Orders of the Day

Hon. M. Farnworth: I call Address in Reply to the Speech from the Throne.

[2:35 p.m.]

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

Deputy Speaker: Members who do not have business in the House, you may leave so that we can continue with the business of the House.

Throne Speech Debate

M. Dean: I move, seconded by the member for Delta North:

[That we, Her Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in session assembled, beg leave to thank Your Honour for the gracious Speech which Your Honour has addressed to us at the opening of the present session.]

Hon. Speaker, it’s a real honour to rise today as the MLA for Esquimalt-Metchosin. I’d like to start with recognition that we do our work here on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋin̓əŋ-speaking people, now known as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. That’s really important to me because within my constituency are the First Nations of the Songhees and Esquimalt communities and reserves and Scia’new, as well, at Beecher Bay.

My constituency contains four municipalities: Esquimalt, View Royal, Colwood and Metchosin. Within that, we have CFB Esquimalt as well. I have a lot of military families living in my community. It’s very coastal. It goes from urban in downtown Esquimalt all the way to rural out in Metchosin.

I’d like to just take this opportunity to actually say thank you to my staff. I have some amazing staff across lots of different offices out of which we work. I have three members of staff in my constituency office: Andrew Barrett, Lawrence Herzog and Nubwa Wathanafa. They do amazing work, represent me well in the community and really listen to people who come into my office. The door is open four days a week, and we take appointments on Friday. They manage my time really well. They’re so respectful and so resourceful and helpful to people in my constituency office.

In my legislative office, I have Noah Mitchell. Again, he’s a great support. For example, when Elder Shirley comes in, he’s always very helpful, making sure that she’s properly greeted and finds her way about safely and securely and with every comfort that she needs. He’s quick on his feet and thinks ahead for me as well.

I have Ange Liu, who’s my ministerial assistant, who has been working with me now for several months. She really knows me and understands me, is really helpful in our gender equity work and helpful as part of our whole team. I have a team in the gender equity office as well. My ADM, Dr. Melanie Stewart, carries a lot of weight and certainly punches well above our weight. It’s a small gender equity office as well.

I was really excited by the throne speech. It’s going to be a great benefit to many people in my community, as well as closing gaps in our gender equity file. I’ll be able to highlight some of those. The throne speech opened the fifth session of the 41st parliament. It took time to recognize the achievements that we’d already accomplished getting to this time and to highlight what’s going to be coming ahead — what our government is going to be doing in the session ahead.

We recognize that we have accomplished a lot and that there is a lot left to do. We have a lot of catching up to do after so many years of neglect and inequality. I say this to other people. I say: “Pick a ministry, or pick an area.” We’ve now understood just how much damage has been done by the depth and the breadth of neglect.

Hard-working families living across my community were suffering. They were living paycheque to paycheque. They couldn’t get by. If they had an unexpected crisis — they suddenly had to have extra servicing done on their vehicle, or they had extra medical bills or something — they couldn’t cope with that. People were just $200 away from not being able to recover. At the same time, tax breaks were given to the people at the top.

[2:40 p.m.]

Houses in my community were treated as commodities. The housing market in my community was spinning out of control. It was skyrocketing. It was difficult for hard-working people in my community to find homes, to find homes that were appropriate for them or good quality for them, or they would be unnecessarily indebted to somebody else and potentially exploited just to be able to get a roof over their head.

Services were being cut. I was feeling like we were operating in a valley of no services, of dust balls rolling, while at the same time, my community is one of the fastest growing in British Columbia. So the gaps between services available and level of need in the community was getting wider and wider all the time.

That was actually one of the reasons why I ended up in politics. It was because I had done as much advocacy and as much work and as much resourcing and grant writing as I could, and we just felt like we weren’t actually making progress. So it’s the system that needs to change.

When we formed government, we took these challenges on. We wanted to make sure that people could have hope and that people could get ahead. We put people first. One of the first things that we did was take big money out of politics in British Columbia, and we’ve tightened lobbying rules. We want our elected officials working for British Columbians, not working for corporations. I go home and tell people in my community that I’m working for them.

Every time I’m in a committee or in a meeting, I’m thinking of the people in my community and thinking: how does this story that I’m being told…? This pressure that’s being put on me to help make things go one way or another — how will it be translated back home? How will it impact people and families in their daily lives now and for the long term as well?

In our early days, we took immediate steps to tackle affordability and inequality. I can tell you that really benefited many people in my community. For example, we increased disability rates. This year, we’re going to increase earnings exemptions for people on disability and income assistance. I know that that creates a lot of self-determination, a lot of dignity. I hear from people in my community that that’s what they want. They want to be able to create their own future and to be able to try and get ahead without just being dependent on handouts.

We’ve reduced interest on student loans. We’ve raised the minimum wage. We created a plan, a strategy, for raising the minimum wage in British Columbia. That is really significant in closing gaps, as well, and reducing inequality. It won’t come as a surprise that the majority of workers on minimum wage are women. Within that group of women on minimum wage, many of them are immigrant women, Indigenous women, women with disabilities. Other women who are marginalized are overrepresented in that group. So lifting them with rises to the minimum wage is really significant, and for the families who depend on them as well.

Something else that was really important, but it’s been hard to kind of get the message out there about how important this is as well, is that we actually tackled the issue of the liquor server wage. About 90 percent of people receiving the liquor server wage are women. What does that do? It creates a system of dependency and exploitation, because it’s based on the premise that liquor servers — women — are going to be reliant upon tips.

What does tipping do? Tipping creates expectations. Tipping creates an imbalance of power between the server and the customer. That gets exploited for so many women. By actually taking that category out and having just the minimum wage, we’re actually protecting more women in British Columbia as well.

Another really significant public policy that we’ve given priority to is good-quality, affordable, universal child care. I am so proud. It makes such a difference in so many ways. It has so many by-products that are really positive for communities, for the province, for closing inequality. The one single public policy that has the biggest impact on closing the pay gap between men and women anywhere is universal child care.

[2:45 p.m.]

This is a really significant investment in actually enabling families to tackle their affordability, to make choices about going back into the economy, about how they want their family to be earning money, contributing to the economy, building businesses and planning for their future as well.

I’ve had so many parents come to me with tears — you know, this is life-altering — saying: “Thank you for bringing child care that’s affordable into my community.” Let me tell you. In my community, families quite often couldn’t find child care. It’s so scarce. Again, it’s one of the fastest-growing communities and one of the youngest communities. Young families are living, particularly, in the western half of my community because it’s more affordable. That’s where the development is as well. There wasn’t investment in child care. The child care spaces weren’t actually keeping up. So people didn’t even have a choice.

Not only that, but if they were really looking for child care and they desperately needed it, they would then have to commute out of their community to get child care, and then they would have to commute into their work. Or maybe they had another kid they had to drop somewhere else as well, like a breakfast club or at school or whatever. That doesn’t help families to create a good balance of life and be able to create the kind of family lifestyle that they want and that they deserve. It puts more cars on the road for more amount of time as well. It creates stress, it’s not good for the environment, and it’s not good for the local community either.

By investing in child care in my community…. People tell me it’s a game-changer. I know it has a significant impact on increasing capacity for employers so that they can actually find people to work. One of the things that we hear in my community from employers is: “We have a skilled labour shortage.” We have a shortage of any kind of…. They’re finding it hard to fill vacancies. Creating those choices for people to re-enter the labour force is benefiting businesses as well, and then benefiting the environment too.

Our program supports good-quality child care. It’s early childhood education, and we’re creating a really professional system of early childhood education that’s accessible and affordable. In Esquimalt-Metchosin, the total amount of child care investments is actually over $10 million. Those are investments in the child care operating fund, the affordable child care benefit, the early childhood educator wage enhancement, the child care fee reduction, the maintenance fund for providers, the start-up grants, Aboriginal Head Start and UBCM space creation.

There are a lot of different initiatives that we’re tackling. There’s not going to be one cookie-cutter approach to this — like just one answer is going to solve this issue. We’ve got to build up the workforce, and we’ve got to create incentives for people to be training. So we’re increasing training spaces. Plus, we’re raising the wages. We need to physically build early childhood education centres as well. There’s a lot to be done, and we are taking action already on that.

The total amount that has gone back to parents — these are parents in my community, Esquimalt-Metchosin, who are going to reinvest those dollars locally — through reduced fees and benefits is $5,767,773. Lots of money going into the pockets of parents in my community. Again, we know the added effect of people being able to afford things in their local community as well. The total number of spaces approved in Esquimalt-Metchosin is 65. So a lot more work to do.

There are lots of partnerships and networks in my community that I know are working really hard on that, and I really want to thank them for all of their work. There have been a lot of people working in this sector for a long time who didn’t get recognition, who stuck there and who are now on to a second generation of families in their community.

We’re here now. We’re here as allies and as supporters and to recognize the profession of early childhood educators and all the work that they’ve done. So now people in my community are able to make these choices that are good for their kids, good for the economy and good for their families.

[2:50 p.m.]

Now, another significant affordability issue in my community — and, I know, across the province, as well, but especially in our region — is housing. The vacancy rate for rentals is below 1 percent in my community, and prices of houses skyrocketed.

The previous government did nothing to prevent the commodification of people’s homes in our communities. That benefited the wealthy already and left families struggling to live together in the same community, not knowing, having uncertainty about where they might be able to live if they lost their rental apartment or if they weren’t able to purchase a home.

I know of many families in my community who were couch-surfing. I know people would say to me: “Oh, West Shore. You don’t have a homelessness problem.” Oh, we do. We do. It might not be as visible as downtown, for example, because people are couch-surfing. People are overcrowded. People are moving about. Our people are living in places that are too small or too deplorable than they should be living in and bringing up their families. But, oh yeah, we have a housing issue as well.

I knew of a single mom. She had three kids. She was given an eviction notice by the owners of the house that she was in. She went out house hunting in the region, in the community. At one house that she went to, there were 17 other people viewing it, so she just left. I mean, she just knew that they would be placing bids, and the amount would skyrocket, and she couldn’t even get involved in any of that.

I have a frequent visitor to my constituency office, an elderly man with a lovely dog. My constituency assistant loves him coming by and loves seeing the dog and having the dog come for a pat, as well. He’s a senior, and he lives in an RV. He lives in an RV in my community, and quite often, he can’t find anywhere to park his RV, or he gets moved on and turned away. So he’s struggling.

Last year, in May, we had a children’s party at our house. We went for a walk in the forest at the back of my house in rural Metchosin. One of the curious kids strayed off the path and found a tent in the forest behind my house, with two people sleeping. Well, they weren’t there, but there was bedding for two people. When we lifted the tent up, obviously it had been there for a long time, uninvited, a surprise, and a sign of the times, I suppose. What a sad sign of the times that is.

Our government made a choice. We created a housing plan that is comprehensive and tackles all the root causes of inequality and poor housing. So, for example, we’re increasing supply. We’ve created improved protections. We’re cracking down on speculation and fraud. I can tell you that I see the results of this plan all around my community.

In Colwood, as I travel down Wale Road, to my left, behind some construction fencing, there used to be a big, big hole. It had been there for years. It was the laugh of the town that there were all these holes around and about. It would just fill up with water, and it was an eyesore and a danger.

Anyway, we now have a collaborative partnership that has B.C. Housing funding for an Indigenous housing project that will go in there. It’s going to be phenomenal. It’s right opposite the West Shore Child, Youth and Family Centre. It’s walkable distance to a grocery store and lots of other amenities, and then, just down at the next junction, there’s the rec centre and the library. It’s perfect. So that’s on my left.

Then, as I look up the hill, there’s a 100-unit affordable housing development. It’s actually on Goldstream Avenue, on a different road, but I can see it, and it’s rising. I see these buildings going up. I’m so excited that I’m actually going to be doing some ribbon cutting and meeting some families who are going to be moving into these in the foreseeable future.

Then, just around the corner, there’s a housing hub project. That’s in a little neighbourhood that actually has quite a lot of military families in it. So that’s a really innovative partnership with the new model of the housing hub and, again, collaboration — people coming together to help to solve these issues. Then we have two projects in development in Esquimalt, and View Royal also has plans for affordable housing as well. So I’m seeing the results of our commitments, and I know that there will be more of these projects coming forward as well.

[2:55 p.m.]

British Columbia now has a homeless action plan, and we have a strategy to lift people out of poverty. Starting in October, families who need more support will receive the child opportunity benefit.

Again, women are often more at risk of living in poverty, and a large proportion of people living in poverty in British Columbia are single moms. Our investments in tackling poverty, supporting the education system and eliminating MSP are helping struggling families to have more opportunities to get ahead.

We’ve been hearing recently, of course, from families about how their car insurance rates are becoming too high for them to afford. Families in my community are struggling with so many different pressures on them, and we’re working really hard to try and tackle all of them. It’s another example of mismanagement and abandonment under the previous government.

We’ve started with some reforms that have been successful, and we’re going to continue this transformation this year so that by next year, at renewal, drivers can expect a 20 percent reduction in their insurance rates. That’s going to be really significant for people in my community who are living so close to the line on a regular basis. The transformation will not only make it more affordable. It takes costly legal fees out of the system and gives enhanced coverage for medical care.

My constituency, as I described to begin with, is really diverse, and many families do still need their cars and depend on them to get around and to get their kids to where their kids need to be. They have vehicles for work or for their own business and for the local economy as well. Now they’re going to actually experience an insurance system that’s based more on fairness and accountability. So I’m really proud of that.

Now let’s talk about a different kind of injury: domestic violence and sexual assault. It is far too prevalent and pervasive in our province. Intimate partner violence is the most common kind of violence experienced by women. Of the 945 partner homicides between 2008 and 2018, 79 percent were women. Let’s call it what it is. This is femicide. Most femicides are actually by the woman’s husband — 73 percent. Indigenous women experience high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault: 2.7 times more domestic violence and three times more sexual assault.

In my role as Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity, I meet with a lot of people and a lot of stakeholders. I meet with a lot of Indigenous women with real lived experience as well. So many of them — doesn’t matter their age, doesn’t matter their profession and doesn’t matter their history — tell me that hardly a day goes by that they aren’t propositioned by someone. That is appalling, and we have to change it.

We had the most police-reported sexual assaults in Canada in 2017 than in any year since 1998. So we need to continue tackling that. In 2016 and 2017, over half of sexual assault victims were women under 25 years, and then they live with that for the rest of their lives.

I’m very proud that our government passed legislation last year to give workers up to ten days of job-protected leave if they’re facing domestic or sexual violence. At the time, we promised that we would look at this further. So we actually did some more consultations. We did some focus groups with representatives from labour, from the women-serving sector and also from employers and employers’ groups as well. We did an online survey, too. We had thousands of responses. Let’s face it: it’s mostly women and people of diverse gender who are impacted by sexual assault and physical violence in their intimate relationships.

[3:00 p.m.]

I want to say to the Leader of the Opposition that this is not a tough marriage. This is abuse, injury and harm. It is traumatizing, and it can be deathly. So we’re not going to minimize our understanding of domestic violence and sexual assault. We take it seriously. It can have an impact on survivors for the rest of their lives.

People recover in different ways, but people will need support and help. It’s traumatizing. Not only that; you might need to actually be organized and change some aspects of your life at the same time, as well — at the time of, potentially, a critical injury and definitely a trauma. We’re committed to supporting people who’ve experienced domestic violence and sexual assault because that will actually help them to rebuild their lives and rebuild the lives of their children if they have children with them as well. That will help them be stronger, more resilient and more healthy as they move forward.

If you imagine it, people who have experienced domestic violence and sexual assault might need to go to court, might need to get medical help, might need a forensic exam. If you have kids and you’re actually leaving an abusive home, then you need to find that home, and you might also need to change their schools. All of this takes up time and energy at a time when you’re feeling the most hurt and the most powerless.

I spent 30 years working in the sector, and I see the impacts of domestic violence and sexual assault. There are many complexities to it where people are being bullied and being groomed and being systematically disempowered and where they need to be able to make those decisions and take those actions in ways that can’t be detected.

You don’t want to impact someone’s payroll in an abusive relationship when it probably is being scrutinized, for example. You have to think about the power dynamics that are going on here to be able to provide a tool that can actually be used by people at the time that they need it. So the leave can be taken in pieces; it doesn’t have to be taken consecutively or a whole day at a time. It could be for going for counselling. It could be for going to court. It could be for going to see a solicitor. Whatever is needed in that particular situation.

I’m really proud that this year we’re actually going to be bringing in legislation that will provide for five days of paid leave. For me, with my community and my experience, I know that is going to help people in my community. I can say now, as well, that there are people in this building and in these chambers who have had these experiences and who know what it’s like to go through them. So let’s not minimize the impact of any kind of domestic violence and sexual assault.

We’re also investing in schools and the education system. People in my community see it directly, especially as you drive along Metchosin Road. You have the ocean on one side and the Royal Bay development on the other side, which is a really big residential development. A new high school was built there maybe four years ago now, Royal Bay High School.

Under the old system of the previous government, the new school was built on enrolment of the day, not on projections. You can see the land. You can see where the development is going to go. It’s one of the fastest-growing communities in British Columbia. So within the first year or two, we ended up with portables on the site of a brand-new high school.

Our government is taking a different approach. We’re actually working on the basis of projected enrolment, because we want to eliminate portables for our students. So we’re investing in this school for an extension. We’re already putting an extension on a school that isn’t five years old. We are because we know the area and the school needs it. So again I’m going to be really excited to go there and be part of an opening ceremony and create more beautiful space for our students at Royal Bay.

The space they have there is stunning. The library literally overlooks the ocean. There’s natural wood and natural materials throughout the school. It really creates that sense of dignity, belief and worth in our students in the school.

[3:05 p.m.]

In fact, our government has invested in over 80 school capital projects. In the schools, the students also have more learning supports: 4,200 new teachers, 700 new special education teachers and nearly 200 teachers, psychologists and counsellors. All of these professionals are critical to the success of our students.

Let’s look at some of the outcomes of our investments. We have now improved Indigenous graduation rates to the highest ever seen in British Columbia. I want to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone in B.C. who ensures that our education system is successful and meets the needs of our students.

Now, another project we worked on in education that I was really proud of was with the United Way to ensure that menstrual products are free and available to students who need them across our education system. I’m also really proud to be a member of the B.C. NDP caucus that has signed the Period Promise pledge. Our government will continue to progress to ensure that services are available for all people.

We’re promoting an inclusive province, tackling hate crime and race-based intolerance. We now have sexual orientation and gender identity initiatives in every single school district. We lifted the trans flag at the Legislature on Trans Remembrance Day for the first time last year. And we have created a provincial anti-racism network to address hate and victimization.

I see my colleague the member for Delta North is here with us in chambers. This is a great opportunity for me to say how proud I was of the work that he did. I was very proud to be able to participate in a workshop that he led that explored racism experienced in British Columbia. It was humbling. It was very humbling. It was also an honour to hear of the truth and the real lived experiences and, also, their ideas for how we move forward safely and positively.

We’re going to continue to ensure that we advance equality, diversity and human rights. Building a better B.C. is one where everyone can be included and can thrive and can fulfil their potential. We know that for people to be able to thrive, they need to have mental wellness, mental health, so we’re investing in mental health care with our Pathway to Hope road map. This includes early intervention and putting services in places where they’ll be accessed — in schools, for example, for students or in the community, for example, in Foundry centres and other centres with wraparound care. Indigenous communities are planning, designing, delivering services that will meet their mental health priorities.

Now, I come from the community social service sector, and I lived through cutbacks in our community. We saw wait-lists increase, and the complexity of issues increased substantially. So I am really proud to be part of a government that recognizes the importance of investing in mental health. We have the first and only Minister of Mental Health, and her team is doing a great job.

We have, for example, a therapeutic recovery community in View Royal. It’s helping to divert individuals from jail to recovery. There’s a recognition there of the trauma that people have gone through that leads into addiction and associated activities that get people into trouble.

