Around 30 people turned out to meet Green candidate Nic Dedeluk when she came to Mansons Hall on Monday, October 7. Cortes Currents recorded 145 minutes of the two hour meeting, which is far too much to fit into a half hour broadcast. So today’s program consists of a few highlights.
This event was put on by FOCI’s Climate Action Committee (The Climate Action Network) and there is a link to the unedited audio at the bottom of this page.
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As a third of the audience came from the Cortes Island Academy, Dedeluk told them, “I’m so thankful that youth are here and participating in this. You’re part of the reason I’m doing this. I’m a mother, I’m a grandmother, and I’m concerned for the children yet unborn.”
Before Nic Dedeluk was a candidate
Dedeluk also gave an overview of her life before becoming a candidate, “I am a marine biologist. About 25 years ago, I came up to study whale/ vessel interactions. I fell in love with the area and I’ve lived in Alert Bay since 2003. Some of you who have spent time on the watermight’ve run into a small Zodiac program that does boater education and lets people know about the whale watching guidelines, Strait Watch. That was a program that I helped create in 2003, as well as the Cetus Research and Conservation Society. That program and society still carries on today even though I’m no longer with them.”
“In 2013, I started working for the Namgis First Nation. I’m their Aquatic Resources Manager. If it has to do with the ocean or the rivers, those are projects that fall under my supervision and I really love my job.”
“While working with Namgis, and still under Namgis, I was subcontracted to work on another project called the Broughton Aquaculture Transition Initiative. That was a four year program where we did work with two fish farm companies, MOWI and Cermaq, as we transitioned to closure 17 fish farms in the Broughton area. That program just ended in March, and so I’m now back to my aquatic resources position with just Namgis. The Broughton project was a project of the Namgis, the Mamalilikulla, the Kwikwasut’inuxw Haxwa’mis nations together. As a biologist, I have experience working with multiple levels of government and organizations to find selective successful paths forward meeting the conservation needs. So that’s quite a bit about me. I’d love to hear about you. I’d love to learn more about your concerns on Cortes and hopefully answer some of your questions.”
The format we agreed upon at the beginning of the meeting was that speakers who were okay with having their comments included in the broadcast would speak their names and anyone who wished to remain anonymous would not. I believe everyone gave their name.
Voting for the Greens
“My name is Kate – I’ve heard the leader, Sonia Furstenau, talk about how there could be some kind of an arrangement if it’s a minority government. In the absence of proportional representation, really a minority government with the Greens is the next best thing. A lot of people believe it’s like anything but the Conservatives, but it’s possible that the Greens will split the vote and then that’s what we end up with is the Conservatives. I’m just wondering how that messaging is going and how she plans on having that result, that there’s not going to be a vote split.”
Nic Dedeluk: “It’s not going to be a Green majority government. We’re quite aware of that, but getting some Green MLAs in there to hold the other parties accountable is really important.”
We do need Green representation. I think personally, a minority government would be great with the Greens coming together with that minority government. I think a minority government does work better for the people rather than for big corporations. If we could get six Green MLAs elected, that would be amazing.”
“We’ve had two representatives elected in the past and they’ve shown that they’re really positioned well in the middle of the political debate, and that means that they can work with either party to try to make things move forward in a positive way.”
Roads and ferries
“Hi, Yvonne Kipp – The BC Ferry Corp has proposed that we will get a new ferry in a year and a bit, and it’ll take double the cars, roughly. So I calculated that in one week in May, we could get 420 new cars. The roads now are almost impossible. I haven’t seen a lick of paint for years and the potholes, I mean, there’s two stalwart men working for main roads, and they can’t do much. When everybody starts coming off the ferry in warm seasons. with their big SUVs, fifth wheels, and then of course massive amounts of building trucks. Our roads have really become very, very poor. We are going to be in very bad shape in a couple of years if more money isn’t put into the road. I’m not saying let’s not have more tourists because they do bring money, but we have to be able to receive them and at the moment, I don’t think we’re going to be able to continue to.”
Nic Dedeluk: “That is a super valid and important question. I don’t have the answer, but I did contact the Green Party to try to follow up on this.”
