With the May 9 provincial election fast approaching, The Squamish Chief sat down with each of the current candidates for Sea to Sky MLA. Each week we will be featuring one of the candidates. First up is the BC Liberal Party’s Jordan Sturdy, the current West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA. The Chief’s broad-ranging conversation with Sturdy includes regional transit, Britannia Beach, the new school curriculum and the provincial Environmental Assessment process.
What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
Q: People have been really excited about the prospect of regional transit in the Sea to Sky Corridor, but will we have regional transit by the end of your next term, should you be re-elected?
A: We will have regional transit in the Sea to Sky.
Q: We are going to hold you to that.
A: Well, do that. This is something that I’ve been passionate about for many years.
As the mayor of Pemberton, we determined as a community that despite other communities stopping funding of regional transit, we were going to maintain it because it is a critical transportation piece and economic piece for the north end of the corridor.
I have always felt that having a public transit connection from Pemberton through to Vancouver has got to be something that we do regionally.
I think when I pushed it in the past, maybe the time wasn’t right because we were getting this fancy-dancey new highway with all this capacity, which is ironic because we didn’t actually gain any capacity.
We still have a two-lane highway; it just has a series of passing lanes.
It is working well for the most part – our travel times are significantly improved, our safety statistics continue to move in the right direction, but as we see growth in the corridor, particularly at Britannia Beach – a community we should touch base on before we go – and obviously Squamish, as well as the drivers in Whistler.
We need to ensure we safeguard the capacity that we do have on Highway 99. One of the ways we do that is by giving people alternatives and regional transit is the logical next step to take.
Q: What did you want to say about Britannia Beach?
A: One of the things that the provincial government did was resolve the issues around Tunnel Dam and the seven different dams in the Britannia Basin.
Over the course of the last two years the province has decommissioned all those dams and has monitored the debris that has been captured behind those dams and that has all started to flow through the system.
We are now at a point we have mitigated those historical features that posed a risk to the community so there is now an opportunity for the old town site, where the mine museum is, to be developed.
Though they still have to do some flood protection measures – there’s a berm and a dike that has to be built and they are going to have to raise and reorient the historical buildings.
It is going to be a neat little community, not big but it will finally allow Britannia Beach to evolve into something that people find attractive and there’s more than one reason to stop. There’s a really strong community in Britannia, but you would never really know it.
Q: Another issue we at The Chief hear a lot about is the provincial Environmental Assessment process. Would you like to see it changed or revamped?
A: It is an evolutionary process and we continue to make changes and we are working with the federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change on the EA process and we have evolved our website to help people better understand how the process works.
I want to highlight that projects definitely change because of input from communities and stakeholders and government.
But to think that we have achieved what we need to achieve, I don’t think anybody thinks that.
I am hopeful we will be able to make some announcements in the next couple of weeks about the next steps, in terms of even responding to the concerns raised in the local government meetings that we did have.
It is a huge challenge to overcome the cynicism and scepticism, and I certainly understand that.
I live it every day and I really hope we can overcome some of that filter, but also the polarization we see in virtually any discussion that involves the landscape in the Sea to Sky.
Q: This is definitely a massive and diverse riding. We saw this with the new provincial curriculum that is being rolled out that is less focused on grades and more focused on child-centered learning. In Squamish it was pretty widely embraced, while in Whistler, not so much.
A: I am not sure that I entirely agree with you there. I have to say School District 48 has really embraced the new curriculum and in many ways has been ahead of the curve, probably at least a year ahead of the rest of the province.
A highlight would obviously be Stawamus Elementary (Sea to Sky Learning Connections), which does reflect a new approach to education and a more modern approach to education and what we need to be doing in terms of setting up our young people for the next of many careers to come.
Being part of developing or supporting the introduction of the new curriculum by this government has been something that I am very pleased and proud to be part of because I think it is very important we change our approach to education.
By the teachers in the Sea to Sky and by the [school] district itself, it has been very well supported.
There has been some concern around aspects of it and that is understandable, especially around the assessment side, and I am not sure that is necessarily unique to each community.
Q: What are you most proud of from your time as MLA?
A: Fundamentally we do need to highlight the financial underpinning of the province that allows us to do a number of different things we wouldn’t have the opportunity to do if we didn’t have the type of fiscal foundation that we do. We’ve had five balanced budgets – this is a really important piece, the solid financial footing that we have here.
