Mike Morris sat down with some of his five grandchildren Saturday morning and told them there was a chance he might have a lot more time to spend with them if he didn’t get re-elected to his third term as Prince George-Mackenzie MLA .
Five-year-old Merrick Morris wasn’t worried grandpa losing his job and the early election results backed him up.
“They’re all sitting at home watching the election on TV and I was joking with them that I might be out of job tomorrow and I said if I don’t get voted in I can retire,” said Morris.
“(Merrick) came up to me yesterday and said I was going to win because I have the most signs on his street. I’m fairly confident I’ll get voted back in.”
With all 82 polls reporting, the Liberal candidate Morris is comfortably ahead of Joan Atkinson of the NDP. Morris had 6,361 votes (52.33 per cent), while Atkinson, the Mackenzie mayor, was next in line with 3,874 (31.87 per cent). Catharine Kendall, the Green Party candidate had 1,406 votes (11.57 per cent), Dee Kranz, Christian Heritage Party of B.C, had 281 (2.31 per cent) and Raymond Rodgers, Linertarian, drew 233 votes (1.92 per cent).
Unfortunately for Morris, his party has lost the B.C. election decisively, with the NDP expected to form a majority government. There are still close to 500,000 mail-in ballots to be counted , including about 4,700 in Prince George-Mackenzie, but those votes won’t be tallied until the first week of November.
“The polls are showing some fantastic numbers for NDP and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens 13 days down the road when they count the mail-in ballots,” he said. “I think what we’re finding tonight with all our poll captains is very low turnout of voters. A lot of seniors are very reticent to go out because of COVID. ”
Assuming Morris hangs on to his lead, the priorities of his second term in opposition remain the same – to keep people working in the region. He said the key to making that happen will be continued diversification in the economy away from the forest sector.
“Forestry is going to change and I want to make sure we have input into how that is going to change,” Morris said. “I’d like to see our petrochemical industry rekindled with West Coast Olefins and the ethylene plant. More people are going to be out of work by next spring, so we need to do something now to mitigate that to the extent possible.”
“Build the mines and build that railway from Dease Lake to Alaska. Get that traffic flowing from the southern states up to Alaska and start looking for the vast amount of gold and copper and other minerals we have in that corridor between the Coast Range and the Rocky Mountains.”
First elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2017, the 67-year-old Morris said the timing of the 2020 election, as the pandemic worsens, could not have been worse. His time to meet with constituents was extremely limited, usually in chance meetings in stores or parking lots or by phone.
“I feel bad for the people who have run for the first time, because they have nothing to measure it by,” he said. “This campaign is muted, everything we do. I’ve had some good debates - we had an excellent all-candidate debate on Zoom put on by the Chamber in Mackenzie and it lasted two hours - and that’s the most interaction I’ve had. But all the questions were fired at us by a moderator and nobody was clapping or cheering. I did it from the comfort of my home.
“I’m a listener. I used to do coffee meetings in backyards where you’d get 20 or 30 people together and they were very good information sessions for people with lots of good interaction, and you don’t have any of that. They miss that. I’ve had more interaction at Home Depot and Costco than I have anywhere else, and people don’t recognize you with a mask on.”
Morris says regardless of the outcome he will do everything he can to represent the people of his riding, whether they voted for him or not. For this third term that will likely mean sitting in opposition as a government critic and he’s hoping that will bring positive results.
“You feel useless, government does not listen to us,” he said. “I know I listened to MLAs from across the province when I was a minister, but these folks here have turned the sound down and have entered into non-disclosure agreements with just about every group that’s out there so they can’t even talk to us.
“But you have to keep at it, that’s your job. I’ve got an opportunity to try to implement some of those changes I’ve been passionate about for years - biodiversity management, forestry, a diversified resource sector and public safety – I’ve done a lot of work on those to try and envision what a model looks like 30 or 40 years out and I’m dying for the opportunity to get into one of those roes to turn the dial and make a difference.”
