who fled their war-torn country and have found jobs and have settled with their families in the region. He said because the federal immigration system is broken, temporary foreign workers are not being let into the country and BC businesses are suffering as a result.
The final topic of Indigenous affairs raised the question of what can be done to eliminate of overhaul the Indian Act, which administers status of individuals, local First Nation governments and management of reserve land and federal funding.
Forbes called the Act horrendous and outdated and said the overhaul of the law should be self-determining and Indigenous-led.
On the subject of reconciliation with First Nations, Forbes said the country should not let conversations on tariffs overshadow the process of truth and reconciliation and Canada needs to act on the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. “One in four Indigenous women or girls will suffer violence or will be murdered in this country, this is genocidal and needs to be addressed,” said Forbes.
