Candidates vying to occupy North Vancouver-Seymour’s seat in the legislature squared off for a pointed but cordial debate, Tuesday night.
The event, which was organized by the Seymour, Blueridge and Deep Cove community associations, fell just short of an “all” candidates meeting, with the Green Party’s Subhadarshi Tripathy a no-show.
But NDP incumbent Susie Chant, Samarth Chandola of the BC Conservatives and independent candidate Mitchell Baker took questions provided by attendees at the Mount Seymour United Church for more than two hours.
Supportive housing
One issue specific to the riding was the Keith Road supportive housing project approved unanimously by District of North Vancouver council in February. The project was controversial with neighbours who raised the prospect of drug use and crime spilling into the nearby area.
Chandola said, if elected, his government would either pause or seriously alter the project so no drug use would be tolerated in or near the site.
“The provincial government has a role to play in it, and we are saying we’re going to come in and remove funding for the project until it’s made either dry or converted to a rehab site or moved to a location that’s away from families and children,” he said.
Chant acknowledged residents’ security concerns and said those have been accounted for in the careful design and planned operations for the site. She added that having stable housing is the critical first step for people getting their lives on track.
“There are people in all communities that need supportive housing, whether it’s a brain injury, whether it’s an addiction problem, whether it’s a mental health problem,” she said. “Right now, we’ve got people living in tents. We’ve got people living in recreational vehicles. We need a safe place where they can be sorted.”
Baker said he agreed with Chandola and added that he would favour more involuntary treatment.
“Nobody recovered by doing drugs. They recovered by not doing drugs. And it’s very difficult to tell somebody that they need to be in care or put them in involuntary care when they don’t want to be there, but nobody can make that decision to stop while they’re doing drugs,” he said.
Debt and deficit
Several residents brought questions about the province’s annual deficit, which is predicted to hit $9 billion in 2025.
Chant said her government’s plan will see B.C. return to balanced budgets in nine years and she highlighted the enormous challenges the province had to face over the last term, including the pandemic, the atmospheric river and forest fires. She also rubbished the Conservatives’ notion that government has any “bloat” that can be cut without hurting services that citizens are demanding.
“I’m sorry, has anybody been to a hospital lately? What’s bloated is how many patients are in there, not how many nurses are in there, not how many healthcare clinicians are in there. In our schools, do we need cuts to teachers?” she asked. “The NDP is going to be managing that deficit, yes, but they’re also going to continue to invest in people.”
In his opening remarks, Chandola said his worries about his daughter growing up with that debt was one of the reasons that inspired him to run provincially.
“COVID was four years ago. That is no reason why our deficit in 2024 should be going up to $9 billion,” he said, adding that government payroll has grown by 71 per cent since the NDP came to power. “The NDP has taken us at a point from going from a capital deficit perspective to also now incurring operational deficit, year over year, which is now causing the inflation that we are in and we plan to get the debt under control in eight years.”
Baker, who described himself as a political centrist who believes in fiscal responsibility, said there will only be more forest fires and other disasters in the future, and that cuts to spending will be inevitable if B.C. is serious about getting the deficit under control.
“We need to tighten our fiscal belt. Period. We’ve been living beyond our means in this province for a long time, and that’s provable by the amount of debt we’re in,” he said. “And it sucks to say there’s going to be some hard decisions that have to be made. There’s going to need to be some cuts made if we want to get back on track.”
Housing
The issue of housing, unsurprisingly, prompted numerous questions, including about the NDP’s recent Bill 44, which guaranteed minimum allowable densities on properties near transit and on single-family lots.
Chandola said the Conservatives’ position is that municipalities will be able to opt out of Bill 44, which he described as “government overreach,” if their councils choose. He said his party favours bringing back tax breaks for developers willing to build affordable rental housing.
“Housing is important. We all need housing. But we don’t need to take planned development and throw that out the window for solving the current problems that we have,” he said, adding that the District of North Vancouver was already meeting its housing targets.
Facing a more pointed question about the cost of newer homes, Chant defended the NDP’s housing policies, saying there is no getting around the fact that they are needed. More than 100,000 new people moved to B.C. in the last three years alone, she noted.
“Part of the challenge is that for many years, housing stock just wasn’t built, so what we are is far behind the housing stock that we need for the people that we have and for the people that keep coming to British Columbia,” she said.
She also touted the recently launched rental protection fund, which provides funding for non-profits to buy up older, more affordable rental properties to protect them from redevelopment.
Baker, who owns a single-family-home construction business, took a nuanced position between the two, arguing that the provincial government shouldn’t be in a position enforce zoning rules on private property owners, but he conceded the system was in need of some reform.
“You don’t just get to tell people that they should go to the bank and borrow a bunch of money and build four- or six-plexes on their property, and you can solve the housing crisis for the government,” he said. “I think that municipalities should be open to different kinds of density on the properties, and they shouldn’t limit people and just automatically say no, which is what’s been happening for the last 20 years. So this is at least opening the conversation.”
Climate Change
Throughout the meeting, the issue of climate change came up only once, from a questioner who made a point of asserting that the carbon tax did nothing but “impoverish” individuals.
Chant responded with an anecdote about a North Vancouver activist who persuaded her government’s environment minister to severely regulate the use of second-generation rat poisons that were found to be inadvertently killing raptors like owls and eagles.
“That is one very small thing that our area has done for the whole of British Columbia and there’s a whole series of things like that going on,” she said. “We’ve got many, many projects happening that are saying, 'how do we help our environment? How do we help our climate?' Green technology that we’re using, hydroelectricity is terrific, wind and solar, all there.”
Chandola dismissed B.C.’s carbon tax as virtue signalling, “which does nothing in a meaningful capacity to reduce global emissions.”
“If there’s 1,000 people who are smoking in a room and one person who quits smoking, we still have a smoke problem,” he said. “I’m always looking at technology to solve problems. B.C. needs to invest in scientific research and development to become a world leader in carbon capture technologies, and export that technology to China, export that technology to India and the United States, and bring down, help bring down carbon emissions globally.”
Baker noted that he drives a diesel vehicle and said he didn’t have any grievance with paying the carbon tax as an individual. But, he said, some of the biggest emitters don’t have any options available to them for zero- or low-carbon alternatives.
“I’m paying the price. I should probably be paying more as a carbon tax for choosing the way that I choose to drive. But some of those industries that cannot or don’t have an option, should not be," he said. “Technology hasn’t caught up to where we need it to be – dump trucks, cement trucks, transport trucks, trains. They’re diesel.… We actually need that technology, and we can’t just force that upon people.”
To see the community associations' video fo the meeting, click here.
