The withdrawal of BC United has left many supporters of their supporters as well as undecided voters who hover in the middle of the road uncertain about how to cast their vote in this polarized atmosphere. How will you encourage these voters to cast their ballots for you?
Well, I think that the B.C. Green Party is your only true alternative this election. I think that the history of the B.C. liberals in this region has been a disaster for our economy, it's been a disaster for the local ownership of things like our forest industry, and the B.C. Green Party is... Let me just back up a little bit, I'll just elaborate on what the NDP has done, which is nothing different from what the B.C. liberals did.
They've basically put everything on autopilot as to what the B.C. liberal policies and priorities were, and we are left with a disaster for our economy here in this town. The Green Party is the only party that represents a different path from sort of the corporate agenda of the B.C. liberal politics and the bureaucratic kind of corporate agenda of the B.C. NDP. The Green Party is independent from these two major influences in our society, and only the Green Party can balance the needs of corporations and bureaucracies, because let's make no mistake, we need both of those things, but we need to balance their interests with the interests of the public.
And I think one of the things we're seeing in this election is that we're not seeing that balance, we're not seeing the public being prioritized in public policies. And the Green Party, if you look at their platform, I think they run a really good attack between those two extremes of the political spectrum, and we have a solid set of policies in place to deal with things like, well, locally in the forestry we want to see more commercial thinning of the plantations. The NDP has been reluctant to issue permits for that, and that's a very practical thing where the Green Party wants to see that type of forestry being prioritized.
Moccasin Flats is a stark example of the addiction, mental health and poverty issues affecting Prince George. What would you do to address these issues?
The issues facing Prince George are not unique. These issues of homelessness and drug addiction are prevalent across the continent. They're prevalent from Canada all the way down to the United States, and fundamentally this is a crisis of housing, and it's a crisis of hopelessness in our society.
So I think, you know, at a big level we need to create an economy that is inclusive, that provides people with opportunity and provides them with hope. In Prince George and across British Columbia and Canada, we used to have policies of non-profit housing models that were brought in in the post-war era that basically wound up in the 1990s, and we have not been building non-market housing in any number since that time. So the Green Party, what we want to see happen is an expansion and revisiting of those old policies that we used to have on the books.
So the Green Party is proposing building 24,000 non-market housing units every year, and I've lived in non-profit housing governed by a non-profit housing model. They work, they can be financed publicly, but at no cost to the public, in that the cost of building that housing would be recovered through rent. And the only difference being that the developers and the financiers wouldn't be there to take their share of the profit.
And these models are effective, have a proven track record of success, and we want to see that model being brought back again to help people get off the streets. And also we want to make sure we have local jobs. We had a lot of local sawmill jobs that kept people off the street.
We need to get those kind of jobs back in place and give people hope and give people meaning and have jobs where they can hold down a family, they can hold down friends and have a social life and have a good job as opposed to going off into a camp, for example.
This part of BC has always relied on the resource sector for good jobs but changes like Canfor's latest closure announcement put these jobs at risk. What will you do to advocate for new resource sector jobs in Prince George?
I think forestry has been the history of Prince George and it has to be the future of Prince George. And there's a lot of things. I've talked about the forestry issue for a long time.
One of the big mistakes of the BC Liberal, BC Conservative politics, and let's not make the mistake of pretending that John Rustad was not the minister of forests under the BC Liberals for a period of time and the fact that he never fixed the problem, which is that we got rid of appurtenancy. The appurtenance clause required the local logs to support the local community. And when we got rid of that, we created this situation where these large corporations believe that they don't have to provide local benefits to the public, even though they're relying on public timber for their operations.
So I think there's a number of practical things we could do. We could have a requirement for these tenures if these corporations want to hang on to their timber harvesting rights. So within a certain period of time, they need to get some production happening again locally.
If they can't provide the sawmills, then that tenure should be transferred to somebody who will. So John Brink is an example of somebody who's, you know, stepped up to the plate and said, you know, if I can provide those jobs, let's get the tenure in my hands and I can build the mills and get the jobs happening again. I don't think we want to replace Canfor with, you know, one individual.
I'd like to see multiple John Brinks kind of step up to the plate. There are specific things in the regulations that prevent small sawmills from operating, you know, not only exclusive timber tenures that prevent local operations from happening, but also like the red tape that prevents, it makes it very difficult for small one or two person sawmill operations to get logs to their sawmill site. So there's a lot of restrictions on, you know, you have to like require a timber mark on, you know, five logs, for example, from somebody's private property to transfer those logs legally on a public highway.
