A lively and free-wheeling federal election forum at Vancouver Island University on Tuesday night saw Nanaimo—Ladysmith candidates from four parties field a number of questions from the audience on topics such as affordability, housing, immigration, climate change, toxic drugs, U.S. President Donald Trump and the CBC.
The forum was organized by VIU’s political science department and moderated by Dr. Michael MacKenzie, Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership.
Candidates who attended were Stephen Welton (People’s Party), Lisa Marie Barron (NDP), Paul Manly (Green) and Michelle Corfield (Liberal). Conservative candidate Tamara Kronis did not attend, choosing to campaign instead, Mackenzie told The Discourse.
Hannah Downes, a VIU journalism student, doesn’t live in the riding but plans to vote by mail for her home riding of Yellowknife. She said mental health and substance use are “huge issues” that she wanted to see discussed.
“Living on the island, I’ve noticed major gaps in the healthcare system, and I think a lot of folks struggle to get proper access to healthcare. I think that also does play hand-in-hand with health care access in terms of mental health access and substance use access.”
Nikki Hearns, a VIU student, told The Discourse she is concerned about health care.
“I was very lucky, lucky to find a nurse practitioner here, but I was on the island for six years before I found a doctor,” she said.
The forum started off with each candidate outlining their platform and resumes and then questions from the audience were taken in a town-hall style question and answer session where three people were allowed to ask one question each and candidates were given two minutes to respond.
Read also: Tariffs, health care and housing top of mind for voters at Chemainus all-candidates meeting
What do Nanaimo—Ladysmith candidates say about addressing the toxic drug crisis?
Brandi Klee, president of the political studies club at VIU, said the most important issue to her was harm reduction.
“Having access to a national harm reduction plan is critical to beginning to address the overdose crisis and saving Canadians lives,” she said. “I’ve lost friends and family members due to the overdose crisis, and we have a disconnected and fragmented current response to overdoses in Canada from the provincial and the federal governments.”
Sarah Lovegrove, a VIU nursing professor and vice president of the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, asked how the candidates plan to “address the increasingly toxic and unpredictable nature of unregulated supply that is killing over 22 Canadians each day?”
Manly said that as the executive director for the Unitarian Shelter in Nanaimo, he knows that about half of the people in the shelter have addiction challenges and he supports alternatives such as fentanyl patches to mitigate opioid sickness from withdrawal.
“It’s a very, very serious thing,” he said. “So people do need a safe supply. It needs to be regulated very well, because we can’t have it out in the community. Those aren’t things to mess around with.”
He said the fentanyl patches are “a reasonable way to give people the dosage that they need when they need it, on a regular basis, and not something that they can break up and smoke or something like that.”
NDP candidate Barron pointed to Moms Stop the Harm as an example of why the issue is so important.
“This is an incredible group of moms who have lost their children, and these are the people that we need to be listening to,” she said. “The people that we need to be listening to are the public health experts who are in the field, who understand what is required. I will tell you the very first thing that they say is to please, keep people safe, keep people alive.”
Barron — who, prior to being elected, worked in mental health and addictions services — said some of the supports people need include on-demand treatment and mental health counselling.
“Right now we’re seeing people who are trying to seek help, and there’s just no available beds for them to actually get that.”
She also said more needs to be done to stop drugs, and precursors to make them, from coming into the country.
“We need to keep the toxic substances from crossing over the border. I’d like to point out that while [former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen] Harper was in power, he cut 1,100 border officers. Now we’re seeing the impacts of that. We need to increase the number of border officers. The Liberals didn’t increase those numbers. It’s been a while since Harper was around,” Barron said.
Parties tout different solutions to tackle affordability and housing
A number of questions around affordability and housing were also asked at the forum.
Welton said that the monetary policy of the Liberal government, which he called a coalition with the NDP, led to inflation that are causing the price of housing to “run out of control. Grocery prices going up, gas prices going up. This is what is harming people.”
Welton said that as a member of the baby boomer generation he has been part of “one of the most privileged generations on the planet, and we’ve had the opportunity to feather our nest very nicely.”
Welton said that federal monetary policy is inflating the housing market.
“The value of my house is going to go up. Thank you very much. Sorry for my son. Sorry for my stepsons. Not so good because they don’t own houses.”
He said he doesn’t want the government to “inflate the value of my home. I want people in future generations to have the standard living that we have had in the past.”
