Nanaimo-Ladysmith candidates fielded questions about the U.S. president and debated accuracy of polls in front of future voters in the riding's first all-candidates' forum.
Lisa Marie Barron, NDP candidate, Michelle Corfield, Liberal candidate, and Paul Manly, Green Party candidate, were at Nanaimo District Secondary School on Tuesday, April 15, for a youth-moderated event where they outlined their party platforms and talked about election issues. Tamara Kronis, Conservative candidate, was unable to attend and Stephen Welton, People's Party candidate, did not respond to an invitation, according to Dan Parker, NDSS teacher.
At an election press conference last month, Manly said that polling research conducted on behalf of the Greens suggested he would came in second in the riding, something Barron disputed. She said the information was "not clear and transparent" and wanted to know how the information was compiled.
"We have serious questions to be asking, because I know to be true when I'm out on the door, people are talking about the NDP and the Conservatives," she said. "We know that the NDP is the party to best beat the Conservatives and make sure that we have strong representation here in this riding."
Manly said Oraclepoll Research contacted 600 respondents via cellphones and landlines. He also pointed to broken promises of proportional representation.
"The Liberals said that 2015 would be the last first-past-the-post election," said Manly. "Then we had a confidence-and-supply agreement with the NDP holding real power in our House of Commons, but they didn't include proportional representation as part of that. Instead, we got leaflets that were sent out to the community saying we should ask the Liberals for that. Why didn't they ask the Liberals for that?"
Corfield said there is no proportional representation without Indigenous voices.
"We haven't elected a Liberal here for a long time, but I'm going to be the first Liberal elected in this riding, and I'm going to stand up for the people in Nanaimo-Ladysmith, and I'm going to do it with hard work, I'm going to do it to be the voice of the people, and the voice of the First Nations people," she said. "Representing government is sitting in government that actually holds power."
With Trump and tariffs on the mind of many Canadians, students wanted to know how candidates and their parties would handle those potential threats from south of the border.
Manly referred to his time representing the riding during Trump's first term in the White House, when he was part the discussion when the North American Free Trade Agreement was renegotiated.
"I fought for a fair trade agreement that protected workers' rights, consumer standards and environmental standards," he said. "We need to negotiate from a position of strength, and that means reducing interprovincial barriers to trade and building up our own economy so we stop ripping and shipping raw resources and selling them overseas and selling them to the Americans."
Barron preached unity and stated Canada must stand its ground.
"We are sovereign, and we are coming together to make it very clear to Donald Trump that he cannot push us around," Barron told the audience. "I had … 450-500 people that came together just a few nights ago saying exactly this. This is the work that I will be doing. I do not cave to the bullies."
Corfield pointed out that her party's leader has held talks with Trump during the campaign.
"Mark Carney has taken on Donald Trump. Mark Carney has played his cards right. He has protected our country against the tariffs thus far,” said Corfield. “He will continue to protect our country going forward. We are a country at war … He's the right man for the job at the right time, and I'm [the] right candidate for the job at the right time.”
Health care and hospital improvements were issues during the recent provincial election and candidates were asked what they could do to help reduce wait times in hospitals.
Manly said Nanaimo Regional General Hospital is 60 years old and in need of a new patient tower, and noted that the federal government doesn’t directly put capital into the hospital system any more.
“We're relying on the RDN … for 40 per cent of a $1.7-billion project,” said Manly. “It's not exactly a fair way of dealing with things. We need to ensure that we have more doctors, and we need good health facilities to do that … When we transfer health funds to the provinces, we need to make sure that they actually put those funds into health care, not into general revenue, and that they spend them fully.”
Corfield, who worked with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., said improving wait times is a complicated issue that will involve not only adding doctors, but also increasing graduation rates for nurse practitioners. She hopes that the federal government would be a partner in paying for hospital tower infrastructure.
“We need hard advocacy to get the medical care that we deserve and we deserve tertiary medical care,” she said.
Barron said the situation didn’t occur “overnight,” and comes from “generations" of underfunding.
“We cannot be moving towards a privatized system where people are forced to use the credit cards instead of their care card to access essential health care,” she said. “We know also that when we have increased privatization, the valuable health care workers that are in our public health care system get siphoned out into private care – it's highly problematic.”
More money from the federal government is needed so “people can access head-to-toe care” in the public system, and the feds also needs to provide money for infrastructure, she said.
Students wanted to also hear candidates’ views on the solutions for the housing crisis and Corfield said "the solution is complicated only because the problem is complicated." She noted that the Liberals are promising to increase home-building in Canada to 500,000 per year over the next decade.
“We can fix the problem, but we have to reduce the barriers in the regional district and City of Nanaimo and the province, to reduce the red tape that happens, and build smarter homes," she said.
Manly said the answer to the crisis could lie in the past, referring to when the federal government was involved in ensuring affordable and co-operative housing was constructed, between the Second World War and the 1970s.
“All of those programs were cut, starting with the Conservatives in the '80s, the Liberals in the '90s, and again with the Conservatives in the 2000s,” said Manly. “That has left us with a deficit in affordable housing. We're always going to have people who need non-market housing … once we do that, that will alleviate the market for the rest of us.”
Barron said the solution is limiting the wealthy’s ability to buy for profit.
“I actually don't think it's all that complicated,” she said. “The housing market has been set up to do exactly what it's intended to do, which is to be an investment tool for rich corporations, those who can afford it, instead of ensuring that it is used as a basic human right. We need to ban corporations from swooping in and buying up affordable homes and leaving people in our communities without the opportunity to actually keep a roof over their head.”
Even though they can't vote, students have expressed interest in the upcoming election, Parker said, particularly with U.S. politics becoming part of the discussion.
"Donald Trump is always an interesting character, and so if his name's attached, people are just more interested…" he said. "The foundations of the world economy are collapsing and our identity as Canada is really coming to the fore in a way we haven't seen, or I've never seen my lifetime, so they're feeling this at home. They're seeing this in the media."
Parker said he wished that the other two candidates had been able to attend.
"There are kids here who are interested in conservative politics and if [PPC and Conservative candidates are] worried about not being able to approach a certain topic, there's so much to talk about; we need all the perspectives," the teacher said. "It was a great time today. I really enjoyed seeing the debate, but the conservative side was missing, and that's unfortunate for democracy."
