As the years go by, Mary Forbes of Williams Lake is realizing she can’t dig through garbage forever.
“I need to be able to do the same work that I do and have the same effectiveness without feeling hindered physically,” said Forbes, an environmental educator whose job includes conducting waste audits to see if people are sorting their garbage properly.
Forbes is running as a Green Party candidate for the Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies riding in the upcoming federal election. She said politics has been part of her plan for a while now and that there’s no better time to get involved than now.
“Of any of the elections that have ever gone, I think this is one that people are really looking at very cautiously, especially considering what's happening down south,” Forbes said.
Though she lives in Williams Lake which doesn't fall in her riding, Forbes has also lived and worked in Fort St. John and is approaching her campaign by building a bridge between herself and her constituents.
“I've lived in the north and I think that is the experience that I'm bringing to this politics is that I'm your neighbour,” Forbes said. “I'm a professional speaker, so I should go speak publicly and be the voice of our local constituents in a way that I don't think we've been heard before.”
She also feels the concerns faced by her constituents are similar to those she sees in Williams Lake, describing both areas as having boom-and-bust, resource-based economies. She said she felt there was a stereotype that northern economies are run by bad polluters, but she challenged that.
“Our jobs are actually the front line of preventing pollution. The people who live and work here love our forests and our environment, that's why we live here,” Forbes countered. “I think we're more greenhearted than people give us credit for and often we're called rednecks, but I think we're actually greennecks.”
Forbes highlighted four main issues she’s concerned about as she ramps up her campaign, and discussed how each one is intertwined with the other. Homelessness, the opioid crisis, mental health and what she calls “global weirding” are top of mind.
“It's not just warmer, it's weirder. It's global weirding,” she said of climate change.
Forbes referenced studies highlighting the severity of homelessness in both the Cariboo and areas which fall in her riding. Out of 26 B.C. regions listed in a 2021 report, Fraser-Fort George ranked highest for its level of homelessness per-capita, and the Cariboo ranked fourth. In 2024, Prince George was also among the top five Local Health Areas with the highest rates of unregulated drugs deaths in B.C.
“William's Lake's not that high up...But we're still feeling it...it's still a crisis for everyone and all of this is related to housing and mental health,” Forbes said.
She said she wants to see funding go towards recruiting service providers for both larger municipalities and rural areas. That should include mental health, dental, vision and medical services, she said.
“It's not like a sprinkle coating of what will keep you alive...All of you has to be well,” Forbes said. “We know that mental health is a huge problem. And then you get the opioid crisis, not enough housing and what's happening with global weirding – all of those things just tie in all together.”
In order to make a difference, Forbes said it’s all about knowing where she can pull her weight and has learned this from her time as a board of education trustee with School District 27 (SD 27).
“Working in the school district, one of the things I really loved learning was staying in your lane and knowing that the work the city does is not the work that the school district does,” she said.
As a member of Parliament, Forbes said this would translate into knowing how the federal government can make a difference. For example, instead of focusing solely on setting housing targets for Prince George without providing the means of building those houses, Forbes suggested leaving the construction to the experts and the funding to the federal government. There are plenty of housing projects already on the go, she said, all they need is extra support from the government.
Similarly, Forbes said residents of Dunster, a community near Valemount bordering Alberta, have been concerned about the spraying of pesticides. While this happens on the provincial level, she said what she can do is find how to make it a federal issue.
“When you go down all of the steps for the spraying and the pesticides... ultimately it all lands on Health Canada's doorstep on whether it gets approved. That's federal. So, you have to kind of like weed through to be able to find the place.”
If voted in on April 28, Forbes said she’ll have to step down from her role as trustee with SD 27. In the past, Forbes has worked as an archaeologist in the oil patch. Today, she works for Scout Island, the Conservation Society and the Stream of Dreams Murals Society. Learn more about Forbes and her campaign on the Green Party website.