Barron said the NDP have been pushing to ban corporations from “swooping in and buying up affordable homes” and that her party wants “to make sure that food is affordable with price caps.”
“We should not have grocery store CEOs that are profiting off of people in our communities struggling to make ends meet, struggling to be able to purchase the groceries that they need and deserve,” she said.
The Green candidate said the affordability crisis starts with housing and wants to see the federal government invest into affordable and co-op housing.
“We need to block foreign ownership of real estate for investment, and we need to make sure that big corporations don’t treat housing like they treat the stock market,” Manly said
Corfield touted the Liberal’s housing plan.
“I’m ready to work at the heart of government with the full weight of Mark Carney’s national plan behind me, from housing to health care, from clean growth to indigenous leadership.”
Nanaimo—Ladysmith candidates debate climate change
One audience member asked about climate change.
“I’m grateful for this one month every four years or so where politicians express concern about transparency and accountability so I’m aware of each party’s policy on the Paris accord. So, considering the billions and billions of tax dollars spent on fighting climate change and soon to be the global water shortage, what evidence does each of your parties provide to validate their position?” he asked.
The PPC candidate started to answer the question.
“Having studied geology, I am more than well aware that [carbon dioxide] levels have been much higher in the past. Climate change has always been a thing, but anthropogenic, or that is to say, human caused climate change is just a hypothesis,” he said before being interrupted by jeers from the audience.
“Sorry, is that a chuckle from scientists in the audience?” he asked.
When people responded that they were scientists Welton continued.
“So you do understand that it’s a hypothesis that is not capable of being tested and becoming a theory except over long periods of time, and that has led to a lot of policies involving trillions of dollars based on that hypothesis that could well be wrong,” he said.
Welton then argued, “even if that hypothesis is true, Canada could go to net zero on [carbon dioxide] and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference because of what’s happening in China and India and the rest of the world. They’re accelerating far faster than we could possibly cut.”
Welton then challenged “anybody who’s really on the side of [carbon dioxide] two being an issue, tell me what the right amount of [carbon dioxide] is?”
Manly answered the question for the Greens.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is thousands of scientists around the planet working together on this challenge, and the proper level for parts per million of [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere is 350,” he said. “We’ve blown way beyond that.”
Manly said the effects of climate change are already being seen in B.C..
“We’ve seen beetles kill the forest of the interior. We’ve seen wildfire rage through there. We’ve had heat domes that have killed 600 people in a matter of days. We’ve seen floods that have caused huge amounts of damage. These are things that are actually costing all of us a lot of money. The cost of food is going up because of droughts around the planet, because of floods, because of fires.”
At this point, Manly was interrupted by someone shouting “chemtrails” from the audience.
“No, it’s not chemtrails,” he replied. “Our insurance is going way out because we’re having to pay for all of these things. Our taxes are going up because we’re having to mitigate and rebuild out the climate disasters. There’s lots of evidence to show it. All you need to do is a little more research than looking on Facebook.”
Support for journalism and the CBC
One audience member asked what the candidates planned to do to ensure journalists were able to ask questions of the government, given Conservative Leader Pierre Poilivere’s tight control over who is allowed to ask him questions during the campaign.
Corfield gave a fiery defense of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
“We need the CBC. When the sovereignty of your country is at stake and you’re fighting a war, an economic war, you need your country to have its own media, just like its own bank,” she said, stepping out from behind the table she was seated in. “You need to have control over the resources that inform our people and we, as Canadians, need to stand up and protect that right. Your right to Canadian content and to Canadian information is what you should have under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that our people, everyone in here has fought for.”
Manly had previously raised the CBC in his opening remarks, saying it was needed “to protect our national identity.”
In response to the question about Conservative handling of the media, Manly said, “it sounds like the Trump regime down south is being repeated up here. The media is super important. I support everything that Michelle just said about the CBC.”
The PPC candidate took a dig at Corfield’s defense of charter rights from a party that invoked the Emergencies Act.
“I’m a little hung up on that rather impassioned speech there from Michelle that was very dramatic,” Welton said. “I wish you had spoken as highly of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms three-and-a-half years ago during the COVID-19 crisis, when the Liberals trampled all over the rights and freedoms of Canadians.”
Barron, Manly go back and forth on electoral reform
A question about electoral reform caused some back and forth between the NDP and Green candidates when Manly claimed to have written the motion on creating a Citizens’ Assembly — a motion that was put forward by Barron.