It’s a wonderful environment. It’s gone through lots of different iterations of the function and purpose of it, and it was renovated to create this therapeutic community. The collaboration there is really neat, because the renovation was actually done by HeroWork. HeroWork is another community organization that supports non-profits by coming in and doing a renovation project with them. We had a wonderful opening ceremony there, and they’ve really created some beautiful features. They’re going to have a community garden, and it’s really going to help people and give them the best opportunity for recovery.

In fact, I was just at another HeroWork project recently which is Peers, an organization that supports people in the sex trade. They, as well, have had a wonderful renovation in their building in Esquimalt.

[3:10 p.m.]

Of course, we have the opioid crisis as well. With the work that the ministry has done with our expanded harm reduction and treatment options, we’ve actually averted 4,700 deaths. We know we have more to do, and we are making some progress there.

Our government is also investing in public health services and in building the public health system. We have moved forward on 13 hospital projects and opened 12 urgent and primary care centres. There’s a new urgent primary care centre that serves my community. Indeed, this centre receives the most visits of any of these centres from across the whole province.

In actual fact, I had to use it. On the last snow day that we had, my husband slipped on ice and cut his head. He landed on his head in the car park, so I took him straight there. We were received by very professional staff. We waited in a very comfortable waiting area. We were treated by a nurse practitioner and then a doctor. Seven stitches later we were out and on our way home. We got home in time for dinner, and this had happened at lunchtime.

Without that centre being there and having the dedicated professional staff and the nursing and then the doctor services, we would have ended up at the ER at Victoria General Hospital, further away from home, and taking up their resources, which is already a stressed system, and probably would have been away from home for a much longer time.

I thank everybody at the centre for their dedication, for their professionalism and for their care as well. I thank all health professionals, everybody involved in the health system and the health service, for all of their work, for all British Columbians.

Across our health service, we’re seeing improvements — more MRIs, reduced wait times, more care for seniors. We appreciate all the hard work that goes into taking care of British Columbians every day.

Our work on reconciliation is another area I’m very proud of. I myself have been very fortunate to receive guidance and teachings from a local Elder. I have known Elder Shirley for probably over a decade now. She’s generous in her teachings and in her advice and support. I’ve been blessed and honoured with a blanketing ceremony in my community.

An Indigenous woman who I was working with…. You know, she had been observing my work in the community before I was elected, and she asked me one day: “Have you ever been blanketed? You’re a woman leader in the community. You must have had a blanketing ceremony.”

I was like: “Well, I’m an immigrant, and no.” So she arranged it for me, and it was very, very meaningful. It really meant a lot to me.

I’ve been learning language from an Elder, and he’s given me permission to use that language, as well, out in public, here in chambers. I’m very humbled by that, and I really appreciate the generosity and the teachings of the Indigenous people in my community.

As a Legislature, we made history when we unanimously endorsed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. This signals that the work is starting, that we’re committed to it, genuinely. We’ll step into our journey and our pathway together. Looking ahead, we’re going to develop an action plan together. Our pathway ahead must include action in response to the climate crisis.

The throne speech presented a vision for a strong, sustainable economy that provides good-paying jobs and quality public services for people and provides businesses with the opportunities that they need to compete and thrive in the global marketplace. Wherever you live in B.C., you’re probably seeing signs of infrastructure investment. This government is making sure that public investments provide public benefits.

We’re rolling out community benefits agreements on some of these projects. I’m very proud of the community benefits agreements because they’re providing better training, apprenticeships and trades opportunities for Indigenous people, women and youth around the province. They are underrepresented.

Our Clean BC climate plan is helping us to grow sustainable economy with good jobs and opportunities for people. It’s already working. More people have cleaner options for getting around, for heating our homes and fuelling industry. More communities are investing in clean energy and green building projects.

[3:15 p.m.]

Already people in my community are telling stories about how they’re saving ten to 15 minutes a day riding the bus into town these days because of the new bus lanes.

I would just like to say that the throne speech really charters out the way forward that we’re going to be moving, building on our successes and continuing along with the same values. I know that everyone in my community loves living here, has a dream of working and bringing up a family in our beautiful area. Our government is making choices to ensure that this remains a choice for them — for them to be able to afford a good home, to be able to choose local, good-quality child care, to make their contribution to tackling the climate crisis, and to be part of the pathway forward on reconciliation.

R. Kahlon: I rise to second that motion: “That we, Her Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia in session assembled, beg leave to thank Your Honour for the gracious Speech which Your Honour has addressed to us at the opening of the present session.”

It’s my privilege to stand and speak today in favour of this throne speech. I don’t think it’s going to surprise many that I’m speaking in favour of the throne speech. There are a few shocked faces I can see across the way, but they shouldn’t be too shocked.

I want to start just recognizing…. In the beginning of the throne speech, there were many people who we’ve lost in the last year that were recognized. It’s a tradition of throne speeches of all governments to recognize these people — some civil servants, some people prominent in B.C. — who made B.C. a better place.

I want to say something that hits close to home: the mention of Brandon Bassi. I know that the Minister of Labour and I have both spoken about what a great loss Brandon was to our community. This young man, a soccer superstar, had the entire world ahead of him, and we lost him way too soon. The community is still shook up. I visited the local high school just recently, and the kids still talk about him. He had graduated already, and the local basketball team still recognized him because he was such an important figure for the local high school basketball team. I know that his family are keeping his legacy alive.

I think I can join the Minister of Labour…. I was so happy when I saw this video of his club team winning the national championships and them celebrating when they were lifting the trophy. They paused for a moment to let his dad come on to the field and pick up that trophy. I think it was a very emotional moment for anyone that knew Brandon but also anyone that knows the family or is associated with soccer in this province. So it was such an honour to see his name recognized in the beginning of the throne speech, along with many others who have contributed so much.

I just want to take a moment to thank my family. Without them, it’s very difficult to do this job. I think my nine-year-old might campaign against me in the next election. He said if the next election comes, he doesn’t want me to…. He’s not going to vote for me, he says, because it’s so hard for them, although he’s starting to understand. He’s at an age where he understands. He was here. The Speaker allowed him to sit on my lap when we brought in the UNDRIP legislation, when this House unanimously voted in favour, and that was the first moment he said: “I kind of know what you do now, Dad.” That was a really proud moment for me.

I want to thank my partner because she’s doing it all. She’s carrying everything in the household. She’s essentially raising my son by herself on top of all the work that she does outside of her direct job. My in-laws and my parents and my brother and sister — everybody is involved in helping my family while I’m away. So I want to thank them.

I want to thank the good people of North Delta. I spent the last six months…. I try to go once a month to go door-knocking and talk to people in my community just to get a sense of where they’re at, what issues are top of mind.

I just have to say that I’m so fortunate to live in North Delta. I’m so fortunate to represent such an amazing community.

[3:20 p.m.]

People are very proud of being from North Delta. It’s not like many other communities where it’s a large, large community. People are uniquely, distinctly proud of being from this place. We’re proud of our schools, we’re proud of our rec centres, and we’re proud of all the teachers who do such good work with our young people. So I want to thank those folks.

As I said, I’m going to speak in favour. The Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity raised an important thing, which was raised today. It’s unfortunate comments that were made by the Leader of the Official Opposition when he referred to our commitment to bring in five days of paid leave as people who are just getting something to get out of a tough marriage. That comment hurts. It hurts a lot of people.

When I first got involved in an issue in my community many years ago, it was to help a lot of activists come together to raise awareness around the need for the first-ever shelter to be created in Delta, the first-ever transition home for Delta. Delta, at that point, did not have a single transition home in the entire city, so many women from the community would have to go to places outside of Delta. It was very difficult.

Many activists were involved. I played a very small role in that, but I learned a lot in that process. I learned that there are many things that are involved in that process, and the Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity has been doing a fantastic job. I’m really proud of the work she does. It’s about building more transition homes, which we’ve been doing. It’s about a second-stage home for women who are fleeing domestic violence so there’s somewhere to go where there’s a base. It’s about a lot more services that we need to provide for women who are fleeing domestic violence.

All these things we’re doing. It does make a difference, but it doesn’t solve the problem. At the core of the issue is addressing what I think is my responsibility and my partner thinks is our responsibility. It’s how we raise our kids, particularly how we raise our boys, and ensuring that they are constantly told about the society we live in, where their role is and how to respect women.

A funny story just popped through my brain. We were watching a cartoon with my son. One of the characters said to the other character: “You have to man up.” My son just froze. He looked back at my wife and me and said: “Mom, did you guys hear that?” I said: “What?” He said: “That’s toxic mascininity, or whatever that word is.” We all started howling and laughing. My wife had a little tear coming down her eye because he’s starting to understand his role. He’s only nine years old. My sister starts laughing and says to him: “Where did you learn that?” He goes: “You wouldn’t believe the things these people teach me.”

I only tell the story because these services we’re putting in place are critically important, but there are lots of things that individuals have a responsibility to do which are in their household. I’m grateful for the work that the parliamentary secretary is doing and our government is doing to advance this.

There are so many things. Affordability is one of the things that we’ve been talking about and that people have been sharing with us along the way. I think the single biggest thing that I heard on the doorstep was no more MSP for families throughout this province. It’s massive. It’s the single largest middle-income tax cut in B.C.’s history.

I often talked about, when I first became an MLA and my first throne speech, this couple, two seniors. I knocked on their door, and they wanted to talk to me about their fixed income and how the MSP was just making their lives so difficult. I told them we were going to remove it. They said: “Good.” But they looked at us like: “Are you really going to be able to get rid of it?”

Just about six weeks ago I was able to knock on their door again. They weren’t home. I was choked because I really wanted to go talk to them. Then two weeks ago I got a chance. I knocked on the door. She opened the door, and I said: “This was a commitment we made, and I just wanted to tell you that we came through.” She said: “We were so delighted, so over the moon.” She thanked me for coming.

I know so many people face this. I actually shared a story of a person who walked into my constituency office with my staff. I was in my office, and they were asking: “Where’s the MSP bill? It hasn’t arrived. What are you guys doing?” I shared with them that it’s gone. They couldn’t fully comprehend it.

[3:25 p.m.]

They said: “Well, what do you mean? Is it going to come at the end of the year?” And I’m like: “No, no. It’s gone.” They were so happy. They were like: “We should go let our bank know.” They walked across the street to the CIBC. My staff and I were chuckling about it. But it’s having a real impact on many families across this province and, in particular, for seniors who have a fixed income and already are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.

I think when we talk about affordability, I have to touch on ICBC. ICBC came up a lot in my community, especially from young people. I visit the schools. It’s funny. They’re concerned about tuition, but they’re also looking for their driver’s licence and to be able to get their own car and get their own insurance. There’s no doubt that this is a concern for many parents with young kids who have to travel long distances from North Delta to get to UBC or SFU, and the transit system just maybe doesn’t work for them.

I’ve gotten so much positive feedback on the move that we’ve made to ensure that people have the enhanced care supports they need but, at the same time, will see up to a 20 percent — and, in some cases, higher — reduction in their ICBC rates. It takes a lot of work.

I was speaking with some physiotherapists. I have got a bad knee, and I went to my physiotherapist to have my knee looked at, and he was just talking about how amazing this is going to be for the many people he works with, who he sees. They should be coming twice, maybe three times a week initially, after an injury. But to save money, they’ll come in maybe once a week or once every two weeks. He knows that’s not best for their care, for them to get back to work. He sees this as an opportunity for them to get the care they need so they can get rehabilitated and get back to work. He was very excited about that, and certainly, I am as well.

I have to touch on housing. Housing is certainly one of the biggest issues that most of my colleagues will hear from their constituents. It’s two-part. For those who are renting, it’s a difficult time. When I talk to people who are renting, they say: “Forget about buying a home. How am I going to afford rent? We can’t even afford rent.” And people who have a home, who are older and are worried about their kids…. “Where are my kids going to live? How are they going to be able to afford a home? How are they going to be able to have the things that we had?”

We’ve been taking huge steps to try to address the housing crisis, which is a crisis, that we have. That means people who are living on the street, trying to get 24-hour care so that they can get a shelter over their head, so they can have some stability in their lives, so they can find and get access to the resources they need — whether it’s getting help to get into the workforce or whether it’s mental health support services or whatever it is they need — just to find that stability so they can make that next step. Housing is critical.

People scoff when we say we have an ambitious goal. We’re going to try to build 114,000 units over the next ten years. It’s ambitious. Sometimes you hear: “Oh, it can’t be done.” Well, it has to be. We have to make our effort to get in that direction. I’m confident that we will find a way.

One of the measures we took around that was the vacancy tax. More and more people are seeing it as a benefit for them to just rent out their property so they don’t have to pay the vacancy tax, find someone to rent it. Because there are plenty of people out there that do want to rent. We’ve seen a considerable amount of units come on the market to become available for people to rent so there are more options.

It doesn’t solve the entire housing crisis. It didn’t just happen overnight. It’s been happening for a long time, but it was just never a priority. But our government is making it a priority. It’s going to take time, but we’re starting to chip away at it and starting to address it.

In fact, we see new housing projects opening up everywhere. I have been having many conversations with our mayor and some councillors who are really adamant on finding ways to build affordable housing here in my community, because we need to. They know that, and we know that, and we’re looking at creative solutions and creative ways of making that happen. I really respect that relationship that we’ve been able to build to start to address these key questions.

[3:30 p.m.]

[S. Gibson in the chair.]

One of the pieces that consistently came up was around foreign influence or foreign-funded investments — people tying up our housing market as an investment, as a piggy bank. Now those people that are doing that will have to contribute. They’ll have to contribute to the local markets so we can use those funds to build more housing.

I want to also touch on child care. I know the parliamentary secretary just talked about how much of a game-changer child care is when we talk about gender equity and closing that pay gap and creating more opportunities for, in particular, women to enter the workforce. I have to say to the minister responsible it’s been massive in my community. I was just visiting a child care centre in my community, where I was meeting with parents who are looking for child care opportunities for their children. So I got to go in and speak to them about the opportunities that we’re providing in our government. There were a lot of happy people there.

Welcome to the chair, to our new Speaker. I wish you the best in your new role. I know you’ll be excellent in that role.

Yes, give the new Speaker a round of applause.

I don’t say that so you’ll give me extra time, Mr. Speaker, but I wish you the best in your role.

I was talking about child care and the effects and the impact that’s having in my community. Over $5 million has gone to families in my community. Over $5 million has been invested in North Delta alone. That’s a huge number of families who are seeing the amount they’re paying be lowered. That’s about 45 new spaces that are being created, and there are more coming. Work is happening on more. We’re seeing…. Through the province, we were able to create a fund for UBCM so that every city can have a working group.

We didn’t even have the data. There was never any work done on this. There was no data on what inventory we have in communities.

Now mayors and child care advocates and school boards and other organizations are providing mental health support services. All of them are sitting at one table and talking about how they can work together to address the needs of our community. That was funded through the provincial government.

We’re seeing success with that in Delta. I’ve heard we’ve been seeing success with that across the province. Forty-five new spaces have been created in that community alone. I know many more examples, examples my colleagues have been sharing with me as well.

Every time I see the Minister of Education come to Surrey or to Delta, it’s either to buy a new property or to build a new school or to announce a new seismic upgrade. We love seeing them come. It’s welcome news. We were able to see the last school that needed seismic upgrading in North Delta completed this last year. It was a nice moment, and it’s a credit to the good people at the school district who have been doing excellent planning over time, who had their plans ready to go. So when we were ready to move, they were ready to move with us. I’m really grateful for the work they do.

One of the pieces I want to highlight is the new playgrounds in my community. Two new playgrounds were just opened. One was opened the previous year, 2018, and one was opened just last year.

It’s amazing. When kids are healthy and active, it’s good for our community, it’s good for our schools, it’s good for grades, and it’s good for mental health. I don’t think there’s a person here that wouldn’t want to see our kids more active. The days when I was growing up, where everybody played outside until it got dark, and then one kid got called home, and that meant everybody had to go home — those days are gone. Kids are not playing anymore. The average child now probably leaves their home up to maybe 50 to 100 metres, when we used to travel a couple kilometres, no problem, every day. We’d be playing all day. That’s just not happening.

[3:35 p.m.]

Creating opportunities, creating safe spaces, creating playgrounds, ensuring people in the community feel that it’s safe for their kids to go to these activities, I think, is critically important. I want to give kudos to Delta city council for making a very wise move to ensure that kids under 17 can have free access to our recreation centres. Combined with our facilities that we’re creating, it’s really good news for people in my community. I know that they’re excited about the opportunities for their kids, because they want to keep them active, and they want to keep them out of trouble.

I have to touch on the health care piece. As I was saying, I just recently was at my physio to get my knee checked out because I’m having some troubles. One of the things the physiotherapist said to me was: “I think you need to get your MRI done, because, clearly, there’s something wrong with your knee.” He said: “Don’t worry about it. Just go to the doctor and get a referral. It won’t take long.” He said it used to take a long time, but it doesn’t anymore. He goes: “You’ll get in, in a couple of weeks.”

I had to chuckle about that. When the throne speech mentioned the incredible work we’ve done around MRIs and getting people back and healthy again, I had to highlight the work of the Minister of Health because he’s been doing phenomenal work, completely transforming our health care system, and everybody is involved in that.

I actually really appreciate seeing our Minister of Health work with the critic from the Third Party as well as the critic of the opposition. You don’t see that. People don’t see that very often, but I see it. People here are seeing it. I think it’s incredible for people to see what can be done when everyone works together. Hats off to all of them.

Urgent care centres are obviously popping up everywhere. It was mentioned in the throne speech. I’ve had a personal experience with a loved one who needed to go. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to sit in the hospital room, so we took him to the urgent care centre. He got in pretty quick, got taken care of but then was told: “You have to go to the hospital, because it’s a lot more serious than you think.” Made the call, let them know we were coming, so they were prepared.

It’s a fantastic system. I’m looking forward to that continuing to expand. I certainly hope that one day we’ll see an opportunity in North Delta to have an urgent care clinic. I’m sure he’s chuckling if he is watching, because I’ve been talking about this for a long time.

There’s a whole host of things on health care, but there are a few other things that I want to touch on. One of them is the overdose crisis. Again, I think full credit goes to the many people who are on the front lines, who are dealing with this issue on the front lines. They’ve been doing incredible work under huge distress, huge stress on all of them. I know that the Minister of Mental Health has been working actively on strategies to target communities and find ways to bring the overdose deaths down. I think it’s good news for everyone. I think everyone in this House would agree.

Just recently I was in Prince George, where we had meetings with mayors in the region, and mental health was one of the top pieces we discussed. Everybody was pleased when they saw that numbers in the region have now come down. But nobody wants to take a big pat on the back because these numbers can fluctuate, and even one death is too many. I’m really appreciative of the work of the Minister of Mental Health. It’s ongoing. There’s a lot more work to do.

I want to touch on a little bit around the sustainable economy piece. Just over five months ago, I was asked to do some work on the forestry file. I’ve really enjoyed the file. My mandate letter is pretty clear. It’s to focus on Interior communities and support, in particular, communities that are going through a transition.

It’s been an amazing experience. I’m really glad I got the opportunity to do this. Not easy conversations — going into rooms where people have lost their jobs, where contractors were on the verge of maybe their business going down. But I try not to shy away from it. I try to go into those rooms, to face people face-to-face and have those tough conversations, because I think it’s critically important that they know that we’re listening and that we care.

[3:40 p.m.]

One of the pieces I want to touch on. I wanted to say thank you to the mayors. My tours, obviously, would start in Prince George. I would head up to Mackenzie and Fort St. James and met many, many times with the mayors of 100 Mile House and Quesnel and met the mayor of Clearwater. I’m just amazed at their calm during the chaos. They’ve got clear plans and clear visions on where they want to take their communities. It’s been a pleasure to work with them over the last six months during a very difficult time.

We talk often, and people in the industry talk often, about shifting from high volume to high value, but the first thing that needs to happen in these communities is to find stability. We were able to do that last year by ensuring that contractors would have access to work and that workers who were close to retirement would be able to find a way to retire early so that it would take some pressure off their families. We’ve had, I think, close to 600 people apply for the pension bridging program. That is huge, huge news.

