Anna Warwick Sears, the Liberal Party candidate for the Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee riding (photo courtesy of the Liberal Party / website)

By Liam Verster

Election 2025

Local Liberal candidate says U.S. trade war a top priority

Apr 3, 2025 | 1:05 PM

The local Liberal candidate has confidence in the party’s ability to fight back against trade threats from south of the border.

Anna Warwick Sears is the Liberal candidate for the Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee riding.

Speaking with Vernon Matters, Warwick Sears said she was motivated to run by the current relationship Canada has with the United States with the tariff and annexation threats from President Donald Trump, saying that is a top issue for people in the riding and across Canada.

“There we were, we still are, in an affordability crisis, and there was a lot of different ways that different parties want to address the affordability crisis, but then we have foisted on us a trade war that is intended to make us come under submission under whatever it is that the U.S. administration wants us to do,” Warwick Sears stated.

“To me, it feels like the partisanship, the partisan arguing, is really like kind of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic right now. The country is under economic pressure, and it will hit British Columbia hard, especially with all the issues with softwood lumber.

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“So this is job number one, we need to get the situation under control and I think, as Trump is going to be in there for four years, it’s going to be a very long battle to maintain our sovereignty and to protect our interests.”

The Liberal candidate said she believed all Canadians want to maintain the country’s ability for self-determination, whether it be in relation to the economy, universal health care, education, environmental regulations, or social programs.

“Regardless on how you feel about how the Republicans are managing the economy down there, we definitely do not want to have anybody from another country telling us how we’re going to manage our resources, how we should set up our investments, who we can have trade partners with,” Warwick Sears said.

“This is a very problematic situation, and I think people need to take it very seriously.”

She noted that key ways to address the tariff threats were to reduce inter-provincial trade barriers and find new, or expand on existing, international partnerships.

With all that said, Warwick Sears remained confident in Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s ability to lead the country in maintaining that sovereignty and moving the country forward.

“I think Mark Carney is really uniquely positioned in order to work on this situation,” Warwick Sears told Vernon Matters.

“He was the Governor of the Bank of Canada, I believe appointed by [then Prime Minister] Stephen Harper, throughout the time that we had the Great Recession [of 2008]. He carried Canada through the Great Recession in a way that we had much less impact from the problems with mortgages and bonds than they had in the United States or in many other countries in Europe as well. There were a lot of countries that got caught up in that financial bubble.

“So he carried Canada through that, then after that he was hired by the Brits to be the Governor of the Bank of England, I think it’s called, and he helped them get through Brexit. Brexit was sort of similar to what this feels like right now where you have Britain wrenched economically from Europe. So he worked on helping reduce the harm that political change made to the British economy.

“So he has extensive experience helping countries get through this kind of economic situation, and he has a lot of international connections, and a lot of international experience. There is no other leader here that has that kind of experience and the brilliance and the connections and relationships. He is unbelievably experienced and absolutely the right man for the hour.”

She also added that Carney is not Justin Trudeau, stating that a change in leadership also results in a change in how the party operates and how a country is run. The candidate said she believed Carney would be able to make those changes and get Canada on track to address the new issues of the day.

Warwick Sears recently retired from the Okanagan Basin Water Board, where she spent 19 years, including serving as the Executive Director.

She ran in the 2024 Provincial Election as the B.C. NDP candidate, though says her values were unchanged between these two election campaigns.

“I ran as a centrist for the NDP in the fall, I’m running as a centrist for the Liberals now in the spring,” Warwick Sears said.

“I’m here to do a different set of tasks, and I believe that Mark Carney will form government after April 28th, and I want to help him get there, I really do. I think it will also really serve the members of the communities here in Vernon-Lake Country-Monashee to have a representative who’s at the table with the party that is governing, the party in power, because it is much easier for us to address the needs of the communities when you are in the governing party.”

Warwick Sears added she believed the top issue for the riding mainly involved infrastructure investments.

“We certainly need a ton more development; we need to fix our water and waste water systems, which is very expensive infrastructure. [There are] some big infrastructure issues you might have noticed on the highway through downtown Lake Country,” she said.

“These need large federal funding initiatives, they absolutely do, so the question is communicating those back to government.”

She added that the “bread and butter” of a local MP’s role, especially one who is not a Cabinet Minister, is relating the needs of the constituents to government, be it housing, infrastructure, or protecting resources. Warwick Sears noted one of her key jobs, if elected, would be to strengthen protections so invasive species like zebra mussels do not infest Okanagan Lake and other bodies of water.

General voting day for the 2025 Federal Election will be held on April 28.