“In terms of the motion that Lisa Marie Barron put forward in the House of Commons, I wrote that motion,” he said. “[Green MP] Mike Morrice was going to put it forward and asked Lisa Marie Baron if she would partner on it. And they did, because there’s a lottery system for who can put forward motions or parliamentary private members bills, and her name was up in the lottery. She worked with Mike Morrice on that. It was my language.”
An incredulous Barron, who had already answered the question taking the Liberals to task for breaking a promise to change the first-past-the-post system in 2015, held up her hands in disbelief but responded at the start of the next round of questions.
“I would love to also hear more of the things that Paul wrote and how he can take credit for those,” she fired back. “I’m sorry. Clearly the NDP was needed to actually pass the legislation to see it go into parliament. I point out that little piece of information.”
The next day, Manly posted an apology to his Facebook page, alongside copies of Barron and Morrice’s motions and his own in 2020.
“During last night’s all-candidates debate at VIU, I made an error regarding my involvement in motions for a Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform,” he wrote. “I incorrectly stated that I wrote the motion that MP Lisa Marie Barron presented. That was inaccurate, and I sincerely apologize for this mistake. MP Mike Morrice wrote the motion, which used language directly from material I had written.”
The issue of Trump and the U.S.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s name came up a couple of times during the night.
Manly said Canada needs to deal with “Trump’s tariffs” and that “we need to make sure that Canadian consumers and workers aren’t punished by tariffs, but that we push back with export tariffs on the things that the Americans need — the raw resources like potash, critical minerals, energy, electricity and raw logs,” he said.
Barron didn’t mince her words when it came to the U.S. President.
“We have a convicted felon elected to the south that’s creating chaos. Here, in Canada, people are paying attention.” she said. “They’re worried. They see Donald Trump and everything that he’s doing and then suddenly they’re realizing, ‘Wait, why is this so familiar to me?’ Well, that’s because we have Trump 2.0 right here in Canada, and people are worried.”
Barron said when she’s out doorknocking, people are talking about the NDP and the Conservatives.
“I will tell you with 100 per cent certainty that if you want to see the party that’s going to have your backs, that’s going to be there at a time when there’s so much at stake, the only party that can beat the Conservatives here in this riding is the NDP,” she said.
Forestry a topic of concern
The local and regional economy, and the forestry industry, was also a hot topic.
Liberal candidate Corfield brought up the long-standing frustration with U.S. softwood lumber duties.
“Our forest economy is being attacked by tariffs, and not just these tariffs. There was actually softwood lumber duties that were coming into play — that were impacting [the] forest industry as a result — that are coming in effect in June,” she said. “Forestry built this region from Port Alberni to Ladysmith, up to Port Hardy.”
Corfield said she would “unblock the fiber access and protect Notice 102 which ensures transparency and timber pricing and trade reporting.”
She said she would also expand Indigenous-led tenure for second growth forest and milling and “delay tax hikes on clean mills,” while cutting permitting delays and red tape.
Manly said his party would ban the export of raw logs.
“We’ve exported 2.7 million cubic meters of trees that should be used by Canadian workers and Canadian mills to create Canadian lumber to build Canadian homes,” he said. “The only thing we should be exporting is in flat boxes. IKEA, Swedish for common sense, maybe with some crazy instructions along with them.”
Conservative candidate a no-show
People in the audience were generally disappointed with Conservative candidate Tamara Kronis’ decision to not attend the forum.
“It’s really too bad, because I value everybody’s ideas, and I would really like to have had an opportunity to understand what their goals are and what their plans are for the future,” said VIU student Nikki Hearns. “With them not being here, I won’t get that contrast against the other candidates, and it almost kind of makes you feel like maybe they’re not up to the task of dealing with a little discourse.”
Klee said she was also frustrated with the Conservative candidate skipping the forum.
“I am frustrated because it breaks down the discourse and political protection and backsliding in our democracy,” she told The Discourse. “It puts our democracy at risk when we’re not able to have good faith conversations. Not who’s right or who’s wrong, but just conversations about these issues and where we each stand as people, as groups, as representatives of our democracy. It’s critically important.”
The Liberal candidate addressed the absence on the stage.
“It’s a democratic system that should enable all of you to question all of us. She’s not here because she doesn’t want to respond back and forth. She’s been silenced, unfortunately, but that’s what her party did,” Corfield said.