We were able to get, just recently, 24 workers who are now going to be trained on heavy-duty with operating engineers to be able to work on projects in their community. Young women who worked in the forestry sector now are seeing opportunities somewhere else. We’re trying to find ways to give everybody opportunities, because in some cases, there’s work nearby. In some cases, it’s about starting something new.

I’m really proud of the work we were able to do with these communities. It’s not done yet. We have a lot more work to do in this transition. This transition is just starting. There are more things to come. But it’s mentioned in the budget. I won’t go too far into it just because there’s going to be an opportunity to talk more about that soon.

One of the things that just recently came out — it was mentioned in the throne speech — was the food security task force report. It was a very impressive work. I want to thank the members of the task force who put that together. They laid out a very compelling case for how agriculture is changing and how B.C. can be leading in the world when it comes to agritech.

I was just so impressed by the report and the work they did by going out to…. They toured Holland. I was just talking to the consul general yesterday about the report and how many times the Netherlands is mentioned in the report. He was really proud, because we were bragging about the work they’re doing.

There are huge opportunities when it comes to agritech. We have got a lot of companies already that have started here that are creating innovative, game-changing technologies for the agriculture sector. There are opportunities to grow food indoors. The opportunities are limitless. That report was phenomenal. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of those pieces come in play. It’s mentioned in the throne speech because we believe that it’s a vision for bringing tech and agriculture together, and I’m looking forward to seeing more from the minister regarding that.

I think that the throne speech also mentioned some of the infrastructure projects that are underway. I know it mentioned Pattullo Bridge. I was very happy to be at the event the other day where we had all these people who have just finished their training who are going to get a chance to be apprentices on Pattullo Bridge. They were so excited to be able to see all their training put to use on a major infrastructure project close to their home. It sounds like it should be a normal thing, but it hasn’t been a normal thing. These opportunities haven’t been available for workers throughout this province. We have a major labour shortage.

With a community benefits agreement on this project, we’re going to be able to give opportunities to people — local women, Indigenous people and people who have not traditionally had access to these opportunities — to be trained on a project that is phenomenal and is going to be critically important to, certainly, my community. If you did a poll in North Delta, I would say that Alex Fraser Bridge is the most used, but I would say that Pattullo Bridge is the second-most-used bridge for people in my community heading towards New West, heading towards Burnaby and heading towards Coquitlam. I think it’s welcome news.

[3:45 p.m.]

It’s going to be built. Initially, it’s going to have the four lanes, but its capacity is available for six lanes. I know, as population grows and as New West expands their capacity on their end, that will come to fruition. In the meantime, there’s going to be capacity for biking and for people walking.

I really think it’s going to connect these two vitally important communities. Because if anyone has gone over the Pattullo Bridge lately, I’ll tell you, it’s scary. When a truck is beside you, and it comes down and takes up both lanes because it can’t make the turn in the single lane, it’s frightening for most drivers, especially when there’s snow or rain. It comes to a halt. I think the wider lanes are going to be critically important and well received by people in my community.

Of course, Kicking Horse Canyon project. That project is going ahead. Again, great opportunities for trades training, people who are in trades and training and apprenticeship to get to work on that project. People who’ve been laid off from the forest sector now are getting an opportunity to work on that project. Also, Highway 1 expansion — so needed, so needed and critically important. I’m very happy to see that that piece is in it.

I want to touch briefly on CleanBC. It was obviously very prominent in the throne speech. I’m one of those people who bought an electric car. It’s funny, when you buy an electric car, you start noticing electric cars everywhere. The one that you drive is the one that you notice the most. I know the member for Oak Bay–Gordon Head and I both got the same car. We ordered at the same time. Mine arrived way earlier than his, and I know that still bothers him today. But I love it. It’s a game-changer.

With the continued investments that we’re making in building the infrastructure needed, building the charging stations along the highway routes, unlocking the opportunities for companies to recoup some of the costs of creating that infrastructure, I think you’re going to see, especially on the EV side, this becoming a game-changer. I believe I saw just recently that we’re well exceeding all our targets already.

CleanBC is not only about that. It’s also about creating opportunities for industry, a fund available for industry to lower its emissions. It’s the piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, but there is a real opportunity for industry to use this fund to become the cleanest and greenest. The vision of CleanBC is so that our industries can be the cleanest industries in the world, and that gives us a competitive advantage. I know that we’ll be able to use that to market our products all over the world. There is a lot of work happening there and a lot more to do.

Of course, this is a topic that’s been on the top of mind for people, especially in the last 24 hours. It’s around reconciliation. It’s around DRIPA, which we all unanimously passed in this Legislature. I think it’s important to take a moment to pause and think about the progress we’ve been able to make.

Language revitalization. It’s been huge. I was just meeting with some folks that do work around heritage. They do lots of work with the First Nations Cultural Council, I believe it is. They were talking about how this has been the game-changer and how they’re seeing, finally, an opportunity to capture language, to help create a curriculum to teach that language. The university program which we created — the first Indigenous law program in North America, maybe even the world. We’ll be able to use that language to extract laws, to re-create laws for communities. I think that is institutional change.

Not to mention the increase in funding for Aboriginal friendship centres. They play a vitally important role in communities all over the province, not only for First Nations and Indigenous people. In fact, they do offer services to everyone. I’ve had a chance to visit many. I’m amazed at the work they do. So we were able to see increased funding for them and the work they do.

I know the Minister of Health has been doing lots of work around creating culturally appropriate health care and mental health supports, working with First Nations Health Council to enable them to decide for themselves what is the best mechanism to deliver some of these health care needs.

[3:50 p.m.]

Not this “we know better” model but trusting that they know better for the community — and working in partnership and learning from First Nations communities about how we can provide the health care needs to people throughout this province.

I think just earlier today in question period the Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation mentioned that for the first time ever, we’re building housing on reserve. Again, it’s critically important, because everyone deserves to have a roof over their head. We shouldn’t just limit it to people who are within our jurisdiction. We have to find ways for everyone to be supported. This was, I think, a very important step. It doesn’t solve all the challenges, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.

I think one of the pieces that was mentioned in the throne speech, near the end, was that we want to continue to create an inclusive and a safe space for people who come here from all over the world. I’ve been proud of some of the work our government’s been doing — the human rights commission, which is now getting up and running. But before I got onto the forestry file, I did a lot of work travelling this province and listening to people about the challenges they’re facing in communities throughout this province.

In fact, I want to recognize the member for Richmond North Centre today who made a great statement about the coronavirus and the stigma that is faced by many people in the Chinese-Canadian community around that and the amount of racism that’s rising from that and how hard it is for these communities. I sent her a note to thank her for her statement. I want to thank the Minister of Health as well, because he’s been very firm and the ministry has been clear in putting out information to people so that we can limit that stigma. But it’s there.

I’ve had many meetings with the Jewish community, and there have been lots of incidents recently where people continue to be targeted. There is a lot of fear. So we have done a lot of that work. One of the major pieces that we launched was the hub-and-spoke model for anti-racism work. What that model does…. It was highlighted in the throne speech. What it does is it’s got spokes, so communities, community by community, can organize locally and address their needs themselves, because every community has unique things that they want to work on.

Just a few months ago I was with the member for Kootenay East. We were meeting in his community. It was great to see him join us in that. There were about 30 people. We had a very thoughtful and deep discussion about racism and how it’s felt in his community.

One thing I heard, no matter what community I went to was…. I heard two things from people. One: “We’re a good community, but we need to do better.” A second thing I heard consistently was people leaving and saying: “I did not know. I did not know that this was happening in my community.”

Our goal wasn’t to have people come there and retraumatize themselves by sharing their stories. In fact, we made it clear in the beginning that there was no expectation of anyone having to tell us what they faced. There was no expectation. But when people felt safe, they chose to do so. This hub-and-spoke model is a very important step to address that, because especially when there is tension in community, we see racism rise.

Recently we’ve seen lots of issues around the caribou. I got a chance to meet with the Chiefs of Saulteau and West Moberly, and they showed me emails and messages of hate that they received, that their members received. They were telling me that some members of their communities won’t even go shopping in one of the communities because they’re so afraid of all the angst and anxiety that has been created in the community.

The point of me saying that is that it’s not isolated to one community. It’s an issue around the community. It’s an issue all over the province. But we need to have a strategy that addresses it and addresses the unique needs in every community so the communities can figure out what their needs are and how to do it. I’m really grateful that it was highlighted in the throne speech, and that work will continue. Although I don’t have the file, I will continue to speak up on this issue, because I think it’s vitally important.

[3:55 p.m.]

Finally, I’ll just say that it’s been two and a half years, and it’s unbelievable the amount of things we were able to do. Government is about choices. We’ve made choices to address these critically important issues that people have been asking for, for a long time. Although a lot of that work is well along the way, it’s not done yet.

We have a lot more work to do, but as long as you have a government that makes the choices in the best interests of people, we will continue to make progress.

With that, hon. Speaker, I want to thank you for listening and thank the members. I look forward to hearing others.

Deputy Speaker: Recognizing the member for Kamloops–​North Thompson.

P. Milobar: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On behalf of this side of the assembly, I’m happy to be the first to welcome you in your new role. We know with your good temperament and great sense of humour, you will do a wonderful job. Although, with that great sense of humour, we’re all interested to watch how you develop your stern look in the chair over the coming months. Welcome to the chair.

I’m happy to rise in response to the throne speech. It’s a little interesting. Yesterday when we heard the throne speech, I could have sworn I heard this throne speech, or the vast majority of it, last year. Then it struck me last night, as I was formulating my thoughts for today, that part of the reason for that could be that last year the other side, the government, didn’t seem to want to talk about their throne speech. So maybe they wanted a do-over this year to be able to address things in their throne speech. I’m sure the first few speakers we’ve had today — I thank them for their comments — have spoken longer this year than the cumulative total last year before we voted on it.

It’s clear in this throne speech that it was really an interesting mix of point the finger and blame back at previous governments — previous governments that after 16 years in government, I would point out, won the most seats in the election and, actually, the most votes of any party in the election. Yet somehow, we’re being blamed three years later for inaction on this government’s part.

With the throne speech, it’s always been my understanding that it’s supposed to be a forward-looking document that really does spell out clearly and articulate well what the direction of the government for the coming year will be, based on changing things and priorities within any population that happens over time. Instead, what we saw yesterday and what we heard was a compilation of back slapping, of cheers, for two and a half years of working on issues and no real clear direction for anything new or exciting, moving forward into the future. In fact, a lot of this throne speech really does strike the core of credibility. I think credibility, over this last bit of this term for this government, will be key.

What I mean by that is, if I think back over the last three years or so, and I think back to the election of 2017 and the promises that were made by this now government, there seems to be a trail of broken promises and commitment. So that’s where, when you look at these commitments, moving forward in the throne speech, it does give one pause about how much credibility to put in any of the promises, moving forward, most of which are conveniently timed to coincide with right before the next scheduled general election or, actually, in accountability measure, to arrive shortly after the next scheduled general election.

I’d say that on a wide range of fronts, because in the election, it was made very clear — certainly at any of the election forums I was in, any of the joint election forums that myself and the member for Kamloops–South Thompson were in — that everything in the NDP platform was fully costed. All promises were fully costed within the existing B.C. Liberal fiscal framework, a fiscal framework that, at that point, no one realized had an extra $2.7 billion surplus in it. Yet here we are, two and a half years down the road, with a trail of broken promises, a trail of unfulfilled commitments.

[4:00 p.m.]

The $2.7 billion surplus has gone into the ether, and there is $13 billion — with a “b” — of extra spending in taxation through 19 different taxes added to the overall provincial plan. Yet we still see, in spite of all that extra spending, a trail of unfulfilled commitments and broken promises. It’s bad enough that they’re there, but it was doubled down in this year’s throne speech, making it sound as if the fact that they repeat it often enough makes it true.

The simple reality is that the communities we go to, the groups we meet with — the social agencies, the housing providers, the daycares, you name it — to a group, are not happy. They all feel misled, they all feel like they have been sold a bill of goods, and they’re all wondering where the actual programming is coming.

The government made a big deal about affordability in the election, and they continued to make a big deal about affordability in this year’s throne speech. In fact, they did last year as well. Again, it was a throne speech this year devoid of any new ideas whatsoever.

Let’s look at this. Vancouver — second-least affordable housing in the world. Average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver is over $2,000, hardly making life more affordable under the NDP. What was promised in the election — going back to credibility — for renters? Oh, that’s right; it was a $400 renters rebate. That was promised. I haven’t heard talk of that in a great time, yet here we have a throne speech praising the measures that the government is taking for affordability for renters and for homebuyers.

The first speaker, from Esquimalt-Metchosin, was talking at great length about the affordability in her communities. According to the recent numbers, Colwood has seen the average rent go up $3,000 per year, $250 per month, under the NDP. It doesn’t sound like life is getting more affordable for those in Colwood when they go to pay their rent, at $250 a month. But why worry about the details, I guess, when you can just have a throne speech that repeats and regurgitates last year’s talking points and hope that nobody really looks into the numbers?

The interesting point with all of these numbers, too, is that over the years, as various critics have dived into the budget estimates to get verification of these numbers, the ministers actually verify them. Then they immediately turn around, go out in the public and contradict their own answer that’s in Hansard. Or their own agencies, like B.C. Housing, issue reports that time and again point out that they’re nowhere near making their target of the much-vaunted 114,000 new housing units.

When confronted by that report, the answer from any minister that might have any responsibility whatsoever, technically, on paper — because nobody seems to want to take responsibility on that side of the House for anything — is that we’re misreading the report, that they’re on track, that things are fine and don’t worry about it. Well, they’re about a third of the way into a ten-year plan for housing that’s supposed to deliver 114,000 units. The Housing Minister says it takes time to build things. Okay, fair enough, but we only have a couple thousand units built in the first third of that ten-year window.

We have only accounted for — unfunded, planned, not quite yet approved, haven’t broken ground yet — another couple thousand units. That will chew up the other third of that time frame to get those actually built, which leaves us with roughly 100,000 units that need to somehow magically (a) find funding and (b) get built in a three-year time frame if we’re to believe that that commitment is going to be met. Again, the credibility gap just keeps growing and growing.

Lots of talk about the poverty reduction plan. That’s been, in several throne speeches, referenced, talked about. We have a plan. It got enacted a year late. I’m sure that really helped people that were desperately waiting for the poverty reduction plan to actually be in effect, to help them in their daily lives and their affordability issues. It was delayed a whole year. We finally get the plan enacted, yet no money to the plan. Again, that doesn’t help anyone in their household that’s relying on the new, revamped poverty reduction plan to actually bring relief into their household.

We’ll see next week if there are any actual dollars attached to the poverty reduction plan, now going on two, 2½ years later than the public was led to believe during the 2017 election that it would happen.

[4:05 p.m.]

We had lots of talk, still on the housing front, about speeding up approvals for housing permits. Go back to the 2017, 2018, 2019, throne speeches. Guess what the government is talking about doing: speeding up approvals for housing permits. I guess one of these days we’ll actually see some action on something within the throne speech. But certainly, that’s not there.

Time and time again in the throne speech, a 21-page throne speech…. I know a great many in here used to teach at universities in previous lives and could be on leave teaching from universities. At 21 pages…. It’s generous calling it a 21-page throne speech given that it’s generously at least double spaced and an interesting size of font. I know I used to try to do the same things to make sure I hit the page count I needed. I don’t know what the word count would be in the throne speech. But given that it doesn’t have much detail, I’m not surprised.

Home prices are going back up. There was a very modest decline very shortly. Prices still aren’t affordable for most. We have contradictory language in the throne speech about adjusting supply and demand. Well, the only way you change demand is if you’re hoping less people move to the province or actually move out of the province. I know the NDP are good at making sure people move out of the province, like in the ’90s, but one would hope that’s not how we’re going to solve the demand side of that equation, having less people actually looking for housing.

On the supply side, there has been precious little done, because we’re still waiting for that speedup of approvals for housing permits. Housing starts are down 40 percent in B.C. already this year. There are only 2,400 new affordable housing units versus the promised 114,000. So again, nothing to increase housing supply. In fact, all we’re seeing is increased taxes and permits and fees, a great many of those provincial, to the bottom line of homebuilders, making them question whether or not to move forward with their projects.

Another great promise in the election campaign still nowhere near delivered upon and still nowhere near funded properly, despite $13 billion of extra spending and taxation and a $3 billion surplus chewed up, is $10-a-day child care. Don’t really hear it called that anymore I’ve noticed. Kind of like the $400 renters rebate. Don’t really hear that talked about. Don’t hear $10-a-day child care. It’s nowhere to be seen.

It’s been nothing but a shell game of daycare spaces. There was always natural growth within the daycare sector in terms of new daycares coming on stream. Some succeed, and some fail. But there was, generally speaking, a net new year-over-year before this government came in. Based on the government’s own numbers, they promised 24,000 by this time. We’re at a little over 2,000. The money has been spent, 22,000 units short of child care spaces by this government’s own documents based on this government’s own promises and own commitments. Again, these are the government’s words, not ours.

ICBC rates. They’re going up and up and up. It’s interesting. This is a government that said they weren’t going to meddle with the Utilities Commission. When their, once again, promised rate freeze for B.C. Hydro turned into a rate increase through the Utilities Commission, the minister at the time said: “Well, they’re independent. We’re not going to dictate to them. That’s why we had to break that promise about a rate freeze for B.C. Hydro, because the BCUC said we have to raise rates.” Now with ICBC a year later, we’re being led to believe that they’re actually going to direct BCUC and freeze ICBC rates.

I don’t know if that’s the politics of picking and choosing when to direct the Utilities Commission or not. I don’t know if it’s the strength of the minister advocating for the freeze or not within the cabinet room that carries the mail or not. But all I know is it amounts to another broken promise.

[4:10 p.m.]

It makes one, again on the credibility side with ICBC, question the timing and the political convenience of this so-called rate freeze, coming forward.

On the one hand, we’re going to keep jacking up the rates — for the last two-plus years at ICBC — and then we’re going to tell everyone: “Oh, don’t worry. We’re going to freeze them at those new jacked-up rates.” It reminds me of the infomercials where you, too, can get a second one, as long as you pay the shipping and handling. You notice they never tell you what the shipping and handling is on those TV ads?

You, too, will get your rates frozen at the new higher level. After two years of paying the new highest levels possible at ICBC, the Attorney General is going to ride in on his white steed and give you a 20 percent cut, magically, right before the next provincial election, and we’re not supposed to be a little cynical of that. Then we’re told there’s supposed to be a 20 percent cut, which equals $400. Almost like the renters rebate — $400.

Simple math would say that when it’s only on the base rates — it’s what we’ve heard from the minister — and most average base rates are around $1,000…. I know I just renewed my 2015 Accord, which has pretty standard insurance. In fact, it has “for business use.” So it’s probably got higher insurance rates than most because I drive it more than six days a month to be able to do this job.

It’s $1,000 for basic. You know how I know that? Because I actually have private optional insurance. A 20 percent saving is not $400 on $1,000. So if it’s only a 20 percent saving on your base…. I don’t know who’s paying $2,000-plus for base insurance in B.C., but it’s certainly not the majority. That means the numbers are questionable, at best, heading into an election.

But wait. There’s more. Not only in an election year can your rates magically be cut by 20 percent after being jacked up over the last three years; they’re going to give you bigger and better benefits than you can ever imagine and dream of. But not until the election year. You don’t get better benefits right now. No, no. ICBC claims adjusters are still going to grind people as hard as they possibly can to make sure you have to go out and hire a lawyer — up until sometime into the future. Then they’re just going to flip the switch and be a kinder, gentler ICBC that gives you everything in your wildest dreams, while they’re giving you a lower rate at the same time.

Credibility counts. When you actually put an objective eye to the claims coming from this government, it’s very easy to question the promises that have been promised.

