A hike with Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver sowed the seeds of Sonia Furstenau’s successful foray into provincial politics.
She says she had approached him about joining Shawnigan residents in their opposition to an old quarry in the area becoming a site for dumping contaminated soil, and that led to a hike to see the facility.
“He was standing there on the hike staring at this sloping quarry,” Furstenau says. “He said: ‘This is crazy,’ and he just started to help, taking his water samples, writing his blog reports.”
Not long after, Weaver suggested that Furstenau would be a good fit with the Green Party.
“He said: ‘I’m going to be knocking on your door,’ and I said, ‘Andrew, I’m busy, I’ve got a little job to do here.’ ”
But Furstenau eventually agreed. She became the Green candidate for the Cowichan Valley riding in September 2016.
Cobble Hill Holdings Ltd.’s permit for the soil site was cancelled five months later, touching off celebration by many residents.
Furstenau says she had only one choice in affiliating herself with a provincial party.
“The Greens are the only party I could have run for because of their principled stand on spending big money, on calling for a moratorium on fracking, on pipelines — the things that really matter to me,” she says. “My values are completely aligned with where the Greens stand on those things.”
Furstenau, 46, is married to Blaise Salmon and is the mother of three children and two stepchildren, ranging in age from nine to 22. Family time is hugely important to her, she says.
“I love spending time with my family, my kids,” she says.
“The campaign has been pretty intense, so it’s really a priority to me to ensure that I protect that family time now.”
Furstenau also enjoys cycling, reading and knitting. “I used to spin wool, but I haven’t had time for that in a long time.”
Politics had not been on her radar before she began working against the soil site, Furstenau says.
“It wasn’t like I had my mind set on a political career, I never did. The circumstances that I found myself in inspired me to step up.”
In 2014, she was elected as the local director with the Cowichan Valley Regional District.
Before serving with the CVRD, Furstenau was a teacher. She taught at Colquitz Middle School and Spectrum Community School, and was the social-justice chair for the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association.
Furstenau, who has a master’s degree in history, went on to teach at Dwight School Canada in Shawnigan, but decided to leave teaching to devote time to her CVRD duties.
She says it has been busy, with a typical work week at the CVRD about 60 hours.
Furstenau says her concern for environmental issues around Shawnigan stems from her upbringing on an acreage about an hour west of Edmonton.
“I grew up in nature, canoeing on the lake or hiking around.”
Every summer from the time she was eight, she visited the Saanich Peninsula’s Ravenhill Herb Farm, which was owned by her aunt and uncle.
She moved to Victoria in 1990 and got involved with trail-building in the Walbran Valley.
“For the first time in my life, I went into an old-growth forest and that was it for me.”
Furstenau says her run for provincial office had to be done a certain way, with an emphasis on a grassroots, people-oriented approach.
“Beginning back in November, we started having what we called kitchen-table meetings,” she says.
“We had dozens of those over the course of the campaign, where we actually sat down with people and listened to them.
“Certainly, my campaign, we didn’t participate in any negative campaigning at all.”
One of Furstenau’s biggest admirers is Calvin Cook, president of the Shawnigan Residents Association and a close ally in the effort to fight the soil facility.
“A key thing about Sonia is her ability to bring people together,” he says. “She may not have had a lot of experience, particularly when she was getting into the CVRD in terms of the political realm, but she was able to attract people to her.”
Furstenau emerged as a spokesperson for the soil-site battle and was always able to get her message across, Cook says.
“Excellent communicator and also very empathetic, and sometimes that can beat you up a little bit in politics,” he says. “But I think she’ll be a great representative for the Cowichan area.”
Cook says he and Furstenau kept in close contact along the way and were able to accomplish a lot together.
“That was one of our goals, just to present a very united community,” he says. “I think we were able to do that.”
Furstenau says working co-operatively was the “secret sauce” to getting things done in Shawnigan, and says she won’t be changing her approach at all as an MLA.
“The spirit that infused how I worked in Shawnigan, which was to bring everybody together across party lines and across jurisdictions, is exactly the spirit that I’m going to continue working in.”
