A week after saying publicly that she would not be seeking the nomination, Kim Darwin has been announced as the B.C. Green Party candidate for Powell River-Sunshine Coast.
“Kim is deeply passionate about her community and the issues that matter most to the people of Powell River-Sunshine Coast,” said leader Sonia Furstenau, in a Sept. 29 release.
“She is highly accomplished in business and brings this important perspective to her thinking. I’m delighted to have her on the team as we put forth our plan to build a stronger, more sustainable province.”
Darwin is an entrepreneur with a mortgage consulting business based in Sechelt who has a long history with the B.C. Greens, serving on the party’s provincial council executive from 2014 until March 2020, when she stepped down to run for party leadership.
This will be Darwin’s second election campaign as a candidate. She finished third with 6,505 votes in 2017, improving on the Green results from the previous two elections.
In its release Darwin’s campaign team said that although she had said at first she wouldn’t run in this election, she was approached by community members from across the riding “asking her to bring her energy and ideas to the campaign.”
Darwin said she was “honoured and humbled that so many people I know and respect asked me to be their voice in Victoria.”
Darwin told Coast Reporter she also talked with Furstenau before deciding to run again. “Sonia and I chatted a couple of times about the gap that would be left here on the Sunshine Coast considering all of the building that I had been doing since the 2017 election.”
Darwin said her bid for the party leadership gave her a sense of the strength of the Greens heading into this election.
“We have quite a track record now of showing how politics can be done differently,” said Darwin. “I think if all of us look back to the previous years, with the partisan politics, that really did change up until this pandemic election got called. I feel like we’re going back to a similar type of politics that we saw under the B.C. Liberals.
Darwin said her local team from the last campaign is also ready to go.
“We enjoyed working with one another so much that we formed our local riding association and we’ve been building capacity ever since,” she said. “We already have a great number of trained volunteers that are ready to hit the ground running. So even though it’s a snap election and we have to move really quickly, we are more ready now than we were in the last election.”
Darwin said running in a leadership race that took place under pandemic precautions gave her and her team experience in how to run a different type of campaign.
In earlier comments to Coast Reporter, Darwin called NDP leader John Horgan’s decision to ask for an early election “a BC NDP backroom boys power grab” and she said this week that holding an election during the pandemic is a concern for people in the riding.
“Most people are worried about their own physical health, their mental health and their financial health, so that is going to be fundamentally different than what it was in 2017,” she said.
Darwin said many of the issues that came up in the 2017 election will be in play this time. “I see the opioid crisis has increased exponentially in both the upper and the lower Coasts and throughout British Columbia. The housing affordability crisis has gone nowhere; it is still a big factor in both areas of our riding. And, I think we’re still talking about the privatization of seniors care and mental health care as well,” she said.