Let’s look at education in the throne speech. Let’s just look at this one tiny burg out there in British Columbia called Surrey — Surrey, where their hospitals alone have the equivalent of two good-sized elementary schools’ worth of kids born every year. Six hundred kids are born in Surrey every year.

They’d need to be adding two elementary schools every year right now, by the time you start planning to completion, just to meet up with the birth rate in Surrey. But what was the promise? What was the promise by this government and continuing on through this throne speech and other throne speeches? Why, the Education Minister and the Premier have made it very clear that in four years, there’ll be no more portables in Surrey. Wiped out. Eradicated. You will not see another portable in Surrey.

At the start of this school year, there were 631 portables in the Surrey school district. That’s a 32 percent increase over 2016 and 2017. But again, in 2017, the Premier promised to eliminate portables in Surrey in four years. After 30 months, all we’ve seen is an increase, and that’s scheduled to keep getting bigger.

Promises are very easy to come by with this government. There’s no shortage of them. If you look at infrastructure projects…. George Massey, out of spite, gets cancelled. It would be halfway to three-quarters of the way built already, the replacement bridge, which would have actually handled extra capacity.

[4:15 p.m.]

Instead, what do we have? We have a proposed tunnel that I don’t think anyone believes is actually going to truly get approved through the environmental assessment process, through Indigenous consultation — although who knows? It’s going underneath one of the major salmon-bearing rivers in the world, and we’re supposed to believe that eight lanes of concrete tunnel are going to get approved by DFO, by First Nations, by all involved.

Under the new Bill 41 UNDRIP legislation, how far upstream do First Nations have a tangible say? Both myself and the member for Kamloops–South Thompson represent the end point of the Thompson River, the end point of those salmon runs. Do the First Nations in our communities have equal standing and equal say on whether or not this tunnel should be built instead of a non-invasive bridge on the river? Do the two members from Prince George get to have a say? Do their First Nations get to have a say, with the critical salmon runs that go up the Fraser feeding off of where this tunnel is going to be? Zero clarity from the government on that point, but we’re supposed to believe that a promise will be kept all of a sudden.

The Massey Tunnel was scrapped so that the Pattullo Bridge could be built. Plain and simple. The Pattullo Bridge replacement is going to replace a four-lane bridge with a four-lane bridge. Talk about looking into the future. If that doesn’t summarize the lack of foresight in this throne speech, I don’t know what does. No extra capacity to replace an 83-year-old bridge. I guess the government hasn’t got the memo that there’s been a little bit of population growth over the last 83 years down in the Lower Mainland, and there’s scheduled to be quite significantly more growth over the next 20, let alone 83, years. But why plan for the future? Let’s just have a throne speech about nothing.

Now, there’s a gentleman, a former colleague, a former editor in Kamloops, who’s currently an electoral area director and writes for the media quite a bit. He and I haven’t always seen eye to eye. We’re collegial. We get along. We can have a good, robust debate. I tend to not agree with most of his editorials. He wrote an editorial about the throne speech. Mel Rothenburger wrote an editorial about the throne speech that I read today, and I’m going to quote him, because I like the one little quote. I think it sums up the throne speech very well, especially from our part of the province. He said: “To borrow from a trend in meat-like products these days, it was a beyond-nothing burger.” That’s what his assessment of the throne speech was.

Let’s move on to forestry. Forestry, a sector in crisis that all the government can do is look backwards and point and blame — point and blame a government who, at the time, was making adjustments for beetle wood, was making adjustments to keep mills operating as best the timber supply would allow — and did precious little in the three years that they’ve been in government to adjust and get ready for today. Yet somehow it’s the fault of the government when the mills were still, essentially, fully operational.

There’s always going to be the occasional mill adjustment. There’s always going to be the occasional curtailment. There’s always going to be the occasional closure. But let’s remember the promise by this Premier during the election: that no mill under his watch would close, that there would never be a problem in forestry again if you would only elect the NDP and their utopic state of how they were going to deal with forestry.

Well, instead, we’ve had more than 100 mill curtailments. We’ve had ten permanent and indefinite shutdowns in 2019 alone. That doesn’t sound like much of a success rate for a Premier that promised forest communities that they would not see harm if he was Premier.

The minister says it’s not a crisis. The parliamentary secretary says there are too many mills. Well, they’re working really hard to make sure there aren’t too many mills anymore. And what was the response in the Interior? Cancel the rural dividend fund and then talk about trying to help communities to plot a new course forward. Well, here’s a news flash to the rural dividend fund, to the government. It’s not a slush fund, as they like to be told. These communities were using the rural dividend fund for years to already start a path forward to diversify their economies. That was taken away. So we’ll see whether or not in the budget there’s going to be any substantial money left in there.

[4:20 p.m.]

What does the Premier say when the communities rise up about the rural dividend fund? He says the mayors and councils, duly elected in those communities, are acting like spoiled children. When the member for Fraser-Nicola, back last spring, raised forestry concerns in this House, the Premier said: “Quit whining.”

That’s the response from a Premier to an elected member of this House bringing forward concerns from a forest-affected community — that her and others in her community should just quit whining. Given that the Labour Minister and the Premier were willing to sit on their hands for eight months and let communities struggle, I’m not surprised that they feel people were just whining.

I think everyone knows that after four weeks or so, three weeks on strike, any gains you’re going to gain at the bargaining table, you’ve lost. So let’s say it’s not four weeks. Let’s say it’s eight weeks. That strike lasted for eight months on the Island — eight months of silence from the government.

Back in April, May, when the forestry crisis in the Interior started, we proposed a five-point plan. It would have provided tax relief, assistance and other things. The NDP ignored it. They brushed it off. People always say: “Well, what’s your solution? Bring forward a solution as opposition.” We did. It was ignored, conveniently ignored for a few months so the government could spin those five things into their own and let communities languish for several months before any action was even remotely taken.

We told the government to go and talk to the federal government before the election window closed in on them federally. Did they? They waited till two days before the writ was going to be dropped federally to go and talk about EI assistance and help for communities and members in those communities, instead of three months earlier. That’s the response we’re getting from this government on their broken promises. Again, a promise from the Premier that the forest sector would not see mills close.

Running around and spouting off a line saying “value over volume” sounds well and good. It doesn’t pay the contractor’s mortgage. It doesn’t pay the mortgage of the millworker that got laid off.

When I look at the prioritization within this throne speech and you cut through the rhetoric of it and you cut through the foot-dragging of it and you cut through all of the back-slapping of each other from the other side about nonexistent programming, it’s very telling where their priorities lie for the future.

A 21-page document. A building surrounded by people protesting issues that do relate to UNDRIP. I’m sure that must have got moved because suddenly it was on page 15 of a 21-page document, any talk about reconciliation whatsoever. Is there anyone in this building that doesn’t think that if those protests weren’t happening that the government wouldn’t have that on page 2? Instead, we’ll just tuck it away on page 15 with a little cut and paste.

Any climate action, page 17. If teenagers are on the front lawn, it’s the government’s biggest priority. If teenagers aren’t on the front lawn, it’s on page 17.

Forestry — hammering the Island, hammering the Interior. Page 19, with barely a mention and nothing but hollow words. That’s what we have in this throne speech.

We have backslapping like crazy about MSP. What the government fails to actually want to acknowledge is that MSP was replaced by a tax that didn’t just collect the equivalent of the MSP, it’s collecting substantially more than the MSP.

Interjection.

P. Milobar: It’s interesting. The ministers that are doing House duty right now continue to tell me I’m wrong. Perhaps they should read their own budget documents and look at their own budget forecasting.

The last one I’ll leave everyone with is the three- to five-year change in the capital plan. As someone who came from local government after 15 years of dealing with five-year capital plans, that is nothing but a shell game of hanging out false hope to communities that they’re going to get a project five years instead of three years from now.

The planning window for major capital projects starts to get too long. Other priorities start to pop in. Slides or things like that start to happen with infrastructure. In our part of the world, they’re taking credit for a highway project they’ve delayed two years that was well on its way in the Kicking Horse. Highway 5 corridor of Kamloops to Jasper has seen no money for the last two years and none on the horizon. That’s their idea of infrastructure planning.

[4:25 p.m.]

I would really hope that moving forward, the ministers get a good handle not on their own budgets but on the whole budget of the province and understand the broken promises. Maybe then they’ll get a glimpse into why people are getting more and more frustrated about feeling like they’ve been misled by a government that says one thing but, in reality, is actually doing the exact opposite — not delivering anywhere near what they have promised.

That is why we have a throne speech that is totally void of most things except for ticket bots and cell phone prices, which were promised, oh, by the way, last year as well, with zero action taken in that year as well.

It’s time to stop trotting out the little populist things and actually get down to the business of governing and actually deliver what they had promised to people and the budget framework they had promised instead of a bloated $13 billion extra spent with zero deliverable to show for at the end of the day.

Deputy Speaker: Recognizing the Leader of the Third Party.

A. Olsen: Thank you, Mr. Assistant Deputy Speaker, and congratulations. You’re looking very good in that seat down there.

Thank you for this opportunity to stand and respond to the Speech from the Throne. Frankly, I found the speech to be underwhelming, though perhaps the content was simply overwhelmed by the inexplicable events that unfolded around the Legislature yesterday.

At a very high level, I appreciate the government’s deci­sion to review the work we have accomplished together in this minority government. Over the past three years, this government has had some wonderful achievements. Many of them have been rightly outlined in this Speech from the Throne.

One feat that is often overlooked is the survival of a minority government that many pundits were betting would face an early demise. We have proven that where there is a commitment to working through even the most intractable issues, when there is a commitment to building a foundation on good governance and when elected strive to create strong public policy, minority governments can and will be stable.

The B.C. Green caucus is proud to advance world-renowned climate economic policies for our province. We’re proud to have worked with the province and the government to increase accessibility to child care options, develop a comprehensive housing program and be the first jurisdiction anywhere to enact the declaration on the right of Indigenous peoples.

We know those policies would not be as strong, not as effective and not as evidence-based, or maybe not even happen at all, if it were not for the B.C. Greens’ presence here in the Legislature. Each one includes hard-fought negotiations that made them better. Each one represents long days, evenings and weekends from our dedicated legislative staff, a heroic team of six — Claire, Sarah, Evan, Macon, Kaylea and Judy — determined to match the entire public service with their expertise and professionalism. We are a small team with few MLAs, and we are determined to not give up. We are not quitters. We have much to be proud of.

Yet as I stand today to respond to the Speech from the Throne, my heart is heavy. On the front steps of this building over the last week, a fire was burning. I could smell the smoke in my office and hear the chanting through my window. As an Indigenous person working in this building, I’m reminded over and over of all of that Indigenous peoples have endured since this building was constructed to assert its dominance over this newly colonized land. I’m reminded of all that we continue to go through as colonization shifts and is reinvented.

The theme of the government’s Speech from the Throne this year is what we have done. What we have done — that is something that I wrestle with every day. Working in a minority government gives me a unique vantage point on what this government has done. I see the good, and I am grateful for our role. But I also see the challenging, the devastating and the enduring.

Progress is not a straight line. Often it is only through the rearview mirror that we appreciate how far we have come. The day-to-day building blocks of progress may not be enough on their own. But with persistence, they can create something monumental.

[4:30 p.m.]

It’s why I can stand here today and can rightly celebrate building one of the world’s strongest climate economic policies and oppose each attempt to use it to greenwash the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

It’s why I worked so hard to see the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act passed into law, even as I fundamentally and wholeheartedly disagree with some of the decisions the B.C. NDP have made that made its passage so critical in the first place. Nothing is gained by empty posturing.

We were elected to govern our province on behalf of all British Columbians. The B.C. Greens reject the idea that threatening the stability of government is a way to create progress. Although people have come to expect otherwise, most British Columbians want their representatives to work together. We can hold different perspectives while still trying to collaborate. It is a balancing act we navigate every day, because the B.C. Green caucus has a very different vision of where we should be going as a province.

We disagree with the NDP’s approach to double down on the expansion of the export-driven fossil fuel sector as the primary driver of our economy. In contrast, the priority focus for the future prosperity of British Columbia in the B.C. Green caucus plan is on innovation and the use of technology across all of our sectors and industries.

We believe that CleanBC can and should be an economic driver that establishes B.C. as a model for the world of how a low-carbon economy can operate, not something that is used to help entrench and even expand the fossil fuel sector in our province. This is a fundamental disagreement that we continue to have with the B.C. NDP government. I’m going to expand on more of these areas when we look at the budget next week and throughout this session.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, the throne speech was overwhelmed by the dramatic events that played out yesterday in the legislative precinct. So today I need to address what we’ve been seeing out in the Wet’suwet’en territory, in communities across our province and right here in the capital.

[R. Chouhan in the chair.]

It is important that people understand that what we see across Canada and on the steps of our Legislature was neither inevitable nor unavoidable. Every member in this chamber, with the exception of the B.C. Greens and our independent colleague, voted to ignite the tragic situation that we face. They voted for it over and over and over and over and over again — 14 times.

Every time the B.C. Greens triggered a vote during the debate of Bill 10, the Income Tax Amendment Act, last spring, a bill which detailed the lucrative financial handout government was offering LNG Canada in exchange for a positive final investment decision, they voted for it.

The B.C. Green caucus carried hours of debate on our own, arguing against massively expanding the fossil fuel industry in the midst of a climate crisis; arguing against approving and endorsing the biggest point source of pollution in our province; arguing against subsidizing foreign multinational corporations — some state owned, like PetroChina — with a corporate welfare package worth billions of taxpayer dollars, British Columbians’ money; arguing against proceeding with a megaproject that was already having Indigenous people taken off their lands. But 83 members of this House voted to proceed.

I will not let them rewrite history to pretend that they are anything but responsible for the painful situation we are seeing playing out right now in our landscape, leveraging Indigenous people against each other, just as we’re all too familiar. With those votes, our colleagues in the B.C. NDP and B.C. Liberals chose to barrel ahead, knowing full well that there were existing long-standing and unresolved matters relating to rights and title in the area. They knew full well of the matters that needed to be reconciled at every point since 1997 through good-faith, government-to-government negotiations.

Honestly, what did you all expect? Did you really think that after decades of fighting for recognition, the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs would just step aside and let you do whatever they wanted in the territory? As lawyer Gavin Smith recently wrote:

“…the Wet’suwet’en are a classic example of how the Crown and the Canadian legal system have overseen a long-term and continuing failure to give effect to the promised recognition of Aboriginal title and Indigenous law.

[4:35 p.m.]

“After millions of dollars spent on some 13 years in court, including 318 days of presenting evidence at trial, the Wet’suwet’en together with the Gitxsan won a landmark…victory in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1997 Delgamuukw decision. The court ordered another trial due to the trial judge’s improper rejection of important Indigenous evidence but explicitly encouraged good-faith negotiation rather than further litigation.

“More than two decades later it is undeniable that the provincial and federal governments have not done enough to advance such negotiations…. The Crown, in fact, continued to make legal arguments to minimize and weaken the meaning of Aboriginal title, such as the arguments that were rejected in the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2014 decision in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia.

“It is manifestly unfair to expect the Wet’suwet’en, and Indigenous nations across the land, to continue assembling overwhelming financial, organizational and emotional resources needed for marathon litigation before their laws and jurisdiction will be taken seriously as required by the Canadian constitution.”

Great efforts are needed to address and reconcile Aboriginal rights and title with assertion of Crown sovereignty. The fact that there is such significant conflict over a resource project that the B.C. Liberals and B.C. NDP made clear they wanted to go ahead at all costs raises significant questions for me about the extent to which they have been meaningfully attempting to achieve reconciliation at all. Every vote to prematurely proceed with this project backed the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs into a corner.

I recognize there are now Supreme Court injunctions and agree that that is not a trivial matter, but it is even just a slice of the bigger problem — a bigger picture that the judge acknowledged in the decision that some members of this place hang their hat on. The court was not positioned to make a ruling on the underlying root cause of the conflict, which is the failure to find a resolution about foundational rights and title and who needs to be making decisions about the land in the first place.

We cannot make our recognition of Indigenous self-determination and jurisdiction contingent on whether they support our project proposals or not. That is exactly what is happening with the two major pipelines currently trying to cut across our province.

In the Wet’suwet’en case, the band council support for the pipeline is cited by politicians and proponents as justification for why the project should be permitted through their territory no matter what the Hereditary Chiefs say. But in Coldwater’s case, where the band council is opposed to the Trans Mountain pipeline running through their drinking water aquifer, they are dismissed and bulldozed. Apparently, there, the opinion of the band council doesn’t mean a thing. But the Crown can’t have it both ways. These narratives are blatantly inconsistent. It doesn’t seem to matter to this House, because forever, forever in this country, the burden — the bucket of water — has been carried by Indigenous people.

When the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs called me last month, I answered. When they invited me to their territory, I went. I went because I wanted to learn about their sophisticated governance structure, a system that stretches back thousands of years. I went because as an active member of this Legislature, I believe it is my duty to understand where people are coming from in these challenging situations. That approach to leadership is also why I met with the RCMP when I was in Smithers and why I flew to Prince George the very next week to attend the Natural Resources Forum.

We may be more familiar with the band council system, which was put in place by the Indian Act to govern Indians on Indian reserves, but that system does not govern all or even most Indigenous people in British Columbia. It certainly has not extinguished everything that came before it. These situations are complex and intertwined with historic and ongoing colonialism. Members of this House have the responsibility to understand that and the impacts of it.

[4:40 p.m.]

Before the 1950s, it was illegal for Indigenous people to hire a lawyer to defend their rights. Now 70 years later, with many cases on the books, including a Supreme Court victory that stole more than a decade of my own father’s life, it appears Indigenous people are not much further ahead than when it was illegal to have representation in the courts. The members of the Crown continue to twist language, erode understanding and manipulate the outcomes or just sign interim agreements and leave Indigenous leaders, elected and hereditary, in an awful bureaucratic purgatory.

Let’s not deceive ourselves. Statements conjuring rule of law serve a very specific purpose. The unwillingness to publicly clarify the role of elected Indian Act band councils and traditional leadership under Indigenous law serves a very specific purpose. We must be honest about who wrote the laws, who they wrote them for and how we improve them going forward.

I ask: where is the militarized RCMP or police response to all of the women who have been raped and murdered? The missing and the murdered Indigenous women inquiry said the violence inflicted on Indigenous women is genocide. Where is their army? Ignoring these realities has not made the problems go away. Instead, it created the pressure cooker of frustration that we saw ignite on the front steps of this very institution.

We cannot use a narrow interpretation of the rule of law to shield us from the hard work of fair and just governing. We know full well that courts in our country have been recognizing Indigenous law as legitimate for decades.

Last weekend I decided to come down here and spend some time with the young people on these steps, our relatives from territories all across this place we now know as British Columbia. It was a sombre time for me. I carried with me the sweet, smoky scent of their fire for hours, a gentle reminder of the sacrifices our families have made, a reminder of the ongoing, decades-old peaceful posture our relatives have taken to point out the dishonour that continues to flow from the decisions of this institution.

While I was here, I was asked to speak to our relatives. I was very clear that I’m deeply troubled by the actions of the provincial government. Members of this House cannot wrap themselves in the glory of being the first jurisdiction to pass legislation formally enacting the declaration of the rights of Indigenous people into law and then seek to leave the work of reconciling governance simply to Indigenous communities and Indigenous people.

Yesterday we saw the frustration and angst of people and our young people in our society who have lost confidence in the government to make decisions that reflect the choices they would make for their future. It is important that we all reflect on what our right to peaceful assembly actually is. We must reflect on how my colleagues and I were treated yesterday. I have great difficulty characterizing much of what I experienced and what is captured on the front page of today’s Times Colonist as peaceful.

I’ve heard the reports of the experiences of others as well, and it’s important to name it. Something is not necessarily non-violent just because we scream it is so. Part of what was missing yesterday was the guidance of the Elders, who taught me that you can use power to build support or you can use it to tear it down. What we need at this time is not tearing people apart but, rather, a force capable of bringing people together.

