The leaders of B.C.’s three main political parties sparred Tuesday evening in a debate that covered housing affordability, health care, seniors' issues, public safety, addictions, Indigenous rights, political polarization and who is fit to lead the province.
Both NDP Leader David Eby and Green Leader Sonia Furstenau criticized Conservative Leader John Rustad for failing to release his party’s fully costed platform ahead of the debate.
Furstenau was the first to note the missing plan and it was a theme Eby picked up several times. “I think it’s a prerequisite that you have a costed platform,” Eby said at one point. Later he added, “How can we debate you when you won’t even say what you’re going to cut?”
During the debate, which was moderated by Angus Reid Institute president Shachi Kurl, Rustad did not directly address the lack of a costed Conservative platform, but afterwards told reporters that his party is still highlighting new policies each day and he expects to release a full platform later this week.
The campaign’s only televised debate, held just past the halfway point in the official 30-day election campaign period, was a key moment with high stakes for all three leaders.
The three participated in just one other debate together, on Oct. 2 on CKNW radio. The one on television aired in a prime evening slot on multiple channels and will have reached a much larger audience.
The election so far appears likely to be close. The Conservatives received a major boost in August when BC United, the former BC Liberal Party that formed government four times before getting voted out in 2017, suspended its campaign and withdrew its candidates. Public opinion surveys in recent months have consistently shown the NDP and the Conservatives to be statistically tied with the Greens trailing.
In the debate Rustad focused on the failures of the NDP government and what he described as a lack of improvement on key issues, including housing, public safety and health care.
“As the Conservative Party of BC we are laser focused on the people of this province,” he said. “People are struggling to put food on the table.” A Conservative government would save families $1,200 a year by eliminating the carbon tax and $1,800 a year with a tax rebate on money spent on a mortgage or rent, he said.
Eby, who has promised to cut the carbon tax if the federal government stops requiring it, said the province can’t remove it unilaterally without a federal change. He contrasted Rustad’s rebate, which he said people would have to wait for, with an NDP promise to immediately cut income taxes by $1,000.
At several points during the debate Eby acknowledged that people are struggling. “Families are under a lot of pressure right now,” he said, blaming inflation and high interest rates that are a concern in many jurisdictions. “I believe that people need support now.... We started this work under [former premier] John Horgan and we haven’t stopped.”
Citing affordability, health care and housing, he said, “We can solve these problems.” He gave the example of how the government had connected 250,000 people to a family doctor in the last year and listed various housing policies the province has begun.
Furstenau criticized both Eby and Rustad for proposing tax cuts instead of spending the money in ways that would help people and solve some of the serious problems the province faces.
“What these people are offering is more of the same or back to the past,” she said, adding that the Greens are focused on proposing solutions while the other two parties either pretend climate change isn’t real or that it can be addressed while building more fossil fuel infrastructure.
At a time when Florida is being hit by a massive hurricane, she said, in B.C. both leaders are retreating from climate action.
On housing Furstenau criticized the government for failing to build more non-market housing and limit rent increases when tenants in a unit change, a policy known as vacancy control. “We are in an emergency where people can’t afford to live here,” she said, adding that the economy can’t be strong in the province when people can’t afford to live in it.
“There’s no one solution to the housing crisis,” Eby said. The government is trying many solutions, he said, including leaning on non-profits to build non-market housing and investing to cover the cost of 40 per cent of mortgages for the buyers of some newly built homes.
Rustad talked about the need for more housing starts, to which Eby responded “If you did that in the 16 years you were in government, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
On health care Rustad said the Conservatives are committed to single-payer health care and would increase spending, but that new options are needed for a system that delivers poor results despite being expensive.
Eby talked about the need for high quality care and acknowledged that while the government has taken steps, including planning a new medical school in Surrey and getting some patients care outside the province, that there is more to be done. “It’s not about ideology,” he said. “We have a shortage of health-care workers.... We’re not going to get there by cutting the health-care system.”
Health care could be designed more like the education system, Furstenau said, with care delivered through Community Health Centres that health professionals would want to work in. “It’s totally possible.”
Both Eby and Rustad said they support programs that allow seniors to stay at home longer. Eby criticized how the BC Liberals managed long-term care, saying, “Seniors who lived in long-term care didn’t get a bath even once a week.... We’ve got a lot more to do, but we’re going to keep meeting standards for seniors in long-term care, something John Rustad never did.”
Under the BC Liberals care homes were managed to the standard of the day, Rustad said.
At one point Rustad told a story about witnessing someone dying in the street from a drug overdose on his way to the debate and linked the opioid crisis with tent cities that have become common in the province. “This is the British Columbia that David Eby has created,” he said.
Later in the debate Eby acknowledged that decriminalizing drugs in the province had gone poorly. “This is a really awful crisis,” he said, adding that many have been directly affected. Decriminalization was done with the support of an all party committee of the legislature and the province’s police chiefs and was intended to remove stigma so that people could ask for help, he said. “We tried it and it didn’t produce the results any of us wanted.”
The government changed direction, but will continue to do everything it can to support recovery, he said.
In a part of the debate on Indigenous rights and land use, Rustad said he supports the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but that legislation to implement it in B.C. has caused “friction” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
“We need to move beyond that,” he said, talking about making “economic reconciliation” a priority.
Eby said a re-elected NDP government won’t bring back abandoned changes to the Land Act, but talked about the need to work in partnership with First Nations in ways that recognize that title exists. “It’s the future of the province, not fighting in court.”
He gave the example of the recognition of Haida title and how Rustad said he supported it in the legislature, then criticized it later on social media saying the Haida were going to take people’s private property. “A total lie and an example of the kind of divisive politics we don’t need,” Eby said.
Furstenau said that benefits agreements that Rustad champions are colonial and paternalistic. For a long time logging and other resource development have been the only options given to First Nations, she said, but land uses on traditional territories are better worked out in negotiation.
Economic reconciliation allows both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to prosper, Rustad said, adding that while he fully supports addressing title, private land and infrastructure should never have been put on the table.
This had Furstenau observing that Rustad’s vision for the province was stuck in 1957. “He is so limited in his imagination of what’s possible,” she said.
Towards the end of the debate the moderator Kurl asked each of the leaders to reflect on how they are contributing to an increasingly polarized political climate.
Eby said he regretted that the debate has become polarizing, but that Conservative candidates had raised topics that many considered long settled, including on climate, vaccines and human rights. “It is important information and I regret we have to talk about it,” he said. “I would much rather be talking about the fact he doesn’t have a costed platform.”
Rustad said he’s been talking about solutions and the problems that concern people in the province, but Eby has been raising polarizing topics because he can’t defend his government’s policies.
Furstenau said polarization increases in two-party systems where the middle ground is lost and the legislature needs to get back to the way it worked together after the 2017 election.
Advance voting opens Thursday and the final voting day is Oct. 19.
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