“The North Island Highway is starting to get a little teeny bit better, but the highway was horrific and I wanted to find out how that infrastructure money works for our rural communities. As an individual living in Alert Bay and as an individual that takes the ferry to get off the island, I actually think that I can bring a really great voice and perspective to this riding because we do face different challenges than living in Campbell river that has still quite a populous. If I were to get elected, I do look forward to having a strong voice to advocate for our small communities.”
Kate: “Related to Yvonne’s point that we don’t have the infrastructure here to deal with all those people, BC ferries community consultation and engagement is really not very great. That’s another whole issue that really should be taken away from them and given to the Ferry Commissioner, Eva Haag, because they do have a mandate for serving communities. They administer the service contract for BC Ferries. Anyway, you’re living in a ferry dependent community, so does any of that resonate with you?”
Transit
Nic Dedeluck: “Yes, I can hear where you’re coming from. The Green Parties seem very committed to working with communities to find community based solutions. One of the solutions that they’ve put forward, that I see working in the urban areas and less so in our really remote communities is fast, frequent, and free transit. So instead of building more roads, they would put a lot Into improving the transit system so it actually worked for people, so that people would use the transit system in the idea of taking cars off the road.”
“I don’t know if you have a bus system on Cortes, but I can tell you that our bus system between Port McNeil and Port Hardy, Maybe works for very minimal people. Yes, we do have a transit system, but it’s not a system that works.”
Kate: “We don’t even have taxis. We don’t have taxis on Quadra or Cortes. Passenger transportation options here are almost non-existent.”
Nic Dedeluk: “I don’t want to come to Cortes and tell you how to solve your problems because I don’t live here. I would rather come to Cortes and be like, Hey, this is the problem. What are all of your solutions? Listen, and then try to see how we can move forward with some of those solutions. I feel like the Green Party resonates with that as well. I’m sure you guys have lots of ideas on how to solve the challenges. It’s just how do we get those, the support behind and get those solutions moving forward.”
Larger Pleasure Craft & Luxury emissions
“I’m Ralph Garrison. This is something I’ve noticed for many years, but I’m noticing it more strongly lately. There’s a number of real mega yachts out there and we see a lot of them going by. Cortes Bay has them, the Vancouver Yacht Club and the Seattle Yacht Club. It seems like the yachts have become bigger, and I’m sure their fuel consumption has gone through the roof, and it just seems like it’s a, it’s symbolic of a bigger problem. The rich having their huge playthings, and the rest of us struggling over ferries and roads. I’m not sure what my question is, but what are you going to do about it?”
Nic Dedeluk: “I’m seeing what you’re seeing. If we look back 30 years, the makeup of what I was seeing on the oceans then slow going, larger fishing fleet vessels. Now there’s less of those and more high speed pleasure craft. I think it was last year in Port MacNeil, the largest sailboat in the world came through. It’s docked in Port MacNeil and I can see the mast from my house in Alert Bay. The demographics are changing.”
Affordability
“I don’t know how to change it but I feel like you’re, the root of your question might be about affordability and that we’ve got a huge challenge in our province. Half of our province. is living at a rate of below $44,000 annually. That’s horrific for a province where we’ve got so much wealth and we’ve got so many affordability challenges. Those that have money are getting more and more money and There’s more and more that are struggling to make ends meet.”
“I just went to the Co-op and I was really encouraged to see that local produce is being sold in your local store, which is awesome. I’m all about trying to promote community gardens, or small gardens.”
“How can We work together as a community to have good livelihoods? I’m not trying to imply that anybody here doesn’t have a good livelihood, but I think there’s lots of things that we can do locally that can really provide a good quality of life. The BC Green Party is committed to working on affordability for British Columbians so that we all feel safe and happy.”
“I’m Maureen Williams. I think the question isn’t about affordability, I think it’s about wealth disparity, and that’s what you’re saying also. You’re using the word affordability, but you’re describing wealth disparity. I’m wondering how you envision the government’s role in managing wealth disparity, because wealth disparity is connected to resource utilization.”
