The tumultuous election campaign and the upheaval since have not been easy on Sea to Sky Corridor MLA Jordan Sturdy, he acknowledges.
BC Liberal incumbent Sturdy regained his seat May 9, but it was a hard fought campaign that got personal at times, both provincially and within the riding.
Sturdy won with about 43 per cent of the vote.
In the 2013 election Sturdy won with 53 per cent of the vote. With that election and with previous municipal elections he ran in, not as much was riding on the outcome, he said.
“It wasn’t my whole identity or anything, so if you didn’t win, you didn’t win,” he said.
This election though, Sturdy said he felt it was a much bigger, more public judgment of his performance and that was challenging.
Sturdy’s and other candidates’ campaign signs were vandalized and he faced online vitriol.
“What else in life – your family, your colleagues, your school, your business, anything in your life – do you every four years throw it all up in the air and let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “I don’t have particularly thick skin and I am not by nature an extrovert, but it is what it is.”
Provincially, the Liberals took 43 seats in the Legislature while the BC NDP took 41 and the BC Green Party garnered three.
With the NDP and Green alliance a fait accompli, Sturdy finds himself in the opposition seat for the first time.
Sturdy said he and his wife Trish and their children have tried to keep a focus on their Pemberton farm.
“So that if I am not re-elected at some point in the future or something happens, I have other things to do,” he said, adding he has seem other politicians whose identities are so wrapped up in that role that they lose their identity when they lose the job.
Not being part of the ruling party has its pluses, Sturdy said, such as allowing him to spend more time in the riding.
“I don’t have the same level of provincial responsibilities,” he said. Previously Sturdy was parliamentary secretary to the minister of transportation, parliamentary secretary for energy literacy and the environment and for a brief time after the recent election he was named environment minister in Premier Christy Clark’s cabinet.
Sturdy said while in the media it may seem that politicians from opposing political parties don’t get along, on a personal level most do.
“I have good relationships with my counterparts, with my colleagues in the house,” he said. “There’s a shared experience there and a sympathy for one another.”
He is relieved Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon didn’t call a snap election.
“I don’t want to go back to an election,” Sturdy said. “That is absolutely the worst part of my job.”
Sturdy said as an opposition member he will remain an advocate for regional transit for the Sea to Sky and is optimistic that it will become a reality.
He is working with the ministry of forests on a recreation opportunities analysis for the Sea to Sky.
The idea is to have a geographic information system (GIS) layering of the Sea to Sky Corridor looking at where there is tenure, conservation areas, motorized access areas, where there is sensitive wildlife habitat and where to minimize interaction, Sturdy explained.
“We have in many ways a capacity issue here and I think everybody recognizes that,” he said, “The first thing we need to do is better understand in the modern context what the opportunities are and what the limitations are.”
Sturdy also hopes to continue working on housing solutions for the riding.
“BC Housing is not going away, unless the government decides there’s going to be major changes there… but I really don’t see that they won’t be a player going forward,” he said.
His involvement in creating an online portal for projects like Woodfibre LNG, to highlight and simplify approval processes and monitoring so it is more transparent for the public, will also continue, he said.
Whatever the next four years hold, Sturdy said one thing is for sure.
“It will be interesting,” he said.