Let's create some changes there to make it easier for small sawmills to get going.
The relationship between the provincial government and BC’s Indigenous peoples is evolving. If elected, what approach do you plan to bring to your work with area First Nations, including the Lheidli T’enneh?
Indigenous rights are critical and a key component of the Green Party platform. We live in a society that respects the rule of law.
And the rule of law has been interpreted to mean that indigenous rights are fundamental. We never signed treaties with our local First Nations all across the interior of British Columbia. This was an unfortunate decision of the leadership of British Columbia back in the 19th century, which strayed from the common practice of British common law that was practiced everywhere else across Canada.
And so that's a reality that we have to face. We have to recognize indigenous rights. We have to make sure that economic development is respecting those rights, that is being done in accordance with their wishes and their legal claims and rights.
But, you know, I want to add that we can't just because somebody has rights, you know, doesn't mean that you can infringe on somebody else's rights. So there's always going to be limitations on rights. You know, if one Indigenous First Nation has the rights to build a mine in a certain area, you know, that can't infringe on another First Nations downstream who's like fisheries or ability to hunt would be impacted by that right.
So, you know, rights always come with responsibilities. And I think that's one thing we have to recognize. We also have to recognize that rights, you know, can't be used by these large corporations as a backdoor means to get what they want and, you know, contradict the overall public interest.
And I think there's a lot of examples where this imbalance of power between small communities, small indigenous communities, and these large corporate interests can compromise everybody's interest locally.
Our area's population is aging. What is your top priority when it comes to addressing the issues facing seniors and why?
The issues facing seniors are huge. I mean, seniors are on fixed incomes.
This is something that I've always, you know, worried about and paid attention to. It's stuff that we've talked about on our radio show time and time again. You know, senior citizens on fixed incomes are facing the crunch of these rising prices.
They have rents that are being jacked through the roof. They're getting evicted, right? They're having to move. Prince George was a place that had affordable housing, and that's just not really the case anymore.
So seniors are bearing the brunt of this economy that we're facing with, like, the price of food going up twice as high and rents just skyrocketing. This is a huge complex issue. There's a lot of things we can do, like getting more affordable housing for seniors is one thing, making sure we have good health care for seniors, making sure that they have, you know, that we're having effective care being provided to seniors.
And there's a lot of things in the Green Party platform that deals with these issues. Right now across Canada, almost 19 million hours of doctor time is being wasted on paperwork. So one of the things the Green Party is bringing to the table is this focus on efficiency and service delivery by government.
I think that's kind of forgotten by the NDP. I mean, they've brought in an incredible amount of bureaucratic waste in the delivery of health care. We've got, you know, more vice presidents and administrative kind of managers than we've ever had before.
If you look at the Dogwood model that the Green Party wants to bring in, this is a concept of basically taking the administrative responsibilities away from government and giving that to the administrators and making sure that doctors and health care providers can focus on delivering service for the people. And I think those are a couple of critical ways that we can help our senior populations. Thanks.
Some MLAs excel in the Legislature while others become known for their constituency work. In a huge riding with this mix of urban and rural communities what kind of MLA do you think you're going to be?
I think if you watch the – if folks watch the debate that we had on the CKPG, it was taped, I think you'll realize that when it comes to performance in the Legislature, I'll be able to think off the cuff and, you know, deliver and communicate important issues well. It'll be apparent that I've looked into these issues, that I've researched these issues, that I'm able to balance the philosophical questions of, you know, the balance between personal freedoms and the public interest in the role of government. These are all things that I've thought a lot about, and I care about our community.
I'll fight hard for the people of the North. You know, I grew up here in northern BC, and I love northern BC, and I've also had experiences in Victoria, and I recognize that we need to get more power away from Victoria and up here into the North. So I want to fight for a change in the institutions, basically, a change in how government is carried out.
And I think these are – this is a core question that goes beyond, you know, my effectiveness as an MLA or a community advocate. I think the bigger question at play here is how can we get Victoria to serve the people and how to prevent Victoria from micromanaging all facets of the decision-making that affect our region and to allow people in Prince George and people in Mackenzie to have a bigger say over the institutions that govern us. Because, you know, from the school district issues up in Mackenzie, where they're not being responded to by the school board to issues of, you know, pertinency and forestry, we are not being recognized by Victoria.
Our problems are not being taken seriously by Victoria.
