As the Oct. 24 provincial election approaches, Jack Knox is looking at Vancouver’s 14 ridings and some of the issues affecting them. Today: Courtenay-Comox and Parksville-Qualicum.
Real horse races, ones that came down to an election-night photo finish, were a rarity in 2017.
In 13 of Vancouver Island’s 14 ridings, the victorious candidates were able to sit up in the saddle at the finish line, winning by comfortable margins.
The exception was Courtenay-Comox, a nailbiter that determined the outcome of the entire provincial election.
Had the riding stayed Liberal, that party would have had a one-seat majority and Christy Clark would have remained premier.
Instead, by the time the mail-in ballots were counted — a process that had all of B.C. squirming for two weeks — New Democrat newcomer Ronna-Rae Leonard’s nine-vote election-night lead had stretched to 189. It was a squeaky-tight margin, but still enough to give the NDP the edge it needed to form a government with Green support.
The result frustrated the Liberals, particularly since an unheralded Conservative took almost eight per cent of the vote — a big bloc that the Liberals figured would have gone their way had the Conservatives, who ran only 10 candidates in all of B.C., not been on the ballot.
There’s no Conservative running this time, though. Instead, Leonard will be challenged by entrepreneur Brennan Day for the Liberals and Gillian Anderson for the Greens. No, not the Gillian Anderson from The X-Files. This one lost the race for the NDP nomination to Leonard in 2017. The plot thickens.
There are more candidates, but perhaps less drama, down the road in Parksville-Qualicum, where Michelle Stilwell is going for her third consecutive term. The lone Liberal MLA on the Island — she must feel like a Boston Bruins fan in a Canucks crowd — the former social development minister is being challenged by Qualicum Beach councillor Adam Walker for the NDP and Rob Lyon, a businessman and former naval officer, for the Greens. Conservative Don Purdey and independent candidate John St. John are also in the race.
That the Liberals fare better in these two ridings than they do elsewhere on the Island might be a function of demographics. These ridings skew toward those who are old enough to remember where they were when Paul Henderson scored. At 50.8, the median age in the Comox Valley is almost eight years older than it is in B.C. as a whole.
Yet valley residents are fuzzy-cheeked teenagers compared to those in Parksville, where the median age is 62.2. And Parksville is positively youthful compared to Qualicum, where the median of 65.9 puts citizens in “I was John Diefenbaker’s babysitter” territory. Well, no, but with 52 per cent of its population over 65, Qualicum has the highest proportion of seniors of any city in Canada.
That makes health care — seniors’ care in particular — top of mind for many in this part of the Island. It was a big deal when the government replaced Comox’s St. Joseph’s hospital with a new one in Courtenay in 2017 (in doing so, it abandoned plans to place the facility halfway to Campbell River, which also got a new hospital). It was also a big deal in May when the province signed a deal with Providence Living to build a 156-bed dementia village on the old St. Joe’s site.
It was also big news when Island Health temporarily took charge of the Comox Valley Seniors Village last October. That was the first of three Retirement Concepts-owned care homes on the Island — the others were in Nanaimo and Victoria — where that happened after the company, which had been taken over by China’s Anbang Insurance Group in 2017, was deemed not to be providing proper care to residents.
Then the pandemic hit, and B.C.’s long-term care facilities became a hot topic.
Ending public funding of for-profit care homes is one of the stated goals of the Green Party, which favours a combination of non-profit, public and community-based care. They also want to give teeth to the province’s seniors advocate and to hike the pay of care workers. Leader Sonia Furstenau didn’t put a price tag on that, though, only saying: “Seniors care is a very expensive part of our health-care budget.”
The New Democrats promise to build $1.4 billion worth of care homes around B.C. over 10 years, shifting the emphasis to non-profits. They also say they’ll hire and train 7,000 more workers for long-term care and assisted-living homes. They also want to continue topping up the wages of care workers, both public and private, as part of efforts to limit workers to a single site, a measure taken to prevent the spread of COVID-19 from care home to care home. NDP leader John Horgan has also promised a cancer centre for Nanaimo.
The Liberals’ platform includes $1 billion to replace and update aging care homes over five years. They also promise a tax credit of up to $7,000 a year for home-care services, the idea being to allow people to stay in their own homes longer. They vow to work with care home operators to improve care and end a chronic shortage of workers.
Appearing in Qualicum Beach on Oct. 11, Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson promised his government would pay for the medical exams that drivers over age 80 must take every two years. The location of his announcement was hardly coincidental.
Candidates
Courtenay-Comox
NDP — Ronna-Rae Leonard*
Liberal — Brennan Day
Greens — Gillian Anderson
Parksville-Qualicum
Liberal — Michelle Stilwell*
NDP — Adam Walker
Greens — Rob Lyon
Conservatives — Don Purdey
Independent — John St. John
* Incumbent
2017 results
Courtenay-Comox
- NDP — Ronna-Rae Leonard 10,886 (37.36 per cent)
- Liberal — Jim Benninger 10,697 (36.72 per cent)
- Green — Ernie Sellentin 5,351 (18.37 per cent)
- Conservative — Leah McCulloch 2,201 (7.55 per cent)
- Voter turnout: 67 per cent
Parksville-Qualicum
- Liberal — Michelle Stilwell* 14,468 (45.13 per cent)
- NDP — Sue Powell 9,189 (28.66 per cent)
- Green — Glenn Sollitt 8,157 (25.44 per cent)
- Refederation —Terry Hand 245 (0.77 per cent)
- Voter turnout: 70.2 per cent
