Vernon-Lumby OneBC candidate hoping to see government go “back to the basics” if elected

“[We need] one set of laws applied the same way to everybody; transparency in contracts and the grants that go from government to various parties; we want accountability for results,” Gibbs stated.

“We want one set of laws across the board and to deal with all the layers of regulations. We have about 176,000 regulations in this province and we need to just go through it and go ‘Where’s the overlap here? What can we simplify? What can we streamline?’ It’ll make everyone’s lives so much easier, especially the businesses.”

Gibbs also noted British Columbia was losing people to other provinces, and there was a need for a government to be in place to incentivize businesses and people to come here instead of leaving.

The OneBC candidate explained her party’s platforms on a number of key issues.

Healthcare

“Our platform would like to see private healthcare offered alongside the public system, especially on the diagnostic end of things,” Gibbs told Vernon Matters.

The candidate said people face long wait times to see a specialist and then have very short periods of time speaking with them about their conditions, and claimed private health care could be a solution to those issues.

She did acknowledge that private health care can result in medical debt, but stated she believed that could be avoided by having the public service still on offer.

“Private health care could be offered as an option so if people wanted they could go there, but the public system is still there” Gibbs said.

“So if people do want to just work within the public system it’s not like they have to go private, because yes I do admit the U.S. system has issues too, there’s a lot of debt people can get into and the insurance coverage is weird. If you have no insurance they charge you one rate and if you’re insurance suddenly is thousands of dollars more. There’s definitely issues there too.”

Gibbs also stated the government would fund the public healthcare, and claimed having private insurance could see people with the resources needed for private healthcare to “go elsewhere and free up the line in the public system.”

Economy

“Economically, we would like to bring the tax rate down again,” Gibbs explained.

“If we have the regulations straightforward, fair, very transparent, the businesses know what they’re getting in to when they come back.

“At the moment there’s a lot of uncertainty around property rights. Like, will the Natives suddenly have a claim on whatever you do? Especially if you are doing something like mining or forestry.”

The last point Gibbs made alluded to OneBC’s plan to rescind the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.

The party would also want to be more “business friendly” by reducing regulations, which Gibbs said would lead to job creation, noting it was not her opinion that governments should create jobs and that it was “the private sector that drives the economy.”

Housing

In discussing housing shortages and affordability issues, Gibbs said she would want to see “unnecessary green building requirements” addressed, saying there should be less red tape to building homes.

Again, she said building homes was not the role of the government but of the private sector.

She also stated that there were issues with building permit costs and property taxes, and though those fall under the purview of municipalities Gibbs said OneBC would work with communities to “point out these unfair things” so they could reduce red tape and cut the costs for consumers.

Gibbs also said the forestry sector should be able to harvest more so as to reduce the costs of building material.

Wildfires and Climate Change

“We don’t say much about climate change because we find the science isn’t really settled on a lot of it,” Gibbs told Vernon Matters.

“Greenhouse gases might trap some heat in but how much of it is actually human caused? How much of it is, if you have a forest fire it actually makes more CO2 than all of the human activity in the province, and that’s natural, or you’ll have a volcano go off. So we will focus more on managing the forest well.”

In addressing wildfire issues, Gibbs said actions should be taken to address the pine beetles killing trees; do slash or controlled burns to clear fire fuels; and cut fire lines through forests to reduce the risk of wildfires spreading too large.

The OneBC candidate said the party would also want to see more land offered to the forestry sector so they could clear the forest of fuels while also harvesting marketable materials.

Gibbs also said there was not much that could be done about drought, noting “you can’t really control how much rain comes through, and when you have a low snow pack you’re unfortunately going to have low water reservoirs.” She added having backup infrastructure to hold more water was a municipal issue and addressing water shortages was not part of OneBC’s platform.

Public Safety

“OneBC wants to eliminate the safe supply experiment, the drug consumption program,” Gibbs told Vernon Matters.

“We are going to have to go the way of some involuntary drug rehab and housing for the severely addicted so we can ween them off of it.

“Having open drug use is just not