Three out of four Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee candidates took part in an all-candidates forum to share their views on climate and the environment Friday, ahead of the April 28 federal election. 

NDP candidate Leah Main, Green candidate Blair Visscher and Liberal candidate Anna Warwick Sears all attended the forum hosted by the Sustainable Environment Network Society (SENS) on April 11. Conservative candidate Scott Anderson did not take part in the forum because he was "scheduled elsewhere," nor did he submit answers to from a group of North Okanagan-based service organizations that were put to all candidates in the riding. 

The candidates were asked three questions in advance of the forum, which only Warwick Sears responded to and her answers are available on the SENS  sensociety.org.

Near the end of the forum, of which a recording was shared by SENS on Tuesday, moderator Jon Corbett lauded the candidates for their respect and good-faith answers at a time in the election cycle when such discussions can often become emotionally charged.

Corbett said there was "an awful lot of agreement through this entire extremely civil discussion."

The questions in the forum were crafted by SENS members as well as the public over the last few weeks. The forum kicked off with five-minute introductions from each candidate before each was given two minutes to respond to questions. Brief closing statements were heard at the forum's end. 

Introductions

Main said she immigrated to Canada from New York in 1967 at the height of the Vietnam War, and was involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements at that time. She said she has been political for many years, and really values being Canadian. She has lived in the Silverton area since 1971 and has served as a councillor there since 2009. She also spent a decade as an elected member of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. 

Main said she's been involved with a number of environmental challenges living in a small rural town, regarding logging, mining and water protection.

"My credentials are on-the-ground credentials from being involved with what affects my community, my region, my province and my nation," she said. "Canada is a small enough country that an individual's efforts are really noticed and do have an impact."

Like Main, Warwick Sears moved to Canada from the United States, back in 1971 when she was six years old. Now living in the Okanagan, she's been the executive director of the Okanagan Basin Water Board since 2007, a post she's retiring from this month. 

"What that involves, it's not just being a water nerd ... it involves a lot of working directly with local communities," Warwick Sears said. 

She's running for the Liberals because she is currently "extremely concerned" about the issue of Canadian sovereignty.

"I feel extremely upset by what's going on with Donald Trump trying to strangle our economy and pressure us into compliance for whatever he wishes to do with Canada, Greenland and the Arctic," she said. "Everything to do with our Canadian approach to environmental protection depends on our sovereignty, because if you look down south, what's happening is that they are tearing up the (Environmental Protection Agency), they're privatizing the national weather service ... all these things that have to do with environmental regulation and protection are being just hammered and gutted right now, and we cannot let that happen in Canada." 

Visscher joined the forum from Edgewood. She lives in Lumby, works in Vernon and is doing graduate research in Lake Country, "so I get to see a lot of this incredible region every day."

Visscher has been a Green member for many years and a member of the party's board for the last year. She decided to run to provide voters with more choice, especially given the failings of the two-party system in the U.S. 

She said from working as a school teacher and creating local food security initiatives, she's noticed that climate change is "inseparable from the challenges our region is facing with our record-breaking wildfires and our prolonged droughts, and our erratic weather patterns that are devastating farms and threatening our way of life."

Visscher's research is on the spread of misinformation and disinformation during wildfire crises, and she said the way in which governments communicate needs to be looked at in light of the poor quality of information people are getting on social media. 

Oil and gas industry requests

The first question posed to the candidates related to Canada's large oil and gas corporations' requests to the government to abandon the tax on the industry's carbon pollution, to throw out the promised cap on global warming emissions, and ensure new projects get approved within six months. Corbett asked the candidates whether or not their party would support any of these requests. 

Main said she and her party would, unequivocally, support none of those requests, saying all of them would add to the climate crisis. 

"Having eliminated the consumer carbon tax, what we're left with is the industry carbon tax which is woefully too small," Main said. "We also give all sorts of money to the oil and gas industries."

Visscher likewise said the Greens would grant none of these requests. 

"Essentially what the oil and gas corporations are asking is for individual Canadians to take on the responsibility for all of the climate damage that they're creating and to subsidize them," the Green candidate said, adding these corporations are already "heavily" subsidized." Visscher said these suggested policies make little sense when the Green Party's goal is to transition towards, and invest in, clean technologies. 