“We know that most of the emissions in the world come from the wealthiest and certainly that’s true locally in terms of yachts and things like this. It’s true locally, and it’s true on a global scale. What role does a provincial government have in managing wealth disparity and the disparity of resource consumption?”
Measuring wellness rather than wealth
Nic Dedeluk: “I think the provincial government does have a role in managing that. One thing that stands out in this platform to me that I haven’t noticed in the others, is we often measure the success of things on the GDP. You’re going to ask me what GDP stands for. I think it’s the gross domestic product, which is a measurement of wealth. The Green party is bringing in a measurement of wellness and taking it more to bring a human perspective to the platform, rather than just measurement of wealth. Do we have safe communities? Do we have people in homes in communities? Can we afford to eat in our communities?”
A Fossil Fuel Free Future
“My name is Carrie Saxifrage. I thought that the yacht question was a climate question, and kudos to the Green Party for sticking to the BC carbon tax, because I think that could make a difference. I’m also concerned about the LNG industry, even relative to BC’s own climate targets. I admit I haven’t done my homework on the Green Party and the LNG industry, but I’m just a little shocked about how people can be against it and they get into office, and then they’re pro LNG. If you could just speak to how you see LNG, and what the Green Party intends to do.”
Nic Dedeluk: “The Green Party has very vocally committed to a fossil free future.”
“Now, that commitment isn’t going to take place on the 21st of October, but there are steps that we can do pretty quickly to try to work towards that. They have committed to stopping any new fracking permits. Obviously there would need to be a transition plan for the current fracking that’s occurring, oil and gas.”
“The Green Party is committed to making polluters pay. The part that I’ve just learned is the big companies are not paying for 65% of the emissions they make. Those are offset in subsidies. So removing those subsidies and making them pay for all of their pollution, I think is a pretty immediate effect that we could take. If those companies need that huge of a subsidy to operate, why are we having them operate when they’re creating such a huge amount of pollution?”
“The Green Party is committed to ending the fossil fuel subsidies, reducing methane emissions, prohibiting fossil fuel advertising right away and banning gas in new buildings.”
The Green party is also committed to not starting any new fossil fuel projects, whether they be LNG or pipelines or whatever.
Education
“My name’s Manda, and I am the Executive Director of the Cortes Island Community Foundation, as well as the founder of the Cortes Island Academy – The Green Party’s commitment to changing our matrix of how we define success is huge. It’s so much of what we end up spending our time and money on is what we look at”.
“One of the things that the Community Foundation recently did was to start looking at the data specific to our area and this comes back to almost all the questions that we were asking before, because what the data revealed is that:
- We barely collect any data.
- Cortes Island is the poorest area in this regional district.
“So of those sad stats that you were saying of the province, we earn 30 percent less than that. 25%t of our kids are living in poverty. We don’t have housing, we don’t have roads, infrastructure, etc. So we are starting to understand, because of our own research, not because of access to the census data, the deep overwhelming need in our community.”
“The government has said, oh, we want to target trying to change these things. Housing, for instance, and affordable housing. Even the rules around foreign ownership and Airbnb that come in, they don’t come into effect in our community. Why? Because we’re a destination location where people like to have their third homes, including the people that we vote for.”
“This gets around to education. We live in one of the not few places in the province where there is no free access to public education for our students and not just for students from here, but throughout our province including many of the rural remote islands.”
Education is something that parents have to pay for in order to send their kids to another community where they can access that. We created an alternative alongside the public system here that we still fund pretty much almost all of it ourselves. It’s almost 300, 000 a year to run this program that the ministry is allowing us to just do on ourselves because they have not figured out a way.
“Recently, when we called up to ask the Ministry of Education as well as the Campbell River School District, how many kids actually don’t graduate or do graduate that start in the system from our community – they didn’t know. No one was tracking. They didn’t even know how many kids were in the local high school. Nobody is tracking. We’ve just decided that we are not going to track the rural and remote communities because they’re too hard.”
“So, my question, this does get to the question (laughter), which is, you’re not going to win this district. We all know, you’re not going to win. I think it’s awesome that the Green Party still tries to shift policy, but what I want to know is how do you and how are the rest of the Greens going to really elevate the rural and remote places. Right now it’s the radical left that kind of say, yes, we’re going to put our votes in the Green, but there’s so much more you could be doing for these remote communities, even when you don’t win.”
