BC Green Party MLA Adam Olsen was in Squamish Friday as part of a province-wide tour.
The Saanich North representative, one of the three Green Party of B.C. caucus members, visited with Mayor Patricia Heintzman and other community stakeholders.
The caucus also includes party leader Andrew Weaver, MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head and Sonia Furstenau, MLA representing the Cowichan Valley
“It is a big province and Andrew and Sonia and I, all live and work and play in southern Vancouver Island and so it is important for us to be seeing the province with our own eyes and hearing stories with our own ears, and being able to go into the Legislature with those stories and paint the picture of the province as it actually is rather than how we might believe it to be,” Olsen told The Chief.
Every community he visits, he hears about the housing crisis, he said.
“The social and economic cost of action or inaction that have been taken over the last five or six years have got us to a situation in our province that is devastating our communities,” he said.
“As a caucus… we really look at housing as the core, central component of a healthy safe, resilient community,” he said. “If housing is not that for a community — if it is a cash machine or it is being used primarily as a commodity, which is what it has evolved into — then we see the devastating impacts that it is having.”
It is not acceptable that people can’t find a home in the community they grew up in and that others are living in their cars because they can’t find housing where they work, he said
Olsen acknowledged that fixing the housing challenges faced in Squamish and elsewhere is complex and said he doesn’t yet have the answers.
“The fact is there has been a problem, it has been ignored and now we are trying to come in and triage a situation that is incredibly bad.”
Some of the tax measures the NDP government is going to be bringing forward in the fall session may be part of the answer, he said.
“There might be some quick responses to [the housing crisis], but I don’t know that there are quick fixes,” he said.
It can take years for a housing project to go through the approval processes and get built, he noted.
There has been a building boom, but what is being built is not the right kind of stock, he added.
“There’s been this perspective that the market will determine what is being built and this current government has a different perspective than that, they are going to be encouraging a lot more diversity in the stock that is built.”
He said that there needs to be a discussion of what role the government will play in housing.
“I am hoping that this government starts to play a more active role in what is built, where it is built and making sure that our communities are complete communities.”
Olsen noted other similarities between his home riding of Saanich and Squamish, include transportation challenges.
Both the Malahat on Vancouver Island and the Sea to Sky Highway have very similar bottlenecks, he said.
“The former government did some work in this area and the current government is doing some work on the Malahat, but those land-based challenges exist.”
Also like Squamish, on southern Vancouver Island tourism is having an impact on trails and recreation spots. Olsen said he feels that local trail builders and trail stakeholders are often experts on what is best for their area.
“I think that BC Parks and the provincial government are going to have to move away from this perspective that only the Ministry of Environment and BC Parks knows how to protect and look after these important places. I think we are going to have to include the people who live and breathe this to help us and government manage parks better.”