I need everyone who surrounded this building yesterday, I need all British Columbians to know that I take this job very seriously. It is my job, our job, to show up. It’s our job to listen with a compassionate ear and love in our hearts. I must bring what I learned into this chamber and use it to change laws and effect change. That cannot be done from the front steps. It must be done in this chamber.

That is why for the next four months of this session of government, indeed, all members of this chamber will have the spotlight on us. Ministers will be asked difficult questions, and backbenchers will be challenged to do more.

Our role has been characterized as being the balance of power. It’s a characterization that I have always had great discomfort with. Some have warned it is a badge of authority. It’s been entrenched by shallow threats. I do not view our role as a few who hold a balance of power. Rather, I proudly hold my balance of responsibility. What is the balance that my colleagues hold?

[4:45 p.m.]

It is in this context that I reflect on how we use the democratic tools that we have at our disposal to change laws and create better outcomes. Does CleanBC reduce emissions enough to make up for the fact that government is now using it to justify the expansion of the fossil fuel industry? Does the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act establish a strong enough foundation for a more respectful, more functional relationship with Indigenous people despite their most recent inexplicable failure? Some days it’s hard to say. But we continue in this chamber because our allegiance is not necessarily to government but to the issues that we have clearly articulated in the CASA.

My choice to stay here should be seen as a steadfast expression of the accountability we share in the decisions that we make in this House. It is our duty, our opportunity, our burden. It is what the people of British Columbia have elected us to do.

What we saw here yesterday were British Columbians — young and old, Indigenous and non-Indigenous — expressing a staggering lack of confidence in this institution. They were lashing out at all of us. Every one of us received the same treatment coming through those doors. It did not matter where your seat was in this place. The anger, the frustration, the angst that was hurled at us must serve as a wake-up call.

Whether you have a “Hug a pipeline” sticker on your bumper or not, we’ve seen the image from around the world of what happens when people lose confidence in their government. From day one, there have been calls from people for the B.C. Green caucus to pull government down, to punish them for one wrongdoing or another.

Yesterday, as I was coming to work to do this job, to even excoriate this government for their lack of attention to some of the details or their unwillingness to help British Columbians see the whole picture of Indigenous relations in this country, people were screaming “shame” at me.

Well, the members elected to this Legislature are largely of a certain generation or two. It is important that we understand that generations following us are of the most aware of the impacts of climate change, they are the most compassionate generation to Indigenous rights issues, and they are possibly the least patient generation ever in this country when it comes to violations against their future and injustices to Indigenous people.

We have been educating them to have a different understanding. While this House continues to make the same old decisions to subsidize dinosaurs, the next generation are rightly angry that the members of this House are literally lighting fire to their future. We should be thankful that they bring this awareness and compassion. We should be not surprised when they react strongly when their elected representatives are selling them out.

Also, we are kidding ourselves if we do not see that they are supported by our peers, people of our generations.

Two and a half years ago I came into this chamber wrapped in a blanket, with TEMEȽ on my face, to the beat of drums of my W̱SÁNEĆ family. It is that powerful expression of love that my family showed for me, even after what generations of decision-makers in this very chamber did to them, that I must now show a compassion and love for this institution. Because tearing this place down, destabilizing it, making it more fragile, in light of what I witnessed yesterday, is the opposite of what we as a society need. Maybe that’s the paradox that was created here yesterday.

I carry no shame because I believe I stand on the correct side of history. A year ago every member of this chamber had an opportunity to vote whether LNG Canada and the Coastal GasLink pipeline should proceed. My B.C. Green colleagues and I voted no and used every democratic tool at our disposal to change the outcome we now see. But every NDP and every Liberal MLA voted yes 14 times over despite being well aware of the realities of climate change and long-standing rights and title challenges in the region.

Instead of shame, I carry a determination to continue to build on the hard-fought progress we have made in the name of good governance.

As the budget rolls out next week, the B.C. Green caucus will be highlighting the specific opportunities we need to be leaning in to build a strong future for our province.

[4:50 p.m.]

To all those that have been disenfranchised from a political system, I’m speaking to you. There is another way, and it is more, so much more, than just a recast of the status quo or a remake of a 1950s tragedy about the British Columbia dream.

I want to end with this. Reconciliation is not dead. I will not allow the important work of finally convincing a Crown government to enact the declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples to evaporate over a Christmas break and a ridiculous climate change–inducing expansion of the fossil fuel infrastructure that has no viable market without substantial corporate welfare gifts of taxpayers.

Instead, I will take my place in this chamber and demand that the Premier and ministers of this cabinet explain how they are expediting the action plan for reconciliation. I will be clear that this is not a one-term or a one-session project for me. Indeed, this is my entire existence. It is not about creating binary options and demanding clarity on where we stand — this side or that side. We cannot and we should not extract ourselves from the incredible complexity that makes up who we are, where we were born and what we were born into.

Reconciliation is not dead, because when it dies, our dignity dies with it. I believe that we all will fight to keep reconciliation alive so that we can be good ancestors and leave for our children a dramatically different world than the one that we inherited. As a person elected to this House to represent W̱SÁNEĆ, Saanich North and the Islands, my business must be done in this House.

We each have our job and our role to play. For each day that I am the representative of that great and beautiful territory, I’ll be working to improve the outcomes in this place.

HÍSW̱ḴE SIÁM.

Deputy Speaker: Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and…. Carry on.

Hon. M. Mungall: It’s a new job title for myself, and it’s also a new title here within our government. I’m very proud to have been given the responsibility for Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness in our economy here in British Columbia.

Before I get started on my comments, I first want to just thank my constituents for giving me the responsibility to be here on their behalf. It’s a responsibility that I take very seriously. Hearing their voices and bringing their voices to this place when we are in session is the fundamental aspect of the job that I do on their behalf and the job that we all do on behalf of our constituents.

Coming here is something that we need to take very seriously, making sure that we take our place in the debates, making sure that we are here to speak amongst ourselves and to make sure that our constituents’ voices are heard, not only here on the chamber floor, but throughout the operations of government on a day-to-day basis. It’s something that we all do and something I take very seriously and am very proud to do on behalf of my constituents.

Before I move into speaking on a variety of issues that were in the throne speech, a throne speech that I’m very proud of…. It highlights the work that this government has done and the work that it plans to do over the upcoming session. One of the items that we put on the floor yesterday in the Speech from the Throne that I am particularly proud of…. It is something that we have been working on inside government and were able to put forward in the Speech from the Throne and are going to be delivering on this session.

I am very proud of this as a feminist, as a person in our society — to be offering paid leave for sexual and domestic violence. It’s something that I think is very serious. It is the right direction to go.

You can probably imagine my level of dismay when I heard the disturbing comments from the Leader of the Opposition, in a dismissive tone on the radio, calling it just “paid leave for a tough marriage” — just blowing it off. I couldn’t believe how he just could say that, how he didn’t get it.

[4:55 p.m.]

For him and for…. I can’t imagine anybody else. But I want to speak to why this is so incredibly important to me. As a little girl, I would hear stories from my grandmothers, who spent almost all of their lives in rural Canada. Up in those communities, during the time that they were young women, in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, and the 1920s as well — this is 100 years ago — domestic violence and sexual violence were the norm in their communities for women.

There were no services like transition homes that we have now and that this government has actually increased funding to. There were no transition homes. There were no supports. The police were far, far away. Hospitals were far, far away. Some of the basic services that we are so fortunate to have in our society just did not exist for women in those rural communities. On top of that, it was normalized. People would characterize those relationships, where violence was almost daily, as just tough marriages.

My grandmothers would tell me these stories because they often found themselves in positions of helping women in their communities get away from some of that violence. They instilled in me the importance of not taking abuse in my own relationships, because it wasn’t about just enduring a tough marriage. It was about the right to safety that I had. I had that right to safety in my own home every single day of my life. They wanted to make sure that the experience that existed so regularly in their community was not going to be the experience that their granddaughter and my children would have.

When I hear, in 2020, somebody characterizing domestic violence as just a tough marriage, even if it was a slip of the tongue and it was accidental…. How could that even be an accidental thing to say? It’s not acceptable. It’s not tolerable. We have to understand in our core that there’s no place for violence anywhere. It certainly doesn’t have a place in a home, and if it does, it’s not a tough marriage. It’s abuse. The family members who are suffering that abuse — men, women or children — don’t have to take it. They have a right to that safety.

I’m very proud to be part of a government who gets that, who gets how important it is to support people leaving violent relationships or who have suffered, who have survived, sexual violence, and that getting time off from work and making sure that they don’t lose pay is an important step to supporting people in their recovery from that violence.

The sad thing is that in other jurisdictions that have this type of benefit for people, very few people actually take it up. They don’t want to go to their employer to disclose what’s going on in their private life. They don’t want to go to their employer to share the fact that they have been raped, that they have been assaulted, that they have been beaten up by their spouse or by somebody else, because of the stigma that still exists in our society.

[5:00 p.m.]

It’s words coming from a politician like “tough marriage” that perpetuate that stigma. I truly hope that the Leader of the Opposition does more than just say, “I used the wrong words,” but actually apologizes and understands the depth of his dismissive comments and how hurtful they are to survivors of violence, how hurtful they are to women who have to think about their safety in a way so much different than many men.

I wanted to get up and say that because in Nelson, in the Kootenays, in Creston and Kaslo and Salmo and all throughout my riding, we have a very strong tradition of standing up for women’s rights. I know that my constituents would want me to get up today and speak to what was said. We have the oldest rural women’s centre in Canada, in Nelson. We have the oldest women’s centre in British Columbia, in Nelson, and it is going strong.

We take pride in taking care of each other and being a caring community and being there for people when they need us. And we speak up for equality and social justice. I felt the need to make sure that these comments were on the record. I know that my constituents would want to say: “It’s not about tough marriage. It’s about the right to safety.”

I’d like to move on to some other aspects of the throne speech that are a real shining light for British Columbia, I think. One of them is our leadership on climate action, and that’s CleanBC. People on the government side, as well as the Third Party, have worked very, very hard to put forward a world-leading climate action plan with legislated targets. We have public accountability built into our plan, so it’s not just something nice on paper that politicians get to talk about. It’s something that’s living, breathing, real and that we can go back to, and the public can hold us accountable on it annually.

One of the things that we need to note, in terms of British Columbia reducing its carbon emissions, is that the primary source for our carbon emissions is transportation. For other jurisdictions — for example, Alberta or other places in the world — it’s how they produce electricity, because they’ve been using fossil fuels like coal, which is a very high GHG emitter.

In B.C., we’re very fortunate that we have hydroelectricity with B.C. Hydro. I come from a part of the province that produces 50 percent of British Columbia’s electricity through our wonderful hydroelectric assets that we have in the Columbia Basin. Those of us in the Kootenays are very proud of those assets.

We’re very proud of what we do for the rest of the province, and we’re very proud that we’re going to be powering up electric vehicles and that this Speech from the Throne further commits our government and our plan in CleanBC to helping British Columbians acquire those electric vehicles so that we can go electric, so that we can make the switch from internal combustion engines and go to a renewable resource in terms of powering up how we get around.

I know that people in my constituency are very excited to be a part of that, not just as buyers of electric vehicles and people at the charge-up station…. In fact, I was with the city of Nelson just a few weeks ago where we were celebrating the new fast-charging station at the Nelson District Community Complex. So you go to a hockey game, and you plug in your electric vehicle. Go for a swim. I like to take my son, Zavier, there on a regular basis for a swim. You plug in your electric vehicle, and you’re charged up. It’s free right now.

This type of an initiative that the city of Nelson has taken has been taken by municipalities all across the province. It’s all part and parcel of a broader plan, and that’s our CleanBC plan.

[5:05 p.m.]

There are many aspects to the CleanBC plan. There are home renovations. I was visiting with a constituent who is using modern technology and accessing our CleanBC rebates to acquire that modern technology to renovate his home. I should say their home; it’s both Marc and Lara Ellenwood. They’re renovating their home to reduce their carbon emissions through their home, and they’re accessing some of our CleanBC rebates to do just that.

The technology that is helping them do that is really interesting. As part of my new role at Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness, I’m responsible for our tech sector, and one of the strongest areas of our tech sector is our clean tech. The things that we’re doing in British Columbia are incredibly innovative and globally recognized for our ability to identify ways to reduce our overall environmental impact in some of our traditional sectors by using innovation and technology to do so.

For example, Saltworks, a fantastic start-up company here in British Columbia, has been working with the mining sector, including big companies like Teck to reduce their overall environmental footprint in terms of water and water treatment. This company was started in a kitchen, I believe, on UBC campus, in student housing. I apologize to Ben, who started the company, if I got that story wrong. What always amazed me was that he was still a student, he was in his kitchen, he was figuring out this technology, and he lands it. He is going global now, from kitchen to the world.

That is what B.C.’s clean tech sector offers, not just to people here in B.C. for the good family-supporting jobs that come from this sector, but what it’s offering the world in terms of solutions so that we can be more environmentally sustainable and reduce our impact on climate change.

The innovation commissioner recently concluded his term and has delivered fantastic information in his over 415 meetings around the province, going to Ottawa to leverage federal dollars for investing into our tech sector here in British Columbia. He did a phenomenal job on behalf of all of us and on behalf of this growing and emerging sector in British Columbia.

Dr. Alan Winter, thankfully, although he concluded his term, is just a phone call away from me as we start to develop the process, going forward, on how we take this amazing work that he’s done and move it forward so that we can further grow and support tech and innovation in British Columbia so that it can help our existing traditional, foundational industries be globally competitive and, as well, the tech sector, in and of itself, be globally competitive.

I’m really looking forward to diving deeper into all the work that Dr. Winter has done, getting on the phone with him, speaking with other members of this House in terms of how we move these amazing opportunities forward so that we’re not only creating good, family-supporting jobs here in British Columbia, but we are solving some of the world’s problems by giving solutions on how we can reduce our impact on climate change while also, honestly, reducing poverty. As people get into the tech sector, they have the family-supporting jobs and they have the wealth to live a comfortable life that everybody deserves.

Some of the stats that I’ve been looking at in my new role really show how well British Columbia has been doing over the last 30 months. Wages. In the last 30 months, I’ve seen an increase of 13.5 percent. We know that it’s not just about the number of jobs, but it’s the types of jobs that’ll give people the opportunities to have a good life, to be able to have a good roof over your head, to have food on the table and not have to worry about where it’s coming from.

[5:10 p.m.]

I ran a food bank for two years, 2003 to 2005. Following that, I was the coordinator for the Nelson Committee on Homelessness. When people are in the food bank or when they’re homeless, the struggle for survival every single day is so incredibly challenging. When people would say to them, “Well, just go get a job,” that’s not always the easiest thing to do when you’re surviving day in and day out, trying to find a meal. In fact, the fastest-growing sector of people who were needing food banks were actually people who were in low-wage jobs.

We’ve taken some very good action, as a government, to increase minimum wage so that the lowest-paid workers are actually able to get food on the table every day, pay their bills. That has contributed to wages going up in this province. We’re also increasing the number of good family-supporting jobs in this province as well. I’m very proud of the work that this government has been doing.

Our unemployment rate is down. We are the lowest in Canada. It goes to show that diversifying our economy, making sure that the opportunities are there for the emerging sectors of our economy and making sure that jobs are good-paying jobs…. Well, this all contributes to the well-being and the opportunities and the fact that these numbers are coming out showing how well we are doing in our community, in our province.

When the economy is doing well…. There are a lot of numbers there. There are a lot of dollars and cents, and so on. And there are a lot of statistics. Absolutely, a lot of statistics. But what all of this tells is the story of what we see in our communities. It’s that small businesses in the downtown core are doing well. The restaurants, there are over 60 restaurants in Nelson, and they’re busy. They’re hopping.

Our tourism is doing really well. People are coming to visit us, which is great. We love visitors. I recommend to anybody right now that we still have an excellent season at Whitewater Ski Resort, and it’s only 20 minutes from town to the chairlift. You’re not going to find that in a lot of other places. The powder is, bar none, the best in the province. We have amazing summer festivals, for those who like to travel in the summertime. The Minister of Tourism took in Kaslo Jazz Fest in the summer. She can attest to how much fun it is.

Point being, when people in other communities have disposable income, they come to ours in the Kootenays, and that helps our local economy thrive. When our local economy is thriving, we see greater wealth throughout the community. We see less poverty. That’s what those numbers are all about at the end of the day. They’re about people. They’re about people doing well in our communities, and we all benefit from that.

One of the sectors in my region — it’s well known, and I’ve heard all of the jokes, so nobody needs to get started — is the cannabis sector in the Kootenays. We’re very proud producers of B.C. bud. The people in my community who have been doing it for a very long time in the black market are very, very much looking forward to being a part of the legal market. But there have been some challenges. Some of those challenges are federal regulation, and some of those challenges come from us here at the provincial level.

That’s exactly why I invited the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, who is the lead on our cannabis file, to come and to meet with my constituents last August. We had an excellent round table about what we can do as a government to support people moving into legal cannabis cultivation and retail.

Let me just say, the expertise in my area is not just about cultivation. It is also about the economy around cannabis. It’s about how we can grow — no pun intended — this economy to the benefit of the province as a whole.

[5:15 p.m.]

We tapped that knowledge, myself and the Minister of Public Safety, and we have been implementing some of that feedback that we’ve been hearing ever since. One of them was supporting people who have historically been in this sector and who want to get into the legal sector on how to do that. If you have been in a black-market sector most of your working life, the concept of filling out forms and writing everything down is not how you did your business, but it’s now how the government requires you to do that business.

People were finding it confusing, in terms of how they transition to this new business culture. So we started a position with Community Futures. The demand was so high. It’s now a team of three, funded through the Ministry of Social Development. The demand for their help is beyond what they’re able to do at the moment, but they are tackling it. They are working with people in the region, and they are helping.

How we can do more of that throughout the province, how we can build this economic sector so that it is creating good opportunities for families, whether it’s cultivation or retail, is really important for us to work on. I’m looking forward to doing that because I know firsthand from talking to my constituents — the people I represent, the people that send me here to work on their behalf…. I know from them that this is very important.

So 2,000 licensed cultivators in the Kootenays. That’s a major, major part of our economy. Making sure that those people are successful and doing well is going to help our downtown small businesses. It’s going to help our tourism businesses. It’s going to be able to help our overall economy, because when people have the opportunity to make a good wage, to put a roof over their head, to put food on the table, to send their kids to post-secondary education, that’s what makes us all thrive, and that’s what gives us the type of lives that we all want.

Hon. Speaker, I really want to thank you for giving me the chance to speak. I have a few more notes that I’m just going to just mention really quickly because, as part of our innovation file, I got caught up in talking about the good work that Dr. Alan Winter did.

I want to just touch back a little bit to my previous file as the Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources, because one of the things that I thought was really cool about how we brought innovation and our traditional sectors together was actually a recommendation that came from the Mining Jobs Task Force, and that was to build a mining innovation road map.

While not specifically talked about in the throne speech — there was a lot there — I wanted to talk about this because, to me, it’s really exciting. It shows exactly part of the direction that B.C. is going to be going in the future. It’s looking at how innovation and technology, like Saltworks, can make B.C.’s foundational economies more competitive. To be able to put money, $1 million, towards building out this road map and making sure that we have structures and mechanisms to then take the road map and actually operationalize it is something that I’m very proud of.

It shows just how well we are working with the private sector, because they’re involved with building that road map. It also shows our commitment to not just resting on our laurels but actually making sure that B.C. is a competitive jurisdiction for our foundational industries as well as for our emerging economies. It’s just one example of all of the things that we are doing in our government in terms of building up our economy.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to put my comments on the record on behalf of the wonderful people in Nelson-Creston. I am so privileged to be their MLA. They are some of the best people in the world, and we live in the best place in the world. So come visit. You won’t regret it.

[5:20 p.m.]