After the election
Nic Dedeluck: “I agree. I think this decision to run has actually been a bit of a life altering decision. I’m sorry that there’s not safe, free and accessible education that is important for all of our children no matter where they live. We also have remote islands and so I’m not sure that I’m gonna be able to just go back to my job and be like, oh yeah, that was a nice little two month experience.”
Michele Babchuk and Nic Dedeluk, the NDP and Green candidates – courtesy Nic for Borth Island Facebook page
“As a running candidate, I can’t promise you the world, but I can promise you that I can keep advocating. And I can ask questions, and I can say, ‘Hey, I learned about this while I was running,’ and ‘hey, Michele, if you get elected, how are you going to work on continuing this?’”
“I am going to become more active politically on some of these issues that hit home and the success of our youth is an important issue that I stand committed behind.”
What can one person do?
Someone whose name I could not make out asked if it was possible to address the issues or planet faces within a capitalist system.
Nic Dedeluk: “It’s gonna be really hard. It is. It sometimes feels a little bit over daunting, but we face these challenges all the time and this election is no different.”
“I personally try to live in a very minimalist pathway. I try to raise awareness about consumerism all the time. Hats off to those marketers, they’re doing a great job selling us stuff that we don’t really need.”
“Max Thayson – it’s kind of daunting as one person to grapple with such a big global system that we all grapple with in various ways. The world being so complex and problems being so massive and so urgent, I feel like we need teams and not individuals. Maybe you can speak to your approach or strategy that you would have in the government to build the team that is required.”
Nic Dedeluk: “ I’m going to just backtrack a little bit before jumping into that. Part of my answer that I wanted to give you, it feels daunting to be an individual, but don’t ever underestimate what you can do as an individual and if you as an individual are feeling this way, there’s probably other individuals out there feeling the same way.”
What 2 Green MLA’s have done
“I think that’s important in government too. Sonia Furstenau and Adam Olsen were elected. There were two of them in the Green Party, but you do need to find and work with others to make change.”
“I haven’t been an elected government leader, so I don’t have experience with what I’m going to say, but this is how I live my life, and it’s been successful so far. I would say that it starts by having an open ear to listen to all perspectives. It starts by not cutting people off and allowing them to say their whole thoughts and then finding those pieces of common threads where you can start that conversation. If you can start to build alliances on those common threads and then have more conversations and hopefully find, ‘oh this isn’t quite that extreme and that isn’t quite that extreme.”
Fish Farms
“As a conservation biologist, you can imagine that I’m often not in agreement with big industry, but if you work together in a respectful manner, you can often find those common grounds to move forward on a solution that does meet some of the needs.”
“One of our chiefs from home, who’s quite a good friend of mine, was talking about the fish farm transition plan that we had that took five years to enact. He said, in the beginning, I wasn’t so thrilled about it. It wasn’t all the farms gone right away. I wanted to hit that home run and I wanted an immediate, but it was a historic day and it was huge, the plan that was developed. While it did take a little bit of time, we did remove 17 farms in five years.”
“So I do think there are paths with industry to help us find a solution that works for the future.”
Compromise
“Tosh Harvey – Sometimes compromising with industry seems to just allow them to continue operating. We had a bunch of fish farms which were shut down for a period of time and now it looks like they may reopen.”
“It sounds as if you’re looking to compromise, but it more and more feels like we’re facing a very existential problem, and some, a lot of the solutions maybe are more, like we have to start taking more radical action. What are the policies that you’re not willing to compromise on and what are the values that define.”
Nic Dedeluk: “I’m just going to correct one thing if I can. I didn’t say that myself or the Green Party, is the center of the political spectrum. I said we’re the center of the political debate, which is two different things. Being in the middle of the debate, we can work with the other parties to make something happen.
“The Greens are not the center of the political spectrum.”
