Conservative candidate for Vernon-Lumby looking to take action on key issues

After the accident, Giesbrecht became involved in politics, volunteering on multiple campaigns, and running for a council seat in the City of Kamloops. His bid for the Vernon-Lumby MLA seat in the 2024 Provincial General Election is his first personal foray into provincial politics.

He currently lives in Kamloops and was to be the Conservative candidate for Kamloops Centre before the party asked him to relocate to Vernon-Lumby. Giesbrecht did tell Vernon Matters he had previously wanted to move to Vernon to be close to the lakes and ski hill, and was in the process of making that move, adding he is not concerned about being seen as a ‘fly-in’ candidate.

“When I”m out talking to people and knocking on doors, the biggest concerns are things like affordability, crime, healthcare,” Giesbrecht said.

“My postal code is kind of the easiest thing to fix. Tackling the things than matter to people will take a little longer, but that’s what I’m here to do.”

Speaking with Vernon Matters, Giesbrecht said he believed affordability to be the main concern for people in the area.

“[Affordability] touches on so many things too, whether it’s housing, whether it’s fuel, whether it’s food,” the Conservative candidate said.

“Affordability has gotten out of control. We’ve announced things like the Rustad Rebate, up to $3,000 a month tax credit whether you’re renting or owning. We’ve talked about things like removing the carbon tax and the clean fuel standard, which should be worth about 36 cents a litre for fuel, and we know fuel touches everything. Everything we wear, everything, we eat probably got here by truck, so if we can start tackling those issues and bringing the cost down a little bit I think we will all be a bit better off.”

During the discussion with Vernon Matters, Giesbrecht was asked to explain his and his party’s stances and thoughts on how to address a series of issues people in the riding and British Columbia face.

Affordability

“When i talk to builders and developers, they just want the government to get out of the way and let them build homes.

“We need to make sure the infrastructure is supported for communities, we’ve already announced over $1-billion investment for infrastructure in communities across B.C. We need to get the builders building so they can stabilize the housing market.

“The carbon tax and the clean fuel standard, right now, taxing people into poverty is not going to change the weather. We need to allow people to afford to do things like drive to work, take their kids to school, the fun vacations, the hockey and soccer, which right now is almost unaffordable for so many families.”

Healthcare

“We need to invest a lot more in healthcare.

“Right now we see waitlist times getting longer; we see hundreds-of-thousands of families in B.C. without a primary care doctor; we see seniors and, especially, children having to wait hours in the emergency rooms to see a physician, that’s unacceptable.

We need to do a few things. We need to train and hire back more doctors. Every doctor that we lost we need to see if they want to come back, a lot of doctors and nurses and staff were let go during COVID, and we need to bring those back. We also need to approach the several thousands that actually retired, that took early retirement to leave the system because they didn’t agree with what was going on. We need to hire back as many as we can.

“We also need to fast-track the approvals of out-of-country trained physicians.

“The last thing we need to do is do more training. Right now, I was told, that UBC (University of British Columbia) has the capability of adding 100 more seats, but haven’t been able to do that yet due to some NDP boondoggles with paperwork and approval. So hopefully we can fast-track that.

“I’d also like to champion a program to get more doctors into the system quickly. Another province in Canada buys blocks of seats at a Caribbean university for training physicians. Maybe we can look at buying blocks of seats whether it’s Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, wherever there’s capacity to train more doctors, and get the kids through there and have some sort of incentive system so when they come back they can work in under-serviced communities.”

Housing

“The permit system,. we need to streamline that.

“We don’t believe that Victoria should be dictating how communities and neighbourhoods look, we need to put the incentive on communities to develop in a way that they see fit.

“Let’s support [communities] with things like infrastructure money.

“We need to get some of the bureaucracy and some of the fees out of the system, let builders build, and get some stability back into the housing market.”

Mental Health and Addiction

“We need to put our emphasis into the treatments.

