Welcome to “Cloverdale In Conversation,” a regular feature with a local newsmaker. This week, Kevin Falcon is our guest. The three-term MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale represented this riding from 2001 to 2013. He took a hiatus from politics for several years, but is now back after recently winning his bid to be leader of the B.C. Liberal party.
Kevin chats about his life, politics, and what he’d do for B.C. if he was elected premier. He also says he’s really looking forward to getting back to Cloverdale soon to reconnect with some familiar faces.
Malin Jordan: Tell me a little bit about yourself, where you grew up, that kind of stuff.
Kevin Falcon: I grew up on the north shore of Vancouver. I grew up in a family of six boys. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a small business operator.
I was very fortunate to go to Vancouver College for high school. And because we were a large family of modest means, they allowed us to go to school for no tuition. I worked my way through Simon Fraser University and worked at the Vancouver shipyard as a security guard. I graduated from university and went into the business world. I was involved in real estate investment, before I went into politics, but I also had a communications company located in Cloverdale.
MJ: Was it the communications company that got you connected to Cloverdale?
KF: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I also have other connections to Surrey that go back to when I was a student in university. I was involved in municipal politics in Surrey. I ran Dianne Watts’ first campaign when she ran for council. Same with Doug McCallum when he first ran for council, way way back when. So I’ve been involved in Surrey for a long time.
MJ: What riding will you run in in the next election?
KF: I will make sure that I run in an NDP-held riding. My responsibility as leader is not to look for a so-called “safe seat,” but to try and win back a seat from the NDP.
MJ: When did you first run in Cloverdale?
KF: 2001 was the first time I got elected as the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale. I proudly served that riding for three elections. I announced my retirement from public life in 2012, when my eldest daughter was just turning three, and my wife was about to have our second daughter, Rose. I wanted to make sure I was going to be present for my kids and not be an absent dad. Politics can be very hard on families because you have to be away a lot.
For the better part of a decade, I’ve been working in the private sector for a company called Anthem Capital. We make investments in real estate development, but we also invest in natural resources and operating companies, high tech companies, etc. So I oversee our investments right across the whole range. And I was most proud of the fact that we are major investors in Surrey, especially in housing, and we’ve built hundreds of homes, mostly townhomes in the Fleetwood area.
MJ: Speaking of housing, what would you do to make housing more affordable for British Columbians?
KF: This is such an important question. The NDP government has no clue what they’re doing. They introduced a whole slough of taxes in the 2018 budget and said this was going to be their solution to the housing crisis. In fact, housing has gone up every year they’ve been in power, and this year is the highest it’s ever been. It’s an utter policy trainwreck.
So, I’ll do two big things differently. One, I will bring in legislation to force local governments to do their bit in ensuring that we get much more new supply into the marketplace, particularly around planned or existing SkyTrain stations. This is absolutely critical, because unless we get far more supply in the market, the demand with limited supply is going to continue to see an escalation in pricing.
The second thing is, I’m going to look at the housing market through the lens of a first time buyer. And I’m going to strip out all of those unnecessary costs that are imposed by government, both provincial and municipal, I can’t do anything about the Feds, and make sure that we are providing affordability for first time buyers in our province.
It’s a tragedy that we’ve got a whole generation of young people that have largely given up on the dream of homeownership. And that is just totally unacceptable.
MJ: I often hear people say, “foreign buyers drive up the cost of housing.” Is there any truth to that? And if so, what could you do to try and cool that off?
KF: Yes, there is some truth, but it’s generally overstated. Today, the government has all the stats. So you can look up and see what the percentage of foreign buyers are. But the reason why it’s very important not to buy into that too much, is that over the last two years, during COVID, we’ve had virtually no foreign buyers buying into the market, because none could travel here. And yet, we still have the highest housing prices ever. Foreign buyers typically represent less than five per cent of the buyers in our market. And I think the NDP have tried to use that as an excuse for their utter failure to deal with the real issue, which is a housing supply issue.
MJ: Changing speeds a little bit, you had talked on RedFM about the hospital site in Cloverdale. After I wrote my story about your comments, I’ve gotten more than a dozen emails from people that have all said the same thing, basically, they’re not fond of that location. Obviously you wouldn’t stop the hospital if shovels were in the ground. But if a Liberal government was elected, and the Cloverdale Hospital had yet to be started, would you move it?
KF: I am very supportive of building another hospital in Surrey. So I want to be clear about that. However, we have to stop calling this a hospital. It’s an urgent care centre, not a full-fledged hospital. It is not another Surrey Memorial Hospital. There’s going to be five operating rooms. They’ll have some cancer services, a childcare centre, lab services, etc. But there’s not going to be any of the full suite of services you would expect at a real hospital.
MJ: Really? I think most people think this will be a full-fledged, regular hospital.
KF: I know. That’s why I refuse to call it a hospital. It is not a Surrey Memorial Hospital. We have to be so clear about that. It’s an urgent care centre.