No compromise
“I do have policies that I don’t want to compromise. I am a very strong advocate for wild salmon. I was very involved in removing open net pen fish farms even before the formal discussions occurred with the companies and the nation. The nations have never agreed to allow the fish farms in their territories. I definitely haven’t been involved from the beginning , but in the more recent years, I was a very strong advocate for that. I think our oceans are facing huge challenges . We have ocean warming. We have ocean acidification. We have a plethora of challenges that are facing our wild salmon and the other animals within our ocean. As an individual, I can speak very strongly from a biological background.”
“I have never been an elected politician, I can’t tell you what policies I’m a hard ‘no’ on because there’s a whole plethora of stuff that I’m still learning.”
“What I will tell you with the Green Party is that we are allowed to vote what is right for our communities that we represent. We don’t have a party stand, so I wouldn’t have to go in and vote yes, for only roads in Vancouver being fixed and all the money is going to go into roads being fixed. I would not have to agree to a vote with that because that would not be what’s good for our riding and our communities. So I think the Green Party is uniquely positioned that way, that we can stand up and vote for what is best for our communities.”
“I know that doesn’t exactly answer the hard no’s. I’m still learning a lot. I am very dedicated to our environment. And so I probably have a lot more hard no’s that I’m aware of. Definitely we have a health care crisis, we have a housing crisis, and we have a drug crisis.”
Dealing with corruption
“I’m Dylan – I’m from a community of about 40 people on Sonora Island and they’ve been vehemently opposing fish farms since before I was born. I also know, just working with a lot of my community members, that there is some corruption within some of the DFO members. I’m just wondering what you plan to do about that?”
Nic Dedeluk: “Yes, Sonora is a community that has been very supportive of removing the fish farms for sure and that’s awesome. I’m happy that you’re here. As far as corruption and what I can do as an individual within these massive government entities, government sections, that is a great question.”
“Once one becomes aware of the corruption within an organization, you can use tools like Freedom of Information Act to try to help expose some of that corruption. It takes a very brave person to expose corruption and stand out on that. So I would need to know a little bit more before I would say, yeah, I’m just going to go out and expose all of the corruption, but there’s corruption in many levels of government. I would love to paint a picture that there isn’t, but there is, it’s true. It is a concern, and it’s a good one to raise.”
Housing & Homelessness
“Hi, Tom. – I just wanted to ask how the Green Party would help alleviate or deal with the problem of homelessness, especially like in Campbell River and places like that. I don’t feel like it’s being addressed very much by the government these days and I never hear about it.”
Nic Dedeluk: “The Green Party has, in their platform, made a commitment to $1.5 billion that would translate into 26,000 non market units annually for the next three years.”
“We have multiple components of a housing issue from my perspective, but not only do we have a lack of housing units, but some of the housing units that we have aren’t safe. They’re overcrowded. It’s important that everyone has a home to live in that is also safe. My hope would be that some of those units would also come to our riding.”
“I’ve just read about a program and Sonia just said that she was supportive. Many of the mayors on Vancouver Island are supportive of a project called the Village, which is in Duncan. It’s a program that is funded by Heart to Health and the village program sets up some temporary housing to help those without a home get into these houses temporarily and provide them with meals and support, which then allows them to progress onto a next level of non market housing.”
“That sounds like a really good solution. I think there might be something in Campbell River in the works. Michele is coming next week and she’s much more familiar with the project (living in in Campbell River). It’s something that both Michele and I strongly feel needs to be advocated for.”
Taxing the Rich
Max Thaysen: “A part of the solution that solves what may have seemed in the past as a dilemma between economy and environment, making sure that we tax excess profits or excess wealth, and make sure that supports people having a dignified life without the requirement of selling off our natural resources.”
Nic Dedeluk: “The Green Party has said that they would increase taxes to the very upper bracket. I’m sorry, I don’t have the cutoff of what that tax bracket is or the percentage, but they are trying to work on the wealth disparity.”
There was much more in the Cortes Island meeting and you can listen to it in the unedited recording below.
Click here to listen to the unedited audio of this meeting
After the meeting on Cortes, Dedeluk caught the ferry to Quadra Island and another gathering.
Links of Interest:
Top image credit: Headshot of Nic Dedeluk – Courtesy Green Party of BC
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