“We’ve all heard of the four pillars system. There’s prevention, enforcement, harm reduction, and treatment. Right now we’re doing very little in the form of prevention for young people, if you go out and talk to teachers they will tell you that they can tell in Grade 6, 7 and 8 which kids might be going down that path. So I would like to see more emphasis placed on teaching the kids early and supporting them and their families before they go down that road to addiction.

“We need to [end decriminalization and] get back to the enforcement side. Harm reduction has it’s place, absolutely.

“But treatment, it would have been nice if there was an emphasis on treatment seven years ago. It”s going to take some time to ramp up and build treatment facilities, but treatment is the only way to get these folks back to a healthy lifestyle, and getting them back to their families and their previous careers.

“It’s going to take some time. We are going to convert some inhalation and injection sites into intake sites for treatment. We can’t have treatment four, five weeks down the road. We have to find a way to get folks that want treatment, treatment immediately. We can’t expect them to come back, so when they’re ready it’s time to go.

“There’s also going to be a component of people that need enforced treatment. Some people cannot make decisions for themselves, and if they’re a danger to themselves and the community around them, we need to be able to have the tools to get them off the street, get them the help that they need, and, hopefully, they can recover.”

Crime and Public Safety

“The biggest disappointment in our system right now is how we are letting repeat offenders out, time and time and time again. It’s frustrating to citizens and it’s also very frustrating for the RCMP.

“[Repeat offenders] need to not be released as quickly as they are being right now. We need a way to target prolific offenders and make sure they face justice.

“We need to get these people off the streets and use whatever capital we have in Ottawa to change the system and enforce the laws.”

Climate Change and the Environment

“Climate change is real, we recognize that, but we need to do things that actually make a difference and not just virtue signaling.

“Something like B.C.’s LNG (liquified natural gas) projects. If we replaced 20 per cent of the coal-fired plants in Asia with B.C. LNG, we would offset the equivalent of Canada’s entire economy in emissions.

Reducing a pound of CO2 here or a pound of CO2 abroad has the same result overall, so if we can get industry working, get these good-paying jobs for British Columbians, and have an overall positive impact on CO2 emissions, worldwide, I think that’s fantastic.”

Public Education

“We have to make sure schools are a safe space for children, first of all.

“We need to have more supports for [the bullied], we know bullying is a bigger issue with the way social media works and you really never get away from this stuff.

“We have to make sure schools are structured in a way that they are there to teach kids how to think, not what to think. Make it a safe space, remove any ideology from the classroom, and let them learn math, let them learn coding, let them learn art, let them learn whatever their interests are and find ways to engage kids.”

Economy and Jobs

“The economy is going to be key, because we need a strong economy to pay for the programs, the schools, the hospitals, that sort of thing.

“Right now, B.C.’s got about 16 mines stuck in the approval process, we need to find a way to fast-track those and get that multi-billion dollar investment out there and put people to work.

“Right now, the forestry sector is suffering. A lot of people have been either on furlough or had their mills closed, all over the province. We need to find a solution to that.

“Right now, B.C. is one of the most expensive jurisdictions to do forestry in North America, [while] Alberta, right next door, is striving to be one of the most competitive. One of the things B.C. is lacking on and Alberta does well is the permitting system. Their goal, after a forest fire goes through an area, is to have permits in place and a plan for harvesting what timber is salvageable, reseeding and mitigating some of the run-off issues with the forest being burnt. Their goal is three months, right now, in B.C., it’s three years.

“You can drive around our area and look up at the hills and [see remnants from] fires from two, three years ago and nothing is happening yet. We need to find a way to get these forests cleaned up and get them replanted.”

Advance voting for the 2024 Provincial General Election will begin on October 10, with general voting day going on Oct. 19.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vernon Matters has contacted all local candidates for the Vernon-Lumby and Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream ridings, and will publish profiles as they respond. All candidates interviewed were asked the same questions.

by Liam Verster

Conservative candidate for Vernon-Lumby looking to take action on key issues

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