B. Stewart: Well, it’s a pleasure to rise in the House again and respond to the Speech from the Throne, being that this is a momentous day. But I first want to just thank the members of my family that have helped make certain that I can continue to stay here: my daughter Llane and her husband, Jan; my son Patrick — both live in West Kelowna, in the riding; and Kitson and Jennifer, who live in Penticton, along with their five grandchildren. Of course, anybody that has grandchildren or children knows we can never have enough of that time.

My sisters and brother and my mother and father are also very supportive, along with the rest of the Stewart clan back in Kelowna. But the constituents that put me here from Kelowna West are very supportive.

Kelowna West is not without challenges, albeit it’s nearly as good a spot as Nelson-Creston, as the member previous had mentioned about visiting. We’re looking forward to a positive season again coming up this year. But I do want to speak a little bit about what it takes to be here in this chamber.

My loyal and hard-working staff are Cheryl Doll, who runs my constituency office; Krystal D’Sa, my legislative assistant; Siyun Zeng, my communications officer; Karen Bill, a research officer; and John Hennenfent, research officer. These people support and help myself and my colleagues in trying to make certain that we stick to gathering good information, doing the right thing to help our constituents as expected as elected MLAs.

I just want to turn to the Speech from the Throne and say that I, needless to say, was disappointed because I thought that it understated some of the things that I think that we need to be charting our course towards when it comes to things that governments need to do. Having been part of government and had a number of portfolios as a minister, as well as serving in international trade, I have concerns. I know the minister is just leaving. Unfortunately, I do want to talk a bit about her ministry.

It left a lot of uncertainty and painted a bleak picture of our province. It was more about announcements that had been made but nothing about the future. It talked about the fact that we were going to get to some of the promises that had been made in the previous throne speech and in the government’s election in 2017, but I think that there’s no lack of self-congratulations in this speech.

However, I don’t recall any part of the remarks with the vision that I think the Premier needs to have about a concrete plan to grow the province and the economy. Earlier today, I was looking at the Victoria Times Colonist. A person that we all know well, Les Leyne, has written about it. He talks about: “Empathy of NDP Knows No Bounds.” I think that that’s reasonably good. We’re all empathetic.

I think that both the previous speaker, as well as the member from the Green Party and others that have spoken today, has very passionate views and empathies towards different aspects. But the bottom line is we don’t get to govern for one group or one sector within this province. We have to govern for everybody. That’s important.

I think that what really contrasts between, I think, the vision that I believe I came here with and the government’s throne speech is what I want to talk about today. Some of the things that I think the government has to be accountable for are promises that were contemplated, promises that were made or promises that have been unfulfilled. I think that, as the government knows, some of those things haven’t been fulfilled, and that was touched on during the throne speech. But it doesn’t really address some of the problems that we’re facing as a province in its entirety.

[5:25 p.m.]

This is a throne speech that doesn’t talk about helping hard-working British Columbians getting ahead in life. It talks about a very specific and narrow bandwidth of them. What I’m hearing is that we’re closed for business. We’re not necessarily open. Some of the things that I’m going to talk about a little in the future, some of the actions that have been taken by the government that don’t send a message that we are here to do business….

It’s always tough out there. It was tough yesterday. It was tough back in 2010, ten years ago today, when the Olympics started in Vancouver. We all remember the 2008 financial crisis. Who doesn’t know that? It was a particularly trying, troubling time for government and businesses. The businesses supply the fuel and the engine to keep government services running, and they plummeted precipitously in 2009 and again in 2010. Thank goodness we had the Olympics. I realize that that’s not something you turn on or off, but I can tell you that the 2010 Olympics was one of those shining beacons.

I know that the Deputy Speaker, as well as his colleagues, visited many of the venues and were there with us celebrating. It was a great event. It was great to feel optimistic, because we sure as heck didn’t feel great about the fact that we had all the businesses failing in the United States. The Canadian bank system, thankfully, stood tall and firm, but the reality was that, for us, it was an opportunity. It wasn’t just the Olympics. It was about everything that we did.

I think about the great memories, the experiences, the successes. I think that one of the things that I remember…. As a matter of fact, it happened right here at this very assembly, out in front. We had the torch relay. All of the members from both sides of this House were out front. We sent off the torch — and here we are just ten years after the fact — and Wayne Gretzky arrived in a truck to light the Olympic Cauldron down at Jack Poole Plaza, which was really instrumental in kicking off such a success.

I think that the thing about the success about the Olympics that we shouldn’t forget about is the fact that we won. We won the Olympics. We were the nation that won. We had a program called Own the Podium, and it worked. I know John Furlong, who was the CEO at the time. We really came up with a winning formula. We’ve done really well, and for a country of our size, we continue to do well in the Olympics.

More importantly, at the end of the Olympics, we had a surplus. We actually didn’t spend all the money that was budgeted for, and that money was returned back to the organizations that helped provide that.

I think that one of the things I can speak to is the fact that when I went around and was working on our international trade, it surprised me. The fact that I happened to be there when Korea had the Winter Olympics…. Tokyo, which is having the Olympics this summer, and Beijing, which is having the Winter Olympics in 2022…. There wasn’t one of those countries that did not want expertise and advice from British Columbia. I can tell you that for Korea, Tokyo and Beijing, this was a huge trade opportunity, not just for the athletes.

This was an opportunity to provide expertise, whether it’s on how to make ice surfaces smooth, whether it’s curling or ice-skating or whatever. Canada knows that. They don’t know that. In China, they need to build a thousand ice-skating rinks. That’s another opportunity that we were participating in when I left Beijing just three short years ago.

I have to say that these are just some of the things that came out of our relationship in terms of having such a successful…. The gold standard for Olympics. It helped make certain that people looked at us as…. We were enviable, and the fact is that it was tough.

The Premier of the day said that there were not going to be any government subsidies afterwards. He made certain that he picked the right people to run it. I mentioned John Furlong, Jack Poole. Those are the types of people that we need to make certain that we look at as examples of the way that government should look at the resources that we have. We have the ability to tax, bring revenue in and spend that money over the period of time that we’re elected as government.

I want to just make certain that we don’t forget about the fact that the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics was a huge success. It is still considered that, and we’re still benefiting from that.

[5:30 p.m.]

I want to talk about choices. I want to talk a little bit about empathy. We talked a little bit — the member for Nelson-Creston, the member for Saanich North and the Islands — about their whole aspirational goals. What is it that we’re trying to do here?

[S. Gibson in the chair.]

Some of the things that I know that…. They’re talking the same things. Child care spaces. Well, do you realize that in our period of time being in government, we created 46,000 new child care spaces since 2004? That was an average of 3,400 new child care spaces every year. Our child care programs included a child care subsidy for families, operating funds for the providers, and capital funding for providers.

Think of one of the biggest expenses that we incurred in my time in government. We introduced all-day kindergarten. Think about that. All of those kids that were of kindergarten age got an opportunity to go to all-day kindergarten. We provided increased resources, space, staff. In fact, that immediately took that group of young British Columbians out of the system and needing child care space.

We started the earlier strategy with StrongStart. I’ve been to those schools in my riding with my grandkids, and I can tell you that those are the types of things that made a difference. We didn’t forget about child care or whatever. We were on it. We also created an early childhood tax benefit, paying out over $145 million per year to 180,000 families.

Let’s just talk a little bit about if you’re a single parent. We created the single-parent employment initiative, one of the most sacred things that the MCFD, Children and Families, is still championing today, because it made so much sense. We also took persons with disabilities and took off the shackles of having them clawed back the money that they had earned with an exemption. It was an annual earnings exemption that they were entitled to use.

Just a couple of examples of having a vision, about how we can be empathetic and try to make certain that we’re managing the public purse in a manner that spreads that around, with everybody getting the benefit from that. How are we making life more affordable? That’s really the question. That’s the tag line that the Premier uses, and members in government.

Let me go back to 2001. There was an election back then, but there also was a government that had the same philosophy: “Let’s help everybody. Let’s make life more affordable.” I won’t bring up the fact that there was also: “Let’s create casinos.” The reality is that when it comes to the operations of government, they were operating at a deficit, on an annual basis, of $4 billion per year.

That’s staggering. Where is that money coming from? That’s money that we’re spending of our children’s future income taxes or corporate taxes or whatever. It’s like we’re spending with no idea about how we’re going to manage and live within our means. It’s easy to use the throne speech to point out how the government cares about everybody and everything. It’s easy to spend money, but it’s difficult to live within your means and make certain you’re doing the right things and prioritizing where that money has to be spent.

My recollection on the budget document that the Finance Minister brought forward last year about this time — in a week’s time — was an overall spending increase from when they took over government to the end of 2021, which will end up seeing spending going up 26 percent. That’s through those 19 new or increased taxes that the government has brought in. This spending didn’t just come out of thin air. It’s not like we had a lottery win or something like that. We don’t want to forget that.

The throne speech was full of aspirations, but let’s have a reality check. In just 2½ years of governance under the NDP, British Columbia is seeing a slowing economy. Now, I know I heard the member for Nelson-Creston say we have the lowest jobless rate — and that is an important matter — but there are signals out there that are sending messages that we should be concerned about.

[5:35 p.m.]

It’s because of the fact that if we want to stay living within our means — balanced budgets, which I know the Minister of Finance highly values — we have to make certain that these things are considered and taken care of in a timely manner so that we don’t wait till it’s too late. They keep talking about how they’re going to make life more affordable and releasing announcements about it. The NDP was so good at photo ops, I’m actually surprised that they weren’t up for an Oscar last week.

Let’s take a hard look at what’s happening in our province — a shrinking surplus. We had a $2.7 billion surplus when the member from Abbotsford, your colleague, was the Minister of Finance. The bottom line is that that surplus is gone. We’ve increased taxes and spending by over 25 percent in the three years.

We’ve got a forest industry in crisis, which, throughout most of 2019, continued to get worse. We’ve got vacancy rates that continue to remain low. We have ICBC rates skyrocketing. We need to look after British Columbia’s economic well-being, not only for the coming year but for the next five years and the next ten years.

In the absence of leadership, British Columbia is on a road to nowhere under this NDP government. Despite all the NDP promises of making life more affordable, on the contrary, we’re seeing soaring prices for gas, housing and auto. Yesterday we heard about strata insurance. How is that making things more affordable?

The bottom line is that there are lots of challenges thrown at government every single day. We now have Vancouver recognized as having the second least affordable housing in the world. A two-bedroom apartment in Vancouver now has an average rent of over $2,000 a month. It might not seem like a lot, but if you’re a minimum-wage or a two-income family that has got kids at home, etc., that’s a lot of money.

The bottom line is that it’s not just going to come from increased wages, it’s going to come from increased supply. We’ve been saying that. It’s not just affordable housing. It’s about increasing supply, working with municipalities to unlock and free up the opportunity to build more and not tie it up with bureaucracy and regulations.

Without affordable housing, how can we attract the talent that we need and the workers to live in such a wonderful city? They want to live here, but they’ve got to be able to afford that. Without talented workers, how are we going to get world-class companies to set up offices here?

One of the promises that the government talked about for housing was that they were going to build 114,000 units — 114,000 units. I know my colleague from Langley East spent quite a bit of time working on housing. He delivered a lot of housing over the years. Of course, we hear that it was never enough. The bottom line is that it may never be enough. But for 114,000 units of affordable housing, considering the speed that they’re going up, it’s going to take us over 100 years to have all of that built.

I mean, let’s be realistic here. Why don’t we set a realistic goal? Look at the problems, whether it’s municipalities in terms of streamlining processes, but let’s get it so that we can get stuff built.

The NDP also promised a $400 annual renters rebate as well as $10 daycare. I think we heard yesterday in the throne speech that $10-a-day daycare is likely going to take over ten years to actually complete, because it’s so expensive, and it takes a lot to do that. The reality is that it’s essentially a subsidy that is going to cost the rest of us that don’t have children, and we need to be able to do that. We need a growing economy. We need a robust, growing amount of income that’s coming in from businesses that want to be here in British Columbia. Nothing really has been added since they made those commitments in the campaign election.

Just this Monday they confirmed that they’re going ahead, and they released the contract on the new Pattullo Bridge. I’m not going to get into the fact that it’s four lanes replacing a four-lane bridge that does need replacement, but it does need to make certain that it’s giving good value to British Columbians.

We created Partnerships B.C. Look at the Sea to Sky Highway. We had a vision of being able to improve the road for the Olympics. We had a budget in mind. We stuck with the budget. The contractor came up with innovations and ways to make the road what it is, within the budget that was set aside.

[5:40 p.m.]

We have all sorts of P3 projects across the province that brought good value for projects like in my riding or the member for Kelowna-Mission’s. The Kelowna General Hospital is a P3 project. The William R. Bennett Bridge is a P3 project brought in within budget. The bottom line is that this project, the Pattullo Bridge, is costing over $100 million more because of what I would call a shady union benefits agreement, not a community benefits agreement.

Of course, there are people that are going to be hired locally — First Nations, people that are minorities, etc. But the reality is that we can make those changes without having to impose 19 friends, or friends and family, if you want to call it…. The situation is that those contractors have to be employed as part of the B.C. Building Trades union. All I can say about it is that is not the way to get good value so that everybody else…. That $10-a-day daycare that you want to have and the aspirational goals within the throne speech can’t be achieved if we do things like that.

That is going back to the 1990s where we had all sorts of contracts, and it was…. I forget the name of it, but it mandated that both union and non-union contracts had to be at the same labour rates, and it was…. It’s kind of skewing the idea of trying to go in and negotiate a good price. I mean, how many of these people haven’t bought a house or a vehicle and gone in and negotiated and made an offer on something rather than…? Well, their asking price is, you know, $300,000. Let me give them an extra $100,000 because, you know, they’re nice people.

That $100 million could have easily been spent on promises that have remained unfulfilled, but they decided not to use it and then reward their union friends. Think about the number of portables that could have been replaced. We heard earlier today from the member for Kamloops–North Thompson speaking about how many people are born every year in Surrey. I mean, it’s the equivalent of dozens of schools every day. I don’t know the exact number….

An Hon. Member: It’s 600 a month.

B. Stewart: It’s 600 a month. Thank you. The bottom line is that’s a lot of schools and a lot of classrooms that we really have to plan on. The fact that…. The number of portables, instead of going down, is up over 50 percent.

We could have added more training spaces for post-secondary institutions like Kwantlen or maybe SFU in Surrey centre or maybe in some of the other institutions that we have around the province. Or we could have completed the health tower at Surrey Memorial with some of that $100 million.

Given the poor record of the NDP keeping its promises, I find that their speech is just simply insincere. Not only did the government or the NDP bring in 19 new and increased taxes; they’re spending money as fast as it comes in. Despite raising more than $5 billion in extra revenue from these taxes, their surpluses are razor-thin. We’ve heard that time and time again throughout government. No additional spending clawbacks.

It’s frustrating for us and, I know, the former Finance Minister to see a $2.7 billion surplus vaporized on promises that have put this government into a situation where their spending is really…. It’s balanced today, according to the Finance Minister, but behind the scenes, it’s still out of control, and the plan forward is not clear. What we don’t want to do is return to where we were back in 2001. We were in last place. We were first in 1991, and we were in last place by 2001. That only just goes to show that that can only happen with a bad economic vision.

I’ve heard from constituents, business owners and experts on how government regulations and policies have been impacting life in B.C. The business barometer of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business shows that since the NDP took power just 30 months ago, small business confidence has fallen off more than 13 points. When 64 percent of the businesses say taxes, red tape, are causing difficulty for conducting business in B.C., the government has to listen.

[5:45 p.m.]

We haven’t heard anything about our expanding trade during this throne speech. We did hear that it was important that we have diversity and the fact that we’re the only G7 country to have a free trade agreement with the United States. But I want to talk to you about…. As co-critic of Trade, I’m really furious about the fact that on New Year’s Eve in Asia, this government decided to close all 13 trade missions abroad over there as if nothing was happening.

Interjection.

B. Stewart: That’s exactly what they did. You don’t know anything about integration, Member, but I can tell you that lots of provinces that have integration would love to have the system that we had. And the cost of those offices was a mere $10 million. The savings are about half that. And, if you knew anything about selling over there, you need to have relationships.

The member for Nelson-Creston talked about Saltworks. We did all sorts of work for that company over in Asia to introduce clients. We did things for Viking Air here in Victoria. We did things. The biggest single deal that we ever did in Asia for Ballard was with a bus company outside of Guangzhou. They had an order for about 2,500 fuel cells. Those trade offices mattered. So all I can tell you is that the time to be spending money rather than thinking you’re saving money, which is a false economy, in my opinion, is when things are starting to look a little bit shaky.

Our trading numbers are down 2.8 percent in the U.S., 3.6 in mainland China, 12.9 to Japan and 11.8 to South Korea — our four biggest trading partners. We look at the number of softwood lumber shipments, and they’ve slipped 25.7 percent.

When our exports are already on a slippery hill, I really can’t figure out why the NDP made the decision to shut down these Asian trade offices at this time for a mere savings of about $5 million, let alone the cost of cancelling leases, severance cost, displacing Canadian workers that were working hard to increase trade opportunities for British Columbia companies. I don’t consider that helpful.

In order to increase British Columbia’s standard of living, we must diversify our economy and trading markets. These trade offices in Asia helped B.C. reduce reliance on the United States and forged to maintain relationships with new partners.

The British Columbia forestry sector has suffered throughout 2019. This is an issue that must be dealt with in an expeditious manner. There is no time for more delays. Not one word in the throne speech about how to help our forest industry and get it back on its feet. It’s hurting not only the companies, the workers and their families but the provincial economy as a whole.

In the year 2019 alone, we witnessed ten permanent or indefinite mill closures and more than 10,000 job losses in the forestry sector. I can speak to that personally, because I happen to have one of Tolko mill’s operations right in downtown Kelowna. It’s one of the oldest sawmills in the province. It officially shut down and put 150 workers out of their jobs — and essentially, all of the support industries — just as a result of the last number of months or last years of inaction.

It’s easy for the government to blame the former government, but the bottom line is that we were taking action. The NDP government has the power to help the forestry families, but it’s done little so far. That’s reflected in the throne speech.

I just made some remarks on some of the grave issues faced by British Columbians. At the end of the day, we need policies to address B.C.’s long-term economic growth. The NDP government is heavy on rhetoric, but they lack specific targets and timelines. It brings uncertainty, which means businesses will hold back on investment decisions and ultimately slow the growth of our industries and economy.

We on this side of the House want to bring opportunity for all of B.C. We don’t pick winners and losers. We are fed up with the opposite side’s broken promises. It’s time for this government to take real action. Two and a half years is already too long a time for B.C. taxpayers to hear the NDP’s empty words.

[5:50 p.m.]

A. Weaver: Thank you to the members of government here who gave a little applause as I rise as an independent member to speak in strong support of the throne speech we heard yesterday.

Before I start, I wish to acknowledge and thank government for raising and acknowledging the passing of a number of friends and constituents: Al Martin, a neighbour, a conservationist, a friend, a great British Columbian; Nils Jensen, former Oak Bay mayor, a friend, a great British Columbian; Eli Pasquale, who went to UVic at the same time as me and was in the rival basketball team, as I was in the rival rugby team, who passed away at the young age of 59. His number 13 has been retired at the University of Victoria. And, of course, Paul Fraser, who we all know in this Legislature, who I became very close to over the years. He will be a great loss to all of us and British Columbia in general.

I’d like to start by addressing some of the issues in the throne speech. Now, with respect to the throne speech, it’s quite clear that the throne speech focused largely on identifying the advances that have already been made and pathways forward to build on those advances for the betterment of British Columbia.

Government has, in its throne speech, mentioned that it has already got big money out of politics and strengthened lobbying rules. As the former leader of the B.C. Green Party, I feel very strongly that these are quite good policies and take great pride in the role that we played in working with government in ensuring that transparency and getting big money out of politics was done early in the term.

