Q&A
Q: Housing affordability is the top concern of Lower Mainlanders in this election. The $400 renters rebate you are offering works out to $33 per month. How will that make a difference?
A: The housing renter rebate is just one part of a multi-faceted plan to make life more affordable for British Columbians. We’ve been raising alarm bells about the high cost of housing in British Columbia for three years, and what we got back from the BC Liberals was stone faces – no desire to take action to stop the flood of speculative money coming into the marketplace and driving up the cost of homes here in Metro Vancouver. The consequence of that is that we have seen a $600,000 increase in the cost of a single-family home between 2014 and 2016.
If you can’t find a place to buy, you should be able to find a place to rent, but we can’t do that either. Fifteen thousand British Columbians are on the wait-list of BC Housing looking for affordable housing. We brought in the renters rebate to match the homeowners grant. If homeowners can get a break for owning a home, we feel that renters deserve a break as well. It’s $400 – it can go a long way to help people put a few more dollars in their pocket while they’re trying to find a place to live. We also want to close the loopholes in the Residential Tenancy Act that allows bad landlords to make it extremely difficult for tenants by making sure that they have to stick to leases.
Q: You want to raise taxes for those making $150,000 or more as well as raising corporate taxes. Are those the only tax increases you plan to implement?
A: We tabled a fully costed, three-year fiscal plan based on the numbers that were provided by the Ministry of Finance. We plan to roll back the millionaire tax break that Christy Clark and the BC Liberals gave the wealthiest people in British Columbia – $1 billion over the term in government – and give some relief to those people that are paying about $1,000 more a year as a result of the choices the BC Liberals made: ICBC rates, hydro rates, ferry fares, tuition fees.
Wherever government could put their hand in your pocket, the BC Liberals have done that. We believe that a modest increase in our corporate income tax, which would match Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, is reasonable.
Q: Christy Clark said you had not once raised the softwood lumber issue in the legislature in three years in question period. What is your response?
A: It’s a bit rich for someone who has been absent from the softwood lumber debate for two and a half years to now – 13 days before an election – to somehow say she cares about forest workers. There are 30,000 fewer forest workers working in British Columbia today than there were when the BC Liberals came to power; 150 mills have closed on the BC Liberal watch, and now Christy Clark expects you to believe her that she cares about the jobs that are at risk while she was chasing LNG [liquefied natural gas] and not focusing on our foundational forest industry.
Q: You have described yourself as mercurial. Do you have an anger management issue?
A: No, of course not. I’m an Irish descendant. I’m passionate. I got involved in public life because I wanted to make life better for people.
Q: Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver accused you of playing “both sides of the money issue” by accusing the Liberals of being compromised by corporate donations while accepting large union donations yourself. If Clark can’t be trusted, how can you be trusted?
A: We, over the past 10 years in the official Opposition, have put forward legislation six times to get big money out of politics, to ban union and corporate unions, to put a cap on individual donations, to put a cap on donations from outside of British Columbia. The BC Liberals voted against it. I believe that we need to get big money out of politics, and the first order of business of an NDP government is to do just that.
Q: You are on record as being opposed to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, the Site C dam and the George Massey Tunnel replacement projects. What do you say to the people counting on those jobs?
A: Certainly the Kinder Morgan expansion is not in the interest of British Columbia.
A sevenfold increase in tanker traffic coming out of our major metropolitan centre, through the Gulf Islands and up the Strait of Juan de Fuca is not in the public interest.
With respect to Site C, I believe that every project that BC Hydro has done since the 1980s has had to go to our independent BC Utilities Commission to get independent assessments and approval. Christy Clark said no to that and is ramming a nine-, 10-, 11-billion-dollar dam without anyone saying it’s a good idea but BC Liberals.
I don’t think that’s acceptable, particularly in light of the fact that hydro rates have gone up 87% on the BC Liberal watch. We have a whole host of alternatives that we could be investing in that are cheaper and will serve us far better in the long term.
When it comes to the Massey bridge, I want to follow the mayors’ plan, the 10-year plan, to build transit and transportation in the Lower Mainland. And every mayor in the region, save one, thinks that the Massey tunnel replacement is not the right solution to that problem. We need to deal with congestion there, but we have much more pressing issues.
The Pattullo Bridge is past its life cycle. In five years it needs to be replaced, and the Liberals have ignored that.
Q: You have pledged to phase out Medical Services Plan (MSP) premiums. What is your plan to replace that revenue?
A: Our plan is to eliminate half the MSP premiums by January 2018 and put in place a blue-ribbon panel to look at employers and employees and others involved in collection of MSP and eliminate it by the end of our first term.
Q: What is you central message to voters?
A: Do you want four more years of increased costs, higher MSP premiums, higher hydro rates, 42% increases in your ICBC costs, a break on tolls but not really a break on tolls?
We’ve made the commitment to make life more affordable in British Columbia.
We’ve made a commitment to make sure that the services you count on are there for when you need it – public education, public health care, seniors care and $10 a day child care, a program that will make sure that women can get back into the workforce. It’s good for women, it’s good for families and it’s good for the economy.