Warwick Sears agreed that major industrial polluters "should not be off the hook," and said Liberal leader Mark Carney's new plan is to shift the burden of the carbon tax onto large-scale industrial polluters. But she acknowledged that the trade war with the U.S. and its threat to Canadian sovereignty complicates matters. 

"We find ourselves in this weird position where we're under this existential threat, we're trying to separate ourselves from our largest trading partner, so part of the clean energy transition includes oil and gas but it is by no way shifting the burden of (greenhouse gas) reduction onto local communities and local families," she said, adding her party would bring back electric car subsidies and create more incentives for Canadians to refit their homes to be more energy efficient. 

Most pressing local environmental issues

A question from the public asked what the candidates believe to be the most important environmental issues in their riding. 

Visscher said wildfires are the biggest climate-related issue in Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee, including their impact on air quality, the tourism industry, small businesses, and people who have lost their homes.

Main, whose whole town was evacuated last summer, agreed with fires being a top concern, and added flooding, drought and food security to the list. 

Warwick Sears agreed "100 per cent" with the other candidates' answers, and added that landslides such as the one that happened  two weeks ago are another concern. She also said protecting drinking water infrastructure needs to be a high priority. 

Indigenous-led conservation

The candidates were asked if their parties will increase Indigenous-led conservation of protected Canadian areas to advance reconciliation and protect nature.

"We can succeed at nothing without learning from the Indigenous neighbours, the people that we live with, who have the communities and the knowledge keepers that have expertise going back millennia, and we are ignoring that knowledge," said Main, adding Indigenous people already know how to steward the planet "without destroying it."

Visscher said she has had the honour of teaching new mandatory high school courses about B.C.'s first peoples, and said there is "so much knowledge and a deep feeling of responsibility for the land among our Indigenous community members that I really think we need to learn from ... we need to do so much more than what we're doing in terms of relationship-building but also assisting First Nations and Inuit peoples to have the ability to make their own choices."

Warwick Sears agreed with Main and Visscher. She said one of the most exciting exciting projects of her career was seeing the restoration of salmon to the Okanagan system, which the Water Board has been involved with, and which she said has received a lot of funding from the federal Liberal government. 

Protecting biodiversity

The candidates were asked whether their party would support legislation to safeguard biodiversity and protect and restore intact forests, which serve to reduce climate impacts.

Warwick Sears said the Liberal platform includes implementing a global biodiversity framework and conserving 30 per cent of Canada's lands and waters by 2030. She added her party is looking to map out Canada's "carbon and biodiversity-rich ecological landscapes" in order to better protect them through a holistic approach to conservation. 

Main said Warwick Sears presented her party's platform on this topic well and said the New Democrats have a very similar outlook on the preservation of intact forests and Canada's boreal forest, "which is where most of the petroleum work is going on." She said the NDP is committed to preserving intact old growth forests and not giving them up for the purpose of extracting resources. 

Visscher said her party would definitely support such legislation, adding the Liberals' 30 per cent plan is "excellent" as a starting point but her party would advocate for even more protection. She said Indigenous knowledge can help guide decisions on how best to manage forests with the threat of wildfires in mind. 

Electoral system and vote splitting

The final question of the forum asked candidates whether they support proportional representation, and if so, what they would do to help implement electoral reform 鈥� and given that all three candidates in the forum were "left or progressive," as Corbett said, they were asked how they justified running against each other given that vote splitting has been a "real concern" in not just this election but last fall's provincial election and other elections as well. 

Visscher said the Green Party strongly advocates for proportional representation. "The numbers show if we had a proportionally representative government we wouldn't see the majorities of either Liberal or Conservative that we see, and more Canadians would feel like their vote actually mattered," she said. 

Visscher called it a "really big letdown" when former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau campaigned on proportional representation and then never carried it out. 

Warwick Sears said she personally supports proportional representation "depending on the form that it takes." Regarding vote splitting, she said she completely agrees with Visscher "that the responsibility is on each of us to get more of the vote out," after Visscher had lamented the fact that only 30 per cent of eligible voters cast a vote in the last federal election. 

Main said it is a core theme of the NDP that Canada is not a two-party system, and that in order to support that system, the country "desperately" needs proportional representation. 

"It is just too important to recognize that we have more than two voices, more than a dichotomy," Main said. "I see people in conflict with themselves over, 'Do I vote what I believe or do I bet on a horse that I think is going to win?'"

Other questions in the forum focused on water, B.C.'s Youth Climate Corps and public transportation.