I would like to address, before I move on, an issue raised by the member for Kelowna West with respect to closing trade offices. Again I’m going to commend government for doing precisely that and doing what virtually every other province in Canada does, which is recognize that you are not a province in isolation of a country and your trade offices should be embedded in national offices to ensure that you capitalize on national opportunity, for which British Columbia has strategic advantage.

The fact that the previous government went rogue alone is quite remarkable. There are still many questions left as to what value was ever achieved from those multi-million-dollar leases for trade offices that were only used for British Columbia. So I commend government for their moves in this regard, and I think many fiscally responsible people will also look at that as a great achievement. It will not affect trade, and if anything, it will expedite the passage of information between provinces and the nation of Canada and enhance trade with our beautiful province.

Health care. I’m very proud of what government has done and the small role we’ve played in some of this — in the issues of MSP, for example. This is one that I personally take great pride in, for it was about five or six years ago that I stood in this Legislature and announced that the B.C. Greens would eliminate MSP as part of our campaign promise.

We feel we deserve a bit of credit for getting both parties, both the B.C. Liberals and the B.C. NDP, to recognize that public support for the elimination of MSP was so strong that really you couldn’t go forward into an election without making that a form of a campaign promise. To see it come to fruition is very, very satisfying, and I thank government for making that happen.

Government has taken the approach, a wise approach in my view, to recognize that, at times now, when capital is cheap, that is the time you use capital to invest in the province. We’re seeing funding of new hospitals and primary care centres. We’re seeing funding of new schools. I’ll come back to that in a second. This is the time to do it, when the capital is cheap. I think that government deserves a good deal of credit for its ventures down this avenue.

I’m still hoping and still working with government to ensure that they recognize that each and every school and hospital that is built should be viewed through the eyes of innovation, as an opportunity for innovation, to showcase British Columbia technologies, British Columbia–engineered products — we’ve heard that in the throne speech today — as well as British Columbia energy efficiency and British Columbia renewable power.

We’ve got new diagnostic machines and funding for more health care professionals. I can tell you that one of the most important pieces of change that government has done in the last two years in the health care file is opening access to MRIs 24-7.

[5:55 p.m.]

I personally have benefited from that, and my wife has benefited from that as well — many times, in fact. The months and months that people had to wait for diagnostic tools like MRIs was unacceptable, and the steps taken by Minister Dix in this regard truly deserve a lot of credit. We see money going into mental health services. We see money going into funding more professionals, seniors getting direct care.

On the issue of affordability, despite the rhetoric I just heard from the member for Kelowna West, government has done a remarkable job in delivering on the affordable file. We’ve seen a slow tempering of the market, a decrease at the higher end of the market in Vancouver — not a collapse, a tempered decrease, exactly the type of tempered decrease the market can absorb. Much of that artificial speculation that occurred has been tempered. Housing is becoming more affordable, and I look forward to working with government along the lines as we did with the speculation and vacancy tax as we move forward to deal with other rental and tenancy issues.

In particular, the speculation tax, which many in this room, including me when it was first introduced, felt was not thought through completely. The final implementation of that, I would argue — and I believe the Minister of Finance would too, after many hundreds of hours of negotiations back and forth — is working. It’s working so well that there are jurisdictions like Tofino, like West Vancouver, that are asking to be included in such speculation tax to deal with this.

Interjection.

A. Weaver: I am hoping….

Yes, to the member who said: “Really?” Yes, really. It’s actually….

There are other issues that I would like to, hopefully, see addressed as we move forward in this session with respect to rental, tenancy act issues. You know, one of the things I would like to explore is the notion — and I will be doing this on my blog shortly to get a sense of public opinion — that there is unfairness in the present system right now.

Let us suppose I live in Ontario, and I have a vacation condo in Victoria, and that vacation condo happens to be in a strata that has a no-rental clause. Well, guess what? I don’t pay the vacancy tax because there’s a no-rental clause in my strata. However, if I was the same person’s neighbour in Ontario and I had a vacation condo in a strata that allowed rentals, I would be subject to the speculation tax unless I rented it.

In my view, what we need to do in this province in a timely fashion is follow the lead of Ontario. In Ontario, they’ve eliminated the ability of strata councils to actually have no-rental clauses attached to them. But in doing so, they allowed stratas to enable the banning of limited rentals — i.e., Airbnb or vacation rentals — and, at the same time, grant to strata council the powers of eviction, the idea being that if there is an absent landlord who is actually not looking after the property, council has the powers of eviction.

This, in and of itself, will create a vast amount of units. We don’t need to build more empty units. We can go to Metrotown in Burnaby. There are skyscrapers full of empty units with no-rental clauses. What we need is, we need units to be used. This, in my view, would be the single most important policy that I hope government will deliver upon in this coming session.

I’m also excited by the words that we saw in the throne speech about ICBC and the reforms that are forthcoming. Now, I recall in September of 2017, very shortly after Minister Eby took the role of Attorney General, he stood, and he spoke out and said: “I’m not considering no-fault insurance.” At the time, I issued a press release, and I said: “Why would he do this? Why would you take ideas off the table before you’ve actually looked at the books? Why would you not look at the model from Manitoba, having some of the lowest rates in the country, where they have a no-fault system?”

We have the analogy in Saskatchewan, which is slightly different, and I know members from opposition will at some point raise it. In Saskatchewan, it used to be no fault. Why are over 90 percent of people in Saskatchewan still no fault? The reason why is because it was no fault for a long time, and then they were allowed to potentially sue and opt out of that, at a later date, and only a very few people did.

[6:00 p.m.]

I think this approach to no fault is certainly going to be one that will get to the bottom of the books of ICBC. I mean, it’s a file that really has been neglected for some time by members of the opposition. I think they have to be very careful when they speak and try to pass blame on the present government in light of what they left behind. I think, in the words of the Attorney General, it was described as “a dumpster fire.”

Education. You know, we come back to the economy. Again, I know the B.C. NDP like to be branded by the B.C. Liberals as bad for the economy. But we’ve had already balanced budget after balanced budget, and I’m convinced the next budget will be balanced with the triple-A credit rating being maintained and the strongest economy in the country. People want to live here. They want to come to British Columbia. Why? Because we are the most beautiful place in the world to live. We have a strong stable democracy, and we can offer everything.

Schools. Our school system in British Columbia is one of the top in the world. It ranks in the top five year after year in the international PISA assessments, ahead of the much-touted Finland, ahead of the much-touted Quebec. We are the very best. We have some of the best schools and best teachers in the province, and government now has invested substantively in more services for schools as a direct consequence of having to implement the rulings of the Supreme Court.

That, frankly, wasted a decade and, frankly — I’ve said this publicly — has led to a decade of children, a whole generation of children, not getting the services they needed at the times they needed in their early developmental years. From 2001 to 2017, for those 17 years, a generation of school children had their child psychologists cut, their speech pathologists cut, the in-class help cut, class size increases.

What would you expect as a result of that? Well, what you would expect is that as those children age out into adulthood, you’d start to see troubles in society. And lo and behold, guess what. Delayed, down the road, we’re dealing with an opioid crisis. We’re dealing with a homeless problem and an out of control….

Interjection.

A. Weaver: It is not a far reach.

Interjection.

A. Weaver: It’s interesting. One of the members opposite, who is a teacher, doesn’t clearly understand the research in education.

Interjection.

A. Weaver: Well, clearly you don’t, because it is very clear that the interventions in early years of child education are absolutely critical to put the children, particularly in their K-to-3 years, on the right paths for success. If you don’t catch it early, you have to pay down the road. That falls squarely on the B.C. Liberal government.

The First Nations. I was very proud to be part of this collective group — there is no one individual — collectively, in the passing of UNDRIP legislation last year. I’m looking forward to seeing how that moves forward.

We see in the throne speech words about safety and policing. We see about increased diversity and inclusion and how a human rights commission has now been improved. There’s talk in the throne speech about what’s being done in the arts and culture and museums. Transport and rural development were there.

One of the key things that has been done — again, I’m very pleased with this; this is something we’ve been advocating for, for a long time — is the beginning of taking high-speed broadband into rural communities. You want to stimulate the economy of rural communities? It’s not going to happen until you bring broadband in.

The only way we’re going to compete in the resource world is not to just dig dirt out of the ground and think, somehow, we’re going to beat, say, Indonesia, which doesn’t internalize the social and environmental externalities we value here. The way we do that is we’re smarter, more efficient and cleaner. We do that by bringing the technology sector together with the resource sector. We do that by focusing on the value-added. We do that focusing on efficiency, cleaner and selling those particular technologies elsewhere, like MineSense, Axine or others. I was so very pleased to see that recognized in this throne speech as a direction this government is going.

I feel that this government is on the right track. It understands where the future of our economy is. It doesn’t lie in continuing to dig dirt out of the ground. It never will. It lies in innovation. It lies in harvesting our resources in innovative ways by bringing the tech sector together with that.

[6:05 p.m.]

A member opposite lauded the $2.7 billion surplus that the last Liberal government left, and seemed to think that that was a good thing. It’s remarkable that this was actually raised — that this $2.7 billion number was touted as a good thing to have as a surplus — when we have the highest child poverty rates in the country, when we have over a decade with disability and welfare rates not being increased, where we have homelessness getting out of control and we have a $2.7 billion surplus. It’s outrageous fiscal mismanagement at its very, very worst.

The Liberals, who claim to be these managers of fiscal prowess, actually demonstrated fiscal incompetence in their budgeting in that last year. We see that not only in the $2.7 billion surplus, but we see that in the money-laundering issue going on, we see that in the out-of-control speculation in the real estate market, and we see that with what has happened to some of our most vulnerable, as they’ve been on the streets.

I say that B.C. Liberals, as I said a while back, needed to be put in a time-out for some time. I’m still convinced that that time-out is not over yet. There needs to be a longer time-out until such time as the opposition starts to recognize that you have to govern for the people of this province, not for those who are your funders, not for the elite, not for the 1 percent. If you start governing for the 1 percent, you end up seeing what we see all around us today.

We see very disturbing trends emerging. We see society splitting into two ways. We see the kind of Trump, and we see the anti-Trump. We see these two kinds of polarizing views of society, the Trump far right and the anti-Trump, almost anarchist. This is a very, very dangerous situation that the world is moving towards. It does not help when we polarize this place and continue to suggest that one side is far better than the other. We must, for the betterment of all of our society, start to recognize that we are in turbulent times.

When unruly mobs like this feel like they are not being heard, it doesn’t lead well. We have ample, ample examples in human history about how it ends up. I don’t need to do history lessons here. The way it ends up is when income inequality gets out of control — when, for those who have, compared to those who don’t have, that gap grows more and more — that sows the seeds for discontent. Each and every time in human history where that has happened, revolution has occurred.

We don’t want that to happen in Canada. We’re a nation of peaceful people. We’re a nation built on immigrants. We’re a nation of openness and of multiculturalism, of awareness, of progressive policies.

We must govern for everybody and recognize that there are some in our society who have a bit too much — maybe some of them have earned it hard; some of them have just inherited it — and there are some who have just lost the lottery of life. It’s not like they knew they were going to be born into poverty. They just lost the lottery of life. Others might have been born and won the lottery of life. That doesn’t mean you’re a better or a worse person.

As legislators, in my view, it behooves us to recognize that we have a duty to ensure that society is stable, that we actually help those who need the help, and that we say to those who have some more: “You know what? Our society, collectively, is better if you give us a little bit more to help those who don’t, because we know what happens in human history if the elite go off over here and everyone else is down here.”

You might want to ask: “What happened in Russia?” Or you could talk about the French Revolution. You could talk about myriad examples like this around the world. This is not what I want to see British Columbia and Canada become.

Coming down to the direct quote from the speech. I want to read this, because to me…. I was blown away, to be blunt. I was very pleased to see this. Directly from the speech, it says this:

“A strong economy cannot be built on a foundation of rampant real estate speculation. It cannot be won in a race to the bottom, with minimum standards and fewer workplace protections. And it cannot be gained through windfall profits earned on the backs of low-wage workers.

[6:10 p.m.]

“Instead, a strong economy comes from good-paying jobs that raise family incomes and everyone’s standard of living. It is built with quality public services as a cornerstone, services that help B.C. grow, attract and keep its skilled workforce.

“A strong economy is rooted in competitiveness, a necessary ingredient for success in today’s global marketplace. And it is in harmony with government’s commitments to fight climate change and achieve meaningful reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

“These are the values that guide this government’s actions to build a sustainable economy that puts people first. The challenges we face — from worsening weather to global economic headwinds — make this work more urgent than ever.”

I’ll stop there and pause there and say that those words are remarkable. It is essentially saying, in the throne speech, that government gets what the challenges are. Then it moves on to say how it plans to deal with those challenges.

“As this government charts a new course to a low-carbon economy, powered by CleanBC, British Columbians can rest assured: not only will we weather these storms, we will create the conditions for people and industry to thrive.

“CleanBC is a critical part of this government’s strategy to grow a sustainable economy with good jobs and opportunities for people. It’s been one year since CleanBC was launched, and British Columbians are starting to see that the way to a cleaner, better future is by innovating and working together.”

The change that has happened in one year is remarkable, whether it be as simple as just saying: “Look at how many electric vehicles there are….” Now, you might say: “Oh, electric vehicles. Whatever.” That’s stimulating the economy. We have B.C. builders of electric vehicles.

We now have Harbour Air seeing the opportunity and seeing British Columbia with the signal that this government has sent, the signal that it sent to the world, that we want to be leaders in clean tech. Harbour Air — the first electric airplane in B.C. This is what you get.

We have Corvus building batteries now for Norwegian ships. We have Portable Electric building diesel generator replacements. Innovation in British Columbia is growing, and the single-biggest seed for that innovation is signals that governments can send saying: “We’re here to support you and nurture you.”

The creation of the innovation commissioner — one of my very dear platforms — has been very, very successful as well. If you track the additional moneys British Columbia is now levering out of Ottawa, we historically have been dreadful — and it falls squarely on the B.C. Liberals — at leveraging the pools of money that exist in Ottawa if you have matching funds here in British Columbia.

One of the first things, in discussions with the innovation commissioner, we talked about was ways to actually lever that. It’s happening now. That bodes well for innovation, and that bodes well for the B.C. economy.

It further says here…. Well, it said in the speech…. It talked about the innovation commissioner as well. Also, it talks about that the government is going to have a plastics action plan and a climate adaptation plan. It’s pretty clear that the government is taking this issue seriously and that it will work with business to promote B.C. businesses as competitive suppliers of low-carbon products. There’s a lot in those small words.

We know that there are consumers out there who want to buy products that are low carbon. We know there are businesses who want to be viewed as benefit companies, which the legislation that was passed by government…. Well, I guess it was my legislation that we all passed. These small signals actually have much greater influence and emphasis on what actually happens in our economy. We’re seeing that now.

We see that government has a potential here to actually stimulate. It’s mentioned in the throne speech that it plans to do that by saying: “Okay. We as government can’t tell you what to do unless we’re willing to model the leadership we expect in others.” Government is going to start using, where possible, B.C.-based engineered wood products in its construction.

Government could continue to advance this by focusing its procurement process on B.C. innovation in a diversity of areas, and I’m convinced that that will happen as we move ahead.

I don’t want to dwell on LNG. To be perfectly blunt, I will believe it when I see it.

[6:15 p.m.]

I know we’re having fights over the Coastal GasLink pipeline. I know people are touting LNG Canada and the, let’s say, $40 billion investment, which it really isn’t because most of that’s being built in Asia and brought up on tide line and then getting steel tariff exemptions, etc.

However, the market for LNG is in the dumps. Like, it doesn’t make fiscal sense right now, and I still will argue that you might get something at some point, but I wouldn’t be counting your pennies on getting any money from LNG. The deep-well credits, $3.2 billion accrued to be used against future royalties…. I mean, there are no royalties coming from natural gas in our province.

The construction of Site C, of course, means that we the ratepayers, not the ratepayers in Kelowna, mind you, because they’re with Fortis…. We the ratepayers in other parts of B.C. are going to end up paying 15 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity that we sell to LNG Canada for 5 cents and change a kilowatt hour. We know that there is going to be no LNG income tax act, so we know they’re going to get exemptions from carbon tax increases.

This scale of subsidy, in my view, is unacceptable. But even given that, I’ll stand here and say I don’t believe LNG will ever be delivered out of Kitimat, because the market simply will not be there. For these multi-billion-dollar companies, they kick the can — $1 billion here, $10 billion there. That’s the cost of doing business. Let’s see what actually happens down the road.

I’ve been to a number of natural resource forums over the years. I’ve been a strong proponent of mining in this province. But again, mining in this province, as articulated and realized in the throne speech…. We will never compete by just going in with a pickaxe and digging dirt out of the ground. We’ve got to be smarter. We get companies like MineSense doing that. We find ways and means of extracting ore in clean ways that use less energy, that use less water, that actually make us more able to reclaim the land. That could be done so more efficiently.

You can grow an economy by making it bigger, by building more stuff, or you can grow an economy by building the same amount of stuff more efficiently. That is where our success will lie, through efficiencies and cleanliness and exporting the knowledge we have developed here.

I come to B.C. Hydro, which was mentioned, albeit passingly, in the throne speech. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done in B.C. Hydro. Over the course of this session, I hope to use my question period times to focus on specific examples, in this regard, of the opportunities that are potentially lost, as B.C. Hydro seems to be a little bit of a behemoth that needs to be reined in, in some sense, to ensure that we actually allow competition, we allow innovation in the energy sector, and we allow the partnership of small projects, existing projects with users of energy as well.

Forestry. Another sector that was mentioned. I’m very pleased to see that the government recently got the settlement on Vancouver Island. That’s good news. Honestly, I think it’s very rich, again…. I mean, I don’t want to dis on the B.C. Liberals. I’m reacting to the comments I heard from the member for Kelowna West, who basically hurled abuse about the forest industry on the B.C. NDP. For heaven’s sake, we lost 30,000-something jobs. We’ve known mills were closing under their watch as well.

This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue that affects all of us. We need to put our collective minds together to think about how best to rejuvenate British Columbia’s forest industry. Is it really the tenure system? Does that really apply in the 21st century? I would suggest not. I would suggest that the tenure-licensing system has been the cause of the death of a lot of our forest industry. What we need to do is move to more of a temporary lease or more of a community-based approach to forest logging.

With that said, taken together, I’m absolutely thrilled to support this throne speech. I feel very pleased that some small part of that has been accomplished through the good work that was done through the collaboration that I have had and I know my former colleagues have had with a number of ministries.

In my case, I would like to thank the Minister of Finance, who I held the files for, the Ministry of Attorney General, the Premier of course, the Housing Minister, Health ministers, Energy and Mines, who I’m really excited about looking forward to working with on the innovation file.

[6:20 p.m.]

We’ve already started communication in that regard. I think this is a great appointment. The former Minister of Energy and Mines is moving to be the minister of innovation. I think that’s exactly what that ministry needs. We’ve already met and ready to go.

I thank you for your attention. I look forward to a positive vote on the throne speech.

Deputy Speaker: I now call on the member for Nanaimo.

S. Malcolmson: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Very good to see you in the chair.

Thank you to my colleague from Oak Bay–Gordon Head for doing a very nice big picture, and all the best to you and to your wife. We are wishing you the best for health.

I am going to speak very much from a Nanaimo perspective of, especially being back in the riding for the last two months, what I’m hearing and seeing on the ground and how encouraged I am about the progress we’ve been able to make over the last year that I’ve been in a position, an honour, to represent Nanaimo in this Legislature, and also to both look back on what has been achieved by this New Democrat government in the last 2½ years and the work that we hope to do on behalf of British Columbians in the year ahead.

Stronger public services and making life more affordable. Absolutely, the pieces that, in Nanaimo, we are hearing are deeply needed, and some of the work is well underway. Some encouraging pieces so far on the affordability picture for the whole province. Having eliminated medical services premiums, this is saving some families up to $1,800 a year. The last province in the country to charge MSP. We do still have people coming to the office, saying: “I didn’t get my bill this month.” We want everybody to know: no more bills.

