Sonia Furstenau on What Must Change in BC

Asked what she would do with British Columbia’s unexpected $5-billion budget surplus, Green Leader Sonia Furstenau quickly runs through half a dozen priorities.

Her list starts with introducing public health measures to better prevent illness from airborne viruses like COVID, raising disability and social assistance rates to reduce poverty, increasing the availability of non-market housing and creating a network of community health centres.

She would also introduce conservation financing to match the federal government’s recent promise of $55 million to protect old-growth forests in the province, take steps to build provincial food security and immediately increase the regulated safe supply of drugs to keep people with addictions alive.

“These priorities, they’re big intersecting and overlapping issues,” Furstenau said in an interview in her office in early December. “That’s where a vision of where we’re trying to get to really helps, because you can measure your solution you’re putting forward based on ‘does this get us to the place we are envisioning for the province?’”

Her own vision includes making sure people’s needs are met so that they are able to thrive, that natural systems are healthy and able to help people be healthy, that communities are connected and have equal access to services, and that provincial institutions and the government are trustworthy.

While Premier David Eby has made a string of announcements about housing, health care and public safety since he took over in November, it’s unclear how they connect to each other, Furstenau said.

“It would be very helpful to hear from the premier what his vision is and, as he’s making announcements, to connect them to this bigger picture of where he wants this province to go,” she said. “The best announcements are the ones that hit all of your goals.”

Furstenau, who represents Cowichan Valley, leads a Green caucus of two in the 87-seat B.C. legislature. While the party failed to make gains in the 2020 election held during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a better showing than might have been expected when then-premier John Horgan called an early vote contrary to the province’s fixed election date law.

Since the election Furstenau has been critical of the government’s approach to the pandemic, especially as measures to combat COVID-19’s spread have been relaxed.

The government is failing to implement even simple measures that would help, Furstenau said.

“Public health has historically always been about education and tools,” she said. “What I’d really like to see is education on airborne viruses, including COVID, education on how to avoid transmission, a focus on transparency with data, not just in terms of in the health-care sector, but data around absentee rates from schools, for example.”

When there are strains on public systems, such as large numbers of children being absent for school or needing medical care, the province needs to have a very clearly defined action plan, she said.

“At a time like this, widely distributing high quality masks, making them available in every classroom, every library and every store. Just provide the tools and don’t try to fit the response into a narrative of ‘B.C.’s doing better than everywhere else.’ Just be straight up. Where are we and what are the tools that can reduce illness in our province?”

In shared public spaces like classrooms there should be more attention to monitoring air quality and taking steps like introducing air filtration to improve it, Furstenau said. “It’s not enough to say ‘we’ve got ventilation systems.’ Measure the air quality and make sure it’s as clean as it can possibly be.”

Doing so would have multiple benefits, she added. “Clean air is good for kids. Clean air is really good for kids when we are in fire seasons. Clean air is really good for kids when we are in high virus seasons.”

Provincial health officer Bonnie Henry has in the past compared the relaxing of pandemic measures to taking off a raincoat when it stops raining.

That offers the public a false reassurance, Furstenau says. “We actually need accurate weather reports,” she said. “We need accurate and timely reporting of the level of illness, the burden of illness, the level of absences in schools.”

Instead much of the information that’s available to the public is anecdotal, she said, giving the example of the strain on children’s hospitals, difficulties getting medical care and some tragic outcomes. Then there was the late November closure of the school on Mayne Island because 75 per cent of the students were sick, as were several teachers and staff.

“We only know that because the school put out a public notice, not because we are getting information from Island Health, or public health or the school districts,” she said. “We’re getting information directly from the school saying ‘our school’s closed now because too many kids are sick’... we’re relying on the anecdotal, when we need the official weather report.”

Furstenau also criticized the direction Eby has taken on the wider health-care system since becoming premier, saying they’ve been small stopgap measures rather than big fixes.

“They’re not telling us about a vision like we have been promoting, of community health centres, public infrastructure being created that doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses can create their health-care teams… meeting the needs of their communities.”

There are examples of communities creating centres like that, she said, but they need to be scaled up across the province in a way that creates a foundation for universal health care and moves away from a model where primary care is provided through a bunch of disconnected small businesses.

Similarly, Furstenau said, the government’s housing bills addressed some specific issues, but didn’t amount to a vision for how to deal with the housing crisis. “They don’t talk about how do we ensure that that human right of housing is actually met in this province,” she said. “I would argue we don’t meet that human right unless we create enough non-market housing.”

It’s entirely possible for governments to do big, great things, Furstenau said. “But there needs to be vision, leadership, and there needs to be a way to bring people along, create trust, and to do that you need to be transparent, you need to be accountable,” she said. “You need to say what you’re trying to do, why you’re trying to do it, how you’re going to measure success.”

In the announcements so far and the truncated NDP leadership race, Eby has yet to set out that kind of vision or build that kind of trust, she said.

Nor does she trust the premier to keep his word — repeated many times now without equivocation — to stick to the fixed election date. The party won’t be caught off guard by another snap election, she said, noting it is already opening nominations for candidates even though the next vote isn’t scheduled for almost two years.

The party had record fundraising in 2020 and 2021 and hopes 2022 will be another record year, she said. “That helps us build a strong team that can support people that want to be candidates, working on platform development, working on building teams on the ground, and attracting... really remarkable people that want to run for us.”

Meanwhile, said Furstenau, Greens will continue to advocate on issues like the unwelcome involvement of Telus and other corporations in the health-care system, on fixing primary care and making sure people have access to family doctors, and on support for people with disabilities.

“We are focused on solutions and we are going to continue to put them forward and hope that we can get movement on these really important issues,” she said.