Premier Christy Clark, it appears, has discovered the Island. “Vancouver Island is growing, vibrant and unique — with its own opportunities and challenges that deserve government’s full attention,” she told more than 600 people gathered for the Vancouver Island Economic Summit in Nanaimo this week.
We welcome the B.C. Liberals’ interest in the Island, but wish they would not wait for election time to tell us how much they care. It makes us wonder about their sincerity.
An election platform is not a bad thing — voters need to know what a party intends to do and how it intends to govern — and this platform has some good planks.
Clark’s 10-year economic and investment plan for Vancouver Island touches on post-secondary education, ways to encourage more tourism attractions, how to decrease barriers for First Nations, ways to promote high-tech, more trades training and where investment needs to go on the Island.
Comox Valley MLA Don McRae, one of only two Liberal MLAs on the Island, has been appointed chairman of the Vancouver Island platform project to gather ideas on a broad range of issues during the next six months. These will become part of the B.C. Liberals’ platform for the provincial election in May.
So the government is listening, but with hearing made more acute by the proximity of an election.
We are mindful that the provincial government has been beavering away at improving the Malahat, putting in barriers and widening the road where possible to make the route safer, and we are grateful — as we are for the $85 million pledged for the McKenzie Avenue interchange.
But we are also mindful of the $800 million spent to improve the Sea to Sky Highway from Horseshoe Bay to Whistler, which handles about 15,000 vehicles a day, compared with about 23,000 on the Malahat.
Huge transportation investments are being made on the Lower Mainland, while ferry costs continue to rise for coastal and island communities that depend on the ferry service as an essential component of the highway system.
In the 2013 provincial election, the B.C. Liberals took only two seats on Vancouver Island. It might be suggested that if we want more largesse from the B.C. Liberals, we should elect more of them, but as soon as the election is over, they become the government of the entire province, not just of Liberal constituencies.
It’s the nature of any political party to ramp up the promises as an election gets closer, in an effort to entice voters.
But it is not what is promised in the months before the election that impresses voters, it’s what is delivered in the months and years after the election.