Also extremely encouraged, having had a lot of letters of concern from constituents about the affordability of ICBC…. It’s well documented that the previous government used ICBC as a piggy bank, very much putting our public insurer into real precarity. Just very relieved last week to have the announcement that moving to a care model and away from a litigation model is going to drop fees an average of 20 percent next year. ICBC fees are frozen this year and dropping 20 percent and doing a better job of honing in on exactly what kind of care victims of car crashes need.

In my own community, with three ferry terminals that I represent, the impact of freezing ferry fares on the major routes, rolling them back 15 percent on the minor routes and restoring the seniors discount is hugely important. Many allies all up and down the coast…. When I was a representative in local government, we worked very hard to let the previous government know that their user-pay approach to a public service was having calamitous impacts on coastal communities. There is a real grassroots movement that I am so relieved has been heard and is having real impact.

Raising the minimum wage already and, by 2021, its reaching $15.20 an hour is, again, an overdue action and something that brings British Columbia up into comparison with the rest of the country. People are starting to see results, for me at home and provincewide, with more money in their banks at the end of every month, in their bank accounts. But we recognize, absolutely, that there is an awful lot of ground to make up and much more to do.

I’m going to focus on…. Out of a whole lot of important issues, I’m going to talk about affordable housing, mental health and addictions support, child care, better supports for our hospital in Nanaimo, paid domestic violence leave, action on ocean plastics and then just closing with some of the reconciliation work that’s being done with Snuneymuxw First Nation back at home.

The housing crisis is well documented, and especially for Nanaimo, having seen the overflow of impacts of the affordability crisis that hit Vancouver especially hard: rampant speculation, money laundering, and a lack of investment by the previous government. We are starting to see some results, but it’s another area where the investments made are just on the verge of bearing fruit. Provincewide, 23,000 new affordable homes are underway or complete. I’m very encouraged to hear, in the throne speech, of more security being given to protect renters against renovictions. That’s work that has to happen. We’re hearing about it all the time.

[6:25 p.m.]

In Nanaimo, other than the temporary housing — the trailer housing that was brought in to deal with the court-ordered evacuation of the 300-strong tent city…. Nanaimo’s supportive housing is not modular housing. Although we’ve had huge successes all through the province with the investments that our government has made, Nanaimo didn’t get those because we didn’t at that time have a council that had created a path that could preplan.

The supportive housing is being…. It’s better than living in a tent city, and our community could not handle those impacts, but I absolutely acknowledge that impacts on neighbours from both the homelessness crisis and some of the collateral impacts of the modular housing are still something we’re trying to get a grip on. We’re very grateful to the folks working on the front line, but we absolutely need to bring more supports. I am working with RCMP and with city hall and all the partners we can draw on within this government and outside to make a difference.

We are going to see some relief, though, this coming year. We have almost 500 affordable housing units that are under construction and have been for the last two years, but we haven’t yet had people move in, except for one small development that’s for middle-income people and not really going to get at the base of the affordability crisis. But Nanaimo folks know that construction is happening in partnership with all kinds of NGOs and churches over the whole of the city, and we’re going to have a lot of good news as people get to move into those homes.

[Mr. Speaker in the chair.]

Uplands Drive. Buttertubs Marsh. Rosehill Road. Seafield Crescent. Estevan Road. Bowen Road. Those are all underway right now, and we are going to have more announcements coming as we work closely with the city with their next wave of zoning. These are a whole range. You can talk with me or look on the B.C. Housing website about each specific project.

Also, a great deal of work is being done by my colleague the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions. There’s never been one in British Columbia before. Again, a tremendous backlog of work to do. Because this crisis was allowed to grow to such an extent, it’s hard for us to see on the ground that we are making progress, but we do know that provincewide, our actions have saved 4,700 lives — people that have not fallen to overdose. If you are alive, you still have a chance of going through addictions treatment and getting the mental health support that you need.

The Pathway to Hope, which is this government’s ten-year plan for mental health and addictions care, is just a year into its work. We’ve allocated $322 million over three years to combat the overdose crisis. Funding community action teams. Nanaimo’s was the very first to be funded. Providing the First Nations Health Authority with over $20 million to support First Nations organizations. Expanding Foundry to 19 communities altogether. Nanaimo had a very strong application that was not accepted, but we’re certainly pushing for further expansion of that program so that Nanaimo can be included in that youth-oriented care model.

A groundbreaking announcement, just quite recently, on 24-7 mental health support on campus, something that universities, Vancouver Island University Student Union in particular, advocated for, especially in the wake of a tragic suicide on campus just last year. I really raise my hands to the minister for stepping out on this one, now that we are removing the taboo around asking for help, to know that there is going to be a dedicated free help line and that we’re training more and more people to work in that field.

A new $10 million announced just last year to support low- or no-cost community counselling programs across B.C. Again, I’m advocating to have Nanaimo included in that model.

Much work to do. More underway. I think this year ahead, we’re really going to see some of these investments bear fruit.

[6:30 p.m.]

I want to move to child care. This is the first new social program added by any government in a generation. We are seeing the results of it in our community — to have parents tell me how much it’s changed their lives, to be able to find child care spaces and to be able to afford them. The impact on women, in particular, to be able to get into the marketplace…. Employers, the chamber of commerce all say they’re happier when we invest better in child care.

For Nanaimo alone, the part of Nanaimo that I represent, which is the centre, 123 new child care spaces have been created — $7 million back into the pockets of families in the area that I represent through reduced fees, and all together, $11 million invested in Nanaimo alone and more in my colleague’s ridings to the north and south of me.

We were able to visit a couple of weeks ago, myself and the member for Nanaimo–North Cowichan, with the Nanaimo Innovation Academy to be able to see their two levels of care — their infant child care and the programming that’s happening on the main floor — and to talk with the child care workers about how proud they are of their field and how much it has been a relief for them to have the dollar wage enhancement that we’ve added already and what good news it is that we’ve added a second dollar wage enhancement. We need to make this a sustainable field for them to work in.

New training spaces at Vancouver Island University — extremely exciting. New spaces created at the Nanaimo Child Development Centre. Some of our institutions we’re so proud of have all been very strong partners.

One that I want to particularly salute…. Just on Friday night, I was so happy to be at the retirement party of Ian Kalina, who’s the long-time executive director of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Central Vancouver Island. He’s an amazing community advocate. We’re going to miss him. We wish him well. We sure gave him a good send-off. To be able to hear from both the child care workers and from the youth that have grown up in this program…. They themselves are now child care workers and working at the boys and girls club. It’s a very sweet intergenerational testimonial about how important the institution has been and how important it has been to our community.

They have ten child care centres in Nanaimo alone — huge delivery. They’ve been carrying the load on this vital community and social support program, and now our government, I’m so proud, is stepping up more deeply in partnership.

Okay. The hospital in Nanaimo I want to talk about — 120 percent capacity almost all the time. It serves a huge area. We are working hard to take the pressure off in a bunch of new ways. Provincewide, the B.C. government has moved on 13 different hospital projects and has opened, I think, 12 urgent primary care centres, which can take the pressure off hospitals. One of those is in Nanaimo. It’s at the Medical Arts Centre in Port Place Mall, adding more than 14 full-time staff, health care staff, in a team-based approach. That is helping.

We’re also making a lot of investments at the hospital. Already a new intensive care unit, something long overdue and that’s going to save lives, is being built right now. We’ve invested over $5 million in a new MRI machine — a second one. Our deciding as a government to run MRIs 24 hours a day has made a huge impact on diagnosis. The faster that people can hear what their illness is, the faster they can get treatment. We know we’ve got more work to do on wait times, but we are really chipping away. To add a second MRI is going to make a huge difference.

Another piece in Nanaimo that’s also taking the pressure off…. Last year we invested over $100,000 to keep the CODE Dental Clinic open. It had had to close. It’s now reopened. This year we’re funding, along with all other dental clinics, $20,000 a year. To have people be able to access dental care can prevent more serious illnesses down the line, but it also is a real dignity piece. It’s much easier to get a job if you’ve got your teeth in good shape. Hands raised to John Howard Society for doing the good work with that fantastic facility.

[6:35 p.m.]

Members of Nanaimo, please write to me with your ideas about further health care investment priorities for Nanaimo General Hospital. I know a lot of you are writing directly to the Health Minister, but I promise you, I will be a good advocate to get in front of the Health Minister, because he’s being lobbied by every other riding that’s also experienced underinvestment in the health sector over the last decade and a half. I’m hearing suggestions for cancer care, better service close to home and a heart clinic. There’s a whole range of pieces. Please do let me know your priorities. We are working hard to try to make that next wave of investment on top of that which we’ve already done.

Another area: domestic violence leave and sexual violence leave. When I was a Member of Parliament and had the women’s equality assignment federally, I was very struck by the impact of the Manitoba NDP government four years ago having the first-in-the-country paid leave for domestic violence.

We heard at committee from women who said: “In my most terrible time, when I had taken the step to leave an abusive relationship, put myself and my family in peril….” The point when you decide to leave is often when you and your children are the most vulnerable. They said, for one, their workplace was sometimes the most stable place for them, and they actually were very motivated to get back to work as soon as they could. But to know that their job would be held for them, and to know that they could take that time to just have a handful of days to rent a new place and get their kids settled, might make all the difference in them moving themselves and their children to a safer place.

Our government, a year ago, said we will have leave for victims of sexual violence and domestic violence, intimate partner violence, and just yesterday in the throne speech it was confirmed that, thanks to the work of the Parliamentary Secretary for Gender Equity and the Labour Minister, that’s now five days paid leave. I’m very proud and very grateful to all the organizations that lobbied the labour movement, and to people that participated in the consultation to let us know that that is a priority.

In my own community, our NDP executive wrote up a resolution saying that this should be a paid leave. They took it to convention. Jordan Crawford wrote the resolution, took it to convention. Lauren Semple gave a fantastic presentation on the floor. It was adopted by the convention unanimously. I’m so sorry that Jordan and his wife, Hannah Crawford, couldn’t be here yesterday to hear that announcement from the Lieutenant-Governor because it was a real affirmation of their activism. I’m so proud of Nanaimo and also of the young activists that are putting policy proposals on the floor and seeing the change.

We’re also going to work — it was just announced in the throne speech yesterday — to adopt a plastics plan for British Columbia. A phenomenal response from the public saying that yes, they do want to go deeper on expanding deposit legislation and talking about ways to better manage single-use plastics.

It fits with the work that I was asked by the Premier to do as his special adviser on marine debris, to talk to communities across British Columbia’s coast about ocean plastic pollution — abandoned vessels, Styrofoam pollution, old fishing nets, all forms of marine-based plastics and debris that end up on shorelines. That could be from fish farms, from shellfish farms, from old marinas and docks that have broken up. I got to be out on a remote beach cleanup in the area that my friend, the Minister for Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation…. We got to pick up Styrofoam and other stuff off the beach with Surfrider, based in Tofino.

I just have to say the deepest thanks for the inspiring conversations we had all summer. There is a whole new wave of environmental activists who are deeply articulate and entrepreneurial. It’s not just enough for them to collect the debris that’s piling up on the beaches. They’re looking for new markets. They’re looking for new products to innovate and not just have the results of community cleanups end up in the landfill, but they are innovating to do good recycling and move ahead on, you know, chipping old neoprene wetsuits and turning them into yoga mats, collecting cigarette butts off parks and turning them into plastic lumber and park benches.

[6:40 p.m.]

I do not want to underestimate the scope of the problem. I heard from people on Lasqueti Island in particular, where there’s a certain orientation of beaches that are having currents and winds and storms just decimating their beaches. They showed me photos of kids shovelling broken-up Styrofoam. It looked like they were in a snowdrift, and this was a summer beach on Lasqueti Island.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. The public concern is extremely high. More than anything, I express gratitude to the community members who gave me their ideas.

If anybody in the public searches marine debris B.C., you’ll find our website that has our report on what we’ve heard and the list of recommendations the public has given us. Now we have to do the work of sorting what’s federal, what’s provincial, what can we do with our recycling tools to minimize the amount of pollution that’s out there and prevent it from happening in the first place and then find better markets for recycling it, at the end of the day.

Then the very final piece I wanted to say is just how proud I am of Snuneymuxw First Nation. Monday night I was at the inauguration of their newly elected councillors: Darren Good, Kate Good, Regan Seward, Isaac Thomas and Bill Yoachim. Amazing compliment to the Chief and council of Snuneymuxw. The Chief was elected two years ago with the other half of the council. Great continuity. The public has asked the same people, mostly, to carry on. It’s a great compliment to their work.

At this time of reconciliation — and there are some very hard conversations happening in our province — some great prospect for change and some very tough, wicked problems that haven’t been tackled before because of their complexity. Snuneymuxw Chief and council have given me very clear direction to keep focused on the work at home, and that is what I’m doing. There’s a lot of reconciliation to tackle right in Nanaimo.

This council has manifested so much just in their last two years. They’re working on a really innovative way of…. Their park managers at what we used to call Newcastle Island — it’s now Saysutshun — have opened the most beautiful school you have ever seen — the first Indigenous school that has been opened, as I understand, in partnership with a school district.

So school district 68, good on you. The Quam Qwum School is beautiful. Just opened. They have a brand-new health centre that I got to tour on Thursday. No, on Monday. It’s been a long week.

They’re new partners in a new hotel. We’ve been waiting for years for a new hotel to be built in Nanaimo, right on the footstep of the conference centre. Snuneymuxw is one of the investor partners.

They are hosting Tribal Journeys this summer, which is a huge exercise. From Alaska down to California, people will be paddling. They’ll all be landing on Snuneymuxw’s beaches.

We’re working hard on a reconciliation agreement between the province and Snuneymuxw. That’s work I’m deeply committed to, to move that along. They’ve also secured a federal commitment to finally transfer the Department of National Defence lands from the federal government back to Snuneymuxw, as it should be.

Most generously, they hosted what we think is the first time in Canada that a university president has been installed in a longhouse. Dr. Deb Saucier, who is Vancouver Island University’s new president, was installed in a deeply moving ceremony just late last year, which was a huge celebration and a testament to Snuneymuxw’s generosity. I’m grateful to the council and to Chief Wyse for showing that leadership and showing us what can happen when we partner together.

I’ll finish with a thank you for the time you’ve given for me to talk about the throne speech and the community that I serve and how encouraged I am. Despite an economic slowdown globally and some real challenges on the trade front on many levels, British Columbia’s economy is the strongest in the country. We have the best credit rating. We have the best jobs rate. We are making a difference in just 2½ years, making up a lot of lost ground.

I’m honoured to represent Nanaimo and work with the many partners to fulfil that full promise of making life more affordable, investing in a sustainable economy, protecting the environment and making life more affordable for the citizens that we serve.

J. Rustad: It’s always a pleasure and an honour to have the opportunity to speak in this House on behalf of my constituents at Nechako Lakes.

[6:45 p.m.]

Nechako Lakes is a very interesting riding. Lots of things are going on in that riding, but I think it’s fair to say that the people of Nechako Lakes probably found the throne speech somewhat disappointing.

Before I start, I just wanted to mention a few people, as I always like to try to do in throne speech and budget responses in particular.

To my lovely wife, who is without…. As everybody here knows, it’s tough to do this work. You’re away a lot. She’s been very supportive. I just wanted to say thanks and tell her I love her — to Kim, for her support and her effort — as well as to my parents.

My mom celebrated her 98th birthday on the 30th of December. It’s quite remarkable. My dad is 92. He’ll be 93 — hopefully he gets there — in April. They’re still living in their own house, but they’re living in their own house because my oldest brother happened to retire and has decided to take on giving them full-time care to be able to keep them in the house. But I’ll tell you, what a difference it makes for parents to be able to stay in their home.

I know many families are not so lucky to be able to have that sort of situation, to be able to be supported by family. That presents a real challenge, and it presents a challenge for many of my constituents in Nechako Lakes as well. Having aging and having to wait and having to try to find a place to be able to stay…. That they’ll have care within the riding, that is a challenge.

The Minister of Health was kind enough to call me on a Friday night to say that there would be an announcement on the Saturday. The announcement was for a replacement hospital in Fort St. James, which will have additional long-term care beds. I think that’s a good thing. This is one of those projects that the people of Nechako Lakes, particularly the people of Fort St. James, will be very appreciative of, that this is coming forward. So I wanted to be able to recognize government making that commitment.

Now, my understanding is that it’s not going to be a line item in the budget. So we’ll see how the budget works through and whether or not the funding will be there for it. Certainly, that will be something I’ll be holding government to task on to make sure the support and the funding is there for that. But on the surface, I want to give credit where credit is due and thank government for moving that project along. There are a lot of people within the community that have been pushing for this for a long time.

It’s curious, though, that the…. Maybe this is a good opportunity to be able to correct the Premier, in his comment, when he said that the people there have been waiting for 12 years. This has been on the desired wish list for way longer than 12 years.

Mayor and council, as well as the regional health authorities, recognized that Burns Lake would be the first hospital to be done, which was completed a number of years ago now. It went forward in 2015. So Fort St. James was the next one on the list for the regional health district, which is my riding. So I’m happy that’s going on. But just wanted to make sure that the Premier had that information right, that it wasn’t 12 years but a shorter window of time since it became the number one priority for the regional health district.

My riding has faced a lot of interesting challenges, and there is a lot that I want to go on with regards to forestry, but I think what I will do is save the comments I’ve got for forestry for the following day, when I have a chance to be able to speak at more length, given the length of time we’ve got.

I do want to just quickly take a moment to talk about agriculture. The throne speech talked a lot about agricultural land and the work that they’re doing around agricultural land, but there was one very important component that was missing. That was the farmer. Whether it was the bills that were brought in, in the past — 52 and 15 — where farmer is even taken right out of the bill, not even recognized as a person, which I think speaks to why it wasn’t talked about in the throne speech. And it’s very unfortunate to hear that.

In my riding, I will hold town hall meetings or committee meetings or meetings where I try to bring out some people. You know, we’ll get 15-20 people, maybe 30 people, out to engage and have conversations on forestry and other things. So I held one of these before Christmas, and 70 farmers came out to this meeting, because they’re irate and worried. They’re very concerned about changes to the ALC and the approach this government is taking. It’s a very legitimate concern.

When you look at the area of Nechako Lakes, it’s not like the Lower Mainland. It’s not like the Okanagan. It is a different zone, if you want to call it that. These people did away with two zones, but that’s fine. It is a different area of the province.

[6:50 p.m.]

In that area, it is common to have your parents and your grandparents living on the farm while you are trying to work and operate the farm and have that second home or even a third home, as multiple families — the children, multiple brothers and sisters — will move and have a place of residence on their property. They can’t operate like that anymore. For many of those families, it’s got them quite irate.

Now, I understand there are changes that have been talked about and looked at, as considering possible changes. But this is how families have operated for years. This is how farms have been built for years.

I started off talking about my parents, being able to look after my parents and the family being able to look after the parents, with my brother retiring, and meeting the care that they need. These are families that grew up and that have built up the land, that have provided food for the area, that are growing food today, whether it’s through ranching and other things….

They want to be able to look after their parents on the farm. Their parents want to retire and stay on the farm, just like what we’re doing for my family and my parents. They’re not being allowed to do that. That’s not right — not to mention that, even with those additional beds that will be going into Fort St. James, there are not enough long-term care facilities, long-term care beds to be able to keep people in their own communities.

This is something that I really hope government will take a long and serious look at. It was very unfortunate, when listening to the throne speech, that there was no recognition of that error that was made by this government and the stress that that has put on the ranchers and the farmers for Nechako Lakes, as well as those right around the province.

There’s much more that I do want to talk about, but recognizing the time, I reserve my right to be able to continue and move adjournment of the debate.

J. Rustad moved adjournment of debate.

Motion approved.

Hon. M. Farnworth moved adjournment of the House.

Motion approved.

Mr. Speaker: This House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

The House adjourned at 6:52 p.m.