With a lack of public addiction treatment beds 鈥� only six in Campbell River to serve the north Island north of Nanaimo 鈥� what will your party do to address the lack of capacity?
The lack of public addiction treatment beds on the North Island is absolutely critical. It's not just treatment for addictions. It's also mental health treatment. That's in a bit of free fall and collapse in our community - the problem has grown so quickly. The Comox Valley Recovery Center is not able to handle these new issues, because you've got people with severe mental health issues, underlying addictions and brain damage potentially. So we're committed to building out regional facilities both for addiction treatment, which needs to be more of an on-demand model like Alberta.
We do not have that here right now. We have a three to six-month wait for treatment. Realistically, that's a death sentence to people that are really suffering in the streets. So I think that's, I don't think that's partisan anymore. I think that would get all-party support because it's absolutely chaos.
Every year, temperature records are broken throughout the province and the forest fire season appears to be getting worse and longer. What does your party see as the best way for carbon reduction, and what goals will you aim to strive for in helping the province and Island hit those goals?
So I think our focus is different than a couple of the other parties.
The carbon tax has been in place now for over a decade, and it's proven that it doesn't drive down. actual emissions, right? So I think we need to be more pragmatic in our approach and look at better forest management, specifically as it relates to forest fires. There's areas in the interior where the natural forest fire cycle is every five or 15 years, and we've been suppressing those fires for so long now that when we do have these major blazes, which are a part of the natural cycle, they are hotter, they're creating their own microclimates.
So what we need to do is make sure we're doing controlled burns around areas where there's structures and you have those interface fires to make sure that they don't provide more fuel when they come through. We need to go back to a more managed system of allowing the natural cycle to take place in areas where we're able to. Realistically, we're never going to stop forest fires.
They're a natural thing but we do need to do a far better job of timberland management as it relates to forest fires.
While there has been an increase in rental housing construction in the Comox Valley, there continues to be a lack of affordable housing. What detailed actions will your party take to increase affordable housing stock here?
Right now the permitting time at every level of our regional government, some are better than others and I'm not pointing fingers, but we've put on so many more regulations that I don't know why we have a building code anymore.
So when we talk about driving up housing costs, we need to look at this holistically. Step code changes have increased the cost but is the additional efficiency worth it, especially in this climate where you're not getting that benefit?
We need to be pragmatic about those solutions. And we also need to focus on under-market housing, sub-market housing. Lots and lots of what were affordable rentals in town now are turning over. We really need to encourage non-profits and others like that. We Can Shelter is the perfect example of a fantastic solution that's quick to deploy and gives people a safe place. And we need to think outside of the box when it comes to under-market housing and not just focus on BC Housing builds which have been slow to get out of the gate and ultimately haven't realized a lot of affordability at that really low end.
The area around the Connect Centre in Courtenay continues to face issues and there have been reported increases of crime in the surrounding neighbourhood. The proposed Braidwood Complex aims to address these issues, but has faced pushback from some neighbours. Do you agree with the Braidwood Complex and its location, and how will you aim to make it work effectively? If not, how will you address these issues in its absence?
I have a couple of issues with the Braidwood project specifically. The first one is that even if we built 1,000 overnight shelter beds today, they'd be filled by the weekend. So if we're out of step with the neighbouring communities, in terms of how we're addressing this issue, you actually end up having an outsized issue in your community which is one of the things we're seeing even here in town. We have an extremely compassionate community. But the result is it's very easy to live here if you were unhoused at the moment.
But the Braidwood project specifically - 132, very minimally staffed, wet facilities where they have active use going on. With Phase 2 proposed as 40 treatment beds, makes absolutely no sense. That's akin to having an AA meeting above a bar.
If we want to actually rehabilitate people, we need to get them into a safe space where they can do that outside of the very culture that's driving these addiction issues. So we need to be more practical in these solutions.
You're just creating a corridor that's going to be problematic in a residential community and I just can't support that. I feel there are solutions and we need to be focused on treatment. and rehabilitation and removing people from that lifestyle, not just offering warehouses.
School District 71 has policies and resources that create a supportive and inclusive environment for students. Will your government do anything to change or limit SD71鈥檚 ability to use these policies and resources?
This is a very contentious issue that I think distracts from the real issues we're having in schools in terms of learning outcomes, tight budgets, and lack of educational assistance, but at the end of the day, we need to strengthen anti-bullying legislation and I feel that the policies that we're currently focused on now, are really a distraction.
They become divisive for no reason. I wrote an article to the paper several, a year ago effectively saying that all sides needed to calm down on this issue because what's happening is we're not talking about the real problems teachers are facing. The real staffing issues and educational assistants are effectively being paid less than a living wage. And the impact that's having on classrooms needs to be the topic of discussion.