It’s also instructive, Malin, that the Fraser Health Authority doesn’t even support where it’s being built. That’s why they’re not putting any money into it. We need another hospital for sure, but the biggest challenge we face in the health-care system is not the structures, it’s the people to staff them: the doctors, the nurses, the care aids, the janitorial staff. If you put a hospital in a location that is difficult to access, or you have to access it primarily by car, and there’s limited bus transportation too, that’s very, very challenging to attract the most important ingredient to a successful hospital, which is people, the staff.
What I have said is the ideal location would be along or close to SkyTrain.
MJ: Do you think the NDP will get shovels in the ground on schedule?
KF: The NDP have been promising this hospital since 2017. We’re now five years later and, not surprisingly, because this is a common theme with the NDP, there’s nothing to show for it. They didn’t even have any money in their budget for it as far back as 2020. And I’m a former finance minister, so the first thing I look at is “have they got the dollars put aside?” And they didn’t.
If they get construction started in 2024, it’s possible, but that’s seven years later. Just to step back for a moment, Malin, understand something. I was minister of transportation for six years and just in that six year period, just keeping to Surrey, we widened No. 10 Highway; we widened 176 Street; we built the Port Mann Bridge; we built the South Fraser Perimeter Road; we did a $500 million expansion of Surrey Memorial Hospital.
MJ: Going back to what you previously said about problems with getting the people to staff new hospitals. The NDP has already suspended thousands of health-care workers without pay. As Omicron fades, and every other province begins to relax restrictions and end mandates, last week Bonnie Henry came out with a new laundy list of other health-care workers that will have to get jabbed or lose their jobs in March: massage therapists, acupuncturists, dentists and others. What would you do, if you were elected, about the mandates that health-care workers have to be vaccinated? Would you remove that and let them come back to work?
KF: I do not like the idea of firing critical health-care workers over issues like those mandates—especially now as we have reached a 92 per cent vaccination rate in the province of British Columbia, which we can all be proud of. But I’m very concerned about the idea of firing critical nurses, and those that work in the health-care system, at this point as we have a hopefully continuing, rapidly diminishing COVID threat. Getting people to staff this new urgent care centre is going to be an epic challenge.
MJ: Did you see the recent stats regarding drug overdoses? Do you have any ideas of how to tackle the opioid crisis?
KF: Oh, absolutely. This government is focused entirely on what they call “safe supply.” And it’s important to understand there’s no such thing as safe supply. It’s unsafe to take narcotics, period. That’s why doctors are highly reluctant to prescribe them. But (the NDP’s) entire focus is on just giving people safe drugs. And while that may be part of the solution, there needs to be way more focus on recovery, investing hugely in recovery to help these folks get off of their addictions, so that they can become contributing members of society. And the second thing I would do is a massive investment in full-time, 24/7 care facilities, probably at Riverview. We need at least 300 beds, to really look after these folks, and make sure they get the proper care and attention, both psychiatric and medical, to ensure that they’re not being left on the streets, being exploited and abused by drug dealers and others, so that they can get the proper care they need. That I think is true compassion.
MJ: Anything you want to add?
KF: Just that I’m really looking forward to getting back to Cloverdale and seeing my friends at the Chamber. I’m hopeful that I’ll get a chance to say hi to local businesses and see how people are doing. It’s been a tough couple of years, especially for small businesses, and I want them to know there’s hope, that there is a leader of the opposition that is absolutely committed to getting this province going again, getting things built, not just talking about them, but actually getting things happening on the ground for the benefit of residents.
editor@cloverdalereporter.com
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Other Cloverdale In Conversation features:
CIC: Olympic bronze medalist Hillary Janssens chats about life, the Olympics, and Cloverdale
CIC: Cloverdale high school teacher chats about teaching and life during the COVID-19 crisis
CIC: Farhan Lalji chats about the new B.C. high school sports governance proposal
CIC: Alan Clegg sits down for a socially-distanced chat about his life in Cloverdale over the years
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CIC: Ursula Maxwell-Lewis chats about life, travel, and her start in journalism
CIC: Music shop owner chats about life, music, and his recent Clovie Award win
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The 2024 federal budget failed to spark a much-needed rebound in the polls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trailing Liberal party, according to new Ipsos polling released Tuesday.
Canadian reaction to the Liberal government’s latest spending plans shows an historic challenge ahead of the governing party as it tries to keep the reins of government out of the Conservative party’s hands in the next election, according to one pollster.
“If the purpose of the budget was to get a political reboot going, it didn’t seem to happen,” says Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs.
The 2024 federal budget tabled last week included billions of dollars in new spending aimed at improving “generational fairness” and rapidly filling in Canada’s housing supply gap.
Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News shows voters’ reactions to the 2024 federal budget mostly ranged from lacklustre to largely negative.
After stripping out those who said they “don’t know” how they feel about the federal budget (28 per cent), only 17 per cent of Canadians surveyed about the spending plan in the two days after its release said they’d give it “two thumbs up.” Some 40 per cent, meanwhile, said they’d give it “two thumbs down” and the remainder (43 per cent) gave a symbolic “shrug” to Budget 2024.
