PENTICTON – Homelessness, the carbon tax, and the collapse of B.C.’s forestry industry are expected to emerge as hot issues during this week’s annual convention of the Union of British Columbia Municipalities.
At the top of this week’s official agenda are homelessness and the inseparable problem of providing treatment to “dually diagnosed” people who are both drug addicted and mentally ill. UBCM chair Robert Hobson has released a policy paper calling on federal and provincial governments to implement cohesive housing strategies. And two of the top three resolutions to be considered first by the UBCM membership on Wednesday morning are a call for the province to expedite provision of care for dually diagnosed, and a strenuous call for national and provincial housing strategies.
But as is often the case at UBCM — an ambitious organization that attempts to address the needs of wildly diverse municipalities spread across a large province — the hottest issues are shunted to the back-end of the week-long agenda, or are brought forward from the floor.
A rebellion against B.C.’s new carbon tax will likely hit the convention floor later on Wednesday, in the form of no less than 11 resolutions lobbed into play by representatives form Grand Forks, Williams Lake, Fort St. John, Smithers, Quesnel and rural districts including Northern Rockies and Kitimat-Stikine. These and other rural governments are giving voice to complaints that Premier Campbell’s carbon tax is inequitable, and will hit their rural communities much harder than urban areas such as Vancouver.
Also brewing to a boil are complaints about the province’s handling of forestry issues. The collapsed US housing market and the pine beetle have delivered a double-whammy to forestry-dependent communities throughout B.C.’s interior, and way-past-angry local officials are here to voice their complaints to Forestry Minister Rich Coleman on Wednesday and Thursday.
Provincial NDP leader Carole James is expected to fan the flames of those concerns in an address Thursday, and Premier Campbell is expected to attempt to douse them by distributing new mountains of cash in a speech Friday.
Representatives of most of British Columbia’s more than 180 local governments are squeezed into the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre. There weren’t enough small meeting spaces to host the hundreds of one-on-one meetings these representatives are seeking with provincial officials, so the province set up a small village of shiny construction trailers in the parking lot.
We media types are not allowed in the “Little Victoria” encampment. So this Penticton parking lot has come to resemble the world around us in at least one way: If you want to find a journalist, look in the bar; if you're looking for a Minister, try the trailer park.
Monte Paulsen is editor of The Hook.
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Skywalker
3 years ago
Hot issues?
There has not been a hot issue on the floor of the UBCM since Campbell took over. No matter how bad things get in some of these communities the liberal farm team goes to convention every year at gives Campbell a pat on the back and rub shoulders with their political buddies. They make the appropriate noises at home to get themselves elected and then are quiet at convention. Now if the NDP were in power there would be "hot issues" created out of dead horses.
mwatkins
3 years ago
In 2004 at the UBCM...
In 2004 at the UBCM convention Campbell made a 1.5 Billion (hot enough?) dollar promise to fix B.C.'s seismic-at-risk schools.
Its 2008, another election cycle is spinning up, and the problem has barely been addressed, despite whatever the bobblehead Shirley Bond has to say on the matter. As of 2006/2007 school year not a single BC Seismic Mitigation Program approval was given for schools in Vancouver. With almost 100 at risk schools in Vancouver alone, and hundreds and hundreds province wide, two things are certain:
1. Upgrading / replacing (most of them) is not happening nearly fast enough. Seattle, for example, with a problem roughly of the same scope as Vancouver's, has basically finished their seismic work within a decade. Almost half a decade later and we'll have barely made a dent. Its not acceptable.
2. 1.5 billion was never enough to do the job and most certainly, with today's costs and future inflation, isn't going forward.