Six leadership candidates for the province's Liberal party gathered in Prince George Saturday to address the concerns of people in northern B.C. and the Interior regions worried about the future of the natural resource sector.
Former forestry and finance minister Mike de Jong took the current NDP government to task for its reluctance to grant final approval of the Site C hydroelectric dam project near Fort St. John.
"Can you believe there is a government seriously contemplating writing off $4 billion and getting nothing for it?" de Jong asked. "Site C represents clean renewable reliable energy into the future. We thought it was bad when the NDP wrote off $500 million for three fast ferries, this is a whole fleet of them. We've got to fight this and make sure the project proceeds, the future of our province depends on it."
The candidates were asked what they would do to strengthen the forestry, energy and mining sectors to keep British Columbians working.
"We're less vulnerable today than we were because of steps we took to diversify our international markets and you know about that here in Prince George" de Jong said. "This is not just the northern capital, it's the forestry capital and it's why I think the forestry ministry should be located here in Prince George.
"Not doing a bad deal is important. We're going to have to stick together in that respect because the American protectionists want to impose quotas on our mills and that's a bad deal."
Andrew Wilkinson, a former advanced education minister first elected in 2013 in the Vancouver-Quilchena riding, said if he becomes leader of the party he would make it easier for resource-based industries to obtain the permits they need to start up projects.
"What we need to do is have a leadership approach that says what you can do, how to build industries here that otherwise wouldn't settle here," Andrew Wilkinson, the MLA for Vancouver Quilchena, said. "This applies to the forest industry but to mining as well. We've got to clean up our permitting process so that when people are applying to make investments and create jobs they have the knowledge they're going to get answers in a timely fashion. Right now it can take years, and that's simply not acceptable in a competitive world."
Candidates in the 90-minute debate talked about their plans to defeat the NDP-Green coalition and take back the government the Liberals held for 16 years leading up to last spring's election.
They stated their opposition to the NDP's proposed change of the province's electoral system to proportional representation, which would allot the number of seats each party receives in the legislature based on their percentage of the popular vote. It would replace the current first-past-the-post system in which the candidate with the most votes wins.
The NDP passed legislation a month ago that will ask voters in a referendum in the fall of 2018. The vote will require 50 per cent approval to pass.
"When we look at proportional representation, that is my No. 1 priority and I'm hellbent in terms of making sure that we defeat that referendum," said Dianne Watts, the former MP for South Surrey-White Rock-Cloverdale, who resigned her federal seat Sept. 30 to seek the Liberal leadership.
Former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan, MLA for Vancouver-False Creek, said the rural-urban divide leaves B.C. residents who live outside population centres in Vancouver and Victoria feeling alienated and undervalued for the contributions they make to the provincial economy.
"Within walking or wheeling distance from my home there's over 1,000 mining and resource companies with their address in Vancouver-False Creek, so I know that when the northern and interior communities succeed and prosper, Vancouver-False Creek succeeds and prospers," said Sullivan.
"I don't think that message is delivered well enough in our urban areas just how dependent we are on each other."
Sullivan also said the health care delivery has to be more flexible to reflect the differing needs of urban and rural communities. Health care takes half of the province's budget and despite that, Watts says too many patients are falling through the cracks.
"We have to make sure that it is patient-focused but using innovation, using technology, using data that actually looks at outcomes," said Watts. "We clearly know that in rural and northern British Columbia, there are gaps."
Developing northern B.C.'s resources is the backbone which pays for the province's roads, schools and hospitals and Lower Mainland residents need to be reminded of that fact, said Michael Lee, a former business lawyer elected in May as MLA for Vancouver-Langara.
"There's a direct connection between urban British Columbia and the rural and north of this province - we built this province on the strength of our resource economy, much of the infrastructure and the benefits for this province derived as a whole have come from this region," said Lee. "We need to respect that and understand that. We need encourage migration into our regions and build up the capacity around our colleges and university systems here."
Watts took the leadership candidates in power before the last election to task, asking why they did not approve funding for a new hospital in Terrace and a surgical tower in Prince George at UHNBC, while also failing to bring engineering and physiotherapy postsecondary programs to Prince George.
"I'm wondering why that wasn't in our last platform," said Watts. "If it's this important and we have identified it and we know about it, it should have been in the last platform and I'm disappointed that it wasn't."
De Jong revealed the Liberals had plans in their platform to bring an engineering program to Prince George at UNBC and and funding for that program that would have in the spring budget had the government not been defeated.
Todd Stone, the Kamloops-based former transportation minister, also highlighted the need to train engineers in the north and said it would be his priority to approve health care projects to establish cardiac services such as angioplasty to Prince George.
"I think it's unacceptable that in rural communities like in Fort St. James and along Highway 16 across the north that it can take up to six days to be medevaced and flown to a larger hospital to receive the services you need," said Stone. "We need to make sure the resources are there for the people who need them. This is not about urban and rural, it's about making sure that health care, education and critical services are there for people when they need it, wherever they are in this province."
Stone said the future of rural economic development especially as it relates to the technology sector depends on northern communities having access to high-speed internet and cellular phone connections.
On the issue of wildlife management and how to to balance the needs of hunters, tourism operators, First Nations and environmentalists to protect to environment but also create economic opportunity, Wilkinson says he grew as a hunter in Kamloops and he's aware of the implications of increased predator populations and loss of habitat due to beetle kill and wildfires.
"We need to whole bunch of work on (hunting allocations) by putting money into that branch of government so we can get better inventories and base decisions on hard science so it takes politics out of this," Wilkinson said.
Stone said the key to ensuring animal populations will thrive is to collaborate with all stakeholders, including local governments and First Nations, pointing to the example of the Great Bear Rainforest area on the established on the coast south of Prince Rupert in 2016 which protects 85 per cent of the land from industrial logging.
De Jong asked Watts if she would reinstate tolls on the Port Mann Bridge the NDP removed so that only the users of the bridge, rather than all of B.C. residents, would end up paying for it.
"I don't think northerners should support tolls on the Port Mann Bridge, full stop," said Watts. "But I also believe the tolling policy of the previous government was antiquated. It didn't work. Tolling individual pieces of infrastructure is not the way to go. What you need to do is look at the whole entire system within the Lower Mainland so it doesn't cost the people in the north."
About 300 people attended the second of six leadership debates the Liberals will host leading up the party's election of a new leader on Feb. 3. The debate was streamed on the Liberal Facebook page. The next debate will be in Nanaimo on Sunday, Nov. 19.