“Thumbs down” reactions rose to 63 per cent among Alberta respondents and 55 per cent among those in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Some 10 per cent of respondents said the budget would personally help them, while 37 per cent said it would hurt, after again stripping out those who said they didn’t know what the impact would be.
Asked about how they’d vote if a federal election were held today, 43 per cent of respondents said they’d pick the Conservatives, while 24 per cent said they’d vote Liberal, followed by 19 per cent who’d lean NDP.
The Conservative lead is up one point from a month earlier, Bricker notes, suggesting that Budget 2024 failed to stem the bleeding for the incumbent Liberals.
Only eight per cent of respondents to the Ipsos poll said the budget made them more likely to vote Liberal in the upcoming election, while roughly a third (34 per cent) said it made them less likely.
“The initial impressions of Canadians are that it hasn’t made much of a difference,” Bricker says.
Sentiment towards the Liberals remains slightly higher among generation Z and millennial voters — the demographics who appeared to be the focus of Budget 2024 — but Bricker says opinions remain “overwhelmingly negative” across generational lines.
Heading into the 2024 budget, the Liberals were under pressure to improve affordability in Canada amid a rising cost of living and an inaccessible housing market, Ipsos polling conducted last month showed.
The spending plan included items to remove junk fees from banking services and concert tickets, as well as some items aimed at making it easier for first-time homebuyers to break into the housing market. It also included a proposed change to how some capital gains are taxed, which the Liberals have claimed would target the wealthiest Canadians.
Paul Kershaw, founder of Generation Squeeze, told Global News after the federal budget’s release that while he was encouraged by acknowledgements about the economic unfairness facing younger demographics, there is no quick fix for the affordability crisis in the housing market.
Trudeau, his cabinet ministers and Liberal MPs have hit the road both before and after the budget’s release to promote line items in the spending plan.
Bricker says this is the typical post-budget playbook, but so far it looks like there’s nothing that “really caught on with Canadians” in the early days after the release of the spending plans. The Liberals have a chance to make something happen on the road, he says, but it’s “not looking great.”
“Maybe over the course of the next year, they’ll be able to demonstrate that they’ve actually changed something,” he says.
Bricker notes, however, that public opinion has changed little in federal politics over the past year.
The next federal election is set for October 2025 at the latest, but could be called earlier if the Liberals fail a confidence vote or bring down the government themselves.
But a vote today would see the Liberals likely lose to a “very, very large majority from the Conservative party,” Bricker says.
“What we’re seeing is, if things continue on as they’ve been continuing for the space of the last year, that they will end up in a situation where, almost an historic low in terms of the number of seats,” he says.
The Conservatives are leading in every region in the country, except for Quebec, where the Bloc Quebecois holds the pole position, according to the Ipsos polling.
The Liberals are meanwhile facing “a solid wall of public disapproval,” Bricker says. Some 32 per cent of voters said they would never consider voting Liberal in the next election, higher than the 27 per cent who said the same about the Conservatives, according to Ipsos.
Typically, Bricker says an incumbent party can hold onto a lead in some demographic, age group or region and build out a strategy for re-election from there.
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But this Liberal party lacks any foothold in the electorate, making prospects look grim in the next federal election; it’s so bleak that he even invokes the Progressive Conservative party’s historic rout in the 1993 vote.
“The hill they have to climb is incredibly hard,” Bricker says.
“I haven’t seen a hill this high to climb in federal politics since Brian Mulroney was faced with a very similar situation back in 1991 and ’92. And we all know what happened with that.”
These are some of the findings of an Ipsos poll conducted between 17 and 18, April 2024, on behalf of Global News. For this survey, a sample of 1,000 Canadians aged 18-plus was interviewed online. Quotas and weighting were employed to ensure that the sample’s composition reflects that of the Canadian population according to census parameters. The precision of Ipsos online polls is measured using a credibility interval. In this case, the poll is accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, had all Canadians aged 18-plus been polled. The credibility interval will be wider among subsets of the population. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to other sources of error, including, but not limited to coverage error, and measurement error.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
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The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
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“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
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West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
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By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
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LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
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Fareed’s take: There’s been an unprecedented wave of migration to the West
On GPS with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, he shares his take on how the 2024 election will be defined by abortion and immigration.
Honda to build electric vehicles and battery plant in Ontario, sources say – Global News
Will We Know if TRAPPIST-1e has Life? – Universe Today
See how chicken farmers are trying to stop the spread of bird flu – Fox 46 Charlotte
Simcoe-Muskoka health unit urges residents to get immunized
Own a cottage or investment property? Here's how to navigate the new capital gains tax changes – The Globe and Mail
Lyrid meteor shower 2024: How to see a stunning fireball tonight – BBC Science Focus
Freeland defends budget measures, as premiers push back on federal involvement – CBC News
Osoyoos commuters invited to celebrate Earth Day with the Leg Day challenge – Oliver/Osoyoos News – Castanet.net
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