FIVE politicians who would seek to occupy the North Vancouver-Lonsdale seat in the provincial legislature drew a capacity crowd to St. Andrew's Church Tuesday night.
The candidates represented a full spectrum of fiscal and social political bents in what is one of the most hotly contested ridings in B.C. But the tone of the meeting was respectful and congenial. The church choir could be heard rehearsing in the basement as candidates slugged it out upstairs.
As it was a North Vancouver Chamber of Commerce event, many of the prepared questions centred around the candidates' economic policies.
What started as a softball lobbed to Liberal incumbent Naomi Yamamoto on her party's plan to develop liquefied natural gas in northern B.C. as a means to deal with the province's debt turned into an all-party melee.
"What we've said is we have an opportunity to generate around $1 trillion for our (gross domestic product) over a 30year period. That means that we will be employing hundreds of thousands of people . . . good paying jobs," she said. "But it also means the revenue that's generated from liquefied natural gas will actually go to paying off the debt so our kids won't have the burden of debt payment."
The operational debt under her government is half of what it was under the New Democrats in the 1990s, Yamamoto added
But NDP candidate Craig Keating, Yamamoto's primary challenger for the seat, shot back calling the LNG plan a "pipe dream" without any plan to generate the huge amounts of electricity needed to run LNG plants unless the province builds the Site C dam. As for the debt, that's something the Liberals had a far worse track record on as they had doubled the debt in the last seven years, he said.
Green Party candidate Ryan Conroy argued increased fracking for natural gas is not only unnecessary but counter productive.
"The natural gas is going to Alberta in a pipeline to fuel the tar sands and we're shipping the tar back to us in B.C. On top of that . . . the Site C dam would be used to power natural gas," he said. "The whole situation is going in the exact opposite direction with our commitments to addressing climate change," he said.
Instead, the government should be focused on developing jobs in the green energy sector, Conroy said.
Neither of the two leading parties could lay claim to the high ground when it came to debt, said B.C. Conservative Allan Molyneaux, who pitched the Conservatives as the only low-tax, balanced budget alternative to the B.C. Liberals.
"The NDP doubled the debt in the 1990s. The Liberals doubled the debt in the 2000s and the Liberals are running on reducing the debt but their budget calls for increasing the debt and we have this fairytale 50-year plan that no one believes," he said.
Speaking last on the matter was 18-year-old Libertarian candidate Laurence Watt who called for an end to the bickering and a focus on citizens' basic rights.
"Instead of blaming each other for our problems, let's just look at a plan. . . . I'm sick of the arguing with each other. What we need to do is go over our environmental laws and our individual rights and our property rights. Those should always come first," he said.
When asked to state where he stands on pipeline expansion, Keating declared that he and the NDP were on the record opposing the Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan pipeline projects.
Yamamoto charged that the NDP's flip-flopping sends the message to the world that B.C. is closed for business investment.
When asked how the Green Party would make up for the lost jobs and revenue with no expansion of oil and gas, Conroy said his party would work to legalize and tax marijuana, an industry estimated to be worth $6 billion per year, and encourage development of green energy.
When it came to the issue of assistance for the film industry, Yamamoto said her party had adequately shown its support by increasing the tax credit from 11 per cent to 33 per cent of labour costs or roughly $300 million in lost revenue, while Keating said bumping that to 40 per cent would help B.C.'s 25,000 film workers keep their jobs from disappearing to other jurisdictions.
The one issue solidly agreed on was that the province is facing a skills shortage, though Keating would not accept Yamamoto's claim that her government had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in skills training when classes at the local university were being cut back because of a lack of provincial funding.
"When Naomi's term as advanced education minister began, a series of cuts totalling $120 million were made from advanced education and we're seeing those results right now at Capilano University, and I urge the administration to take a pause on this," Keating said.
"I'm hopeful we'll have change for the better in British Columbia and we'll be able to take a look at a new way of funding Capilano University because our government is committed to funding post-secondary education."
That comment drew the loudest and longest sustained applause of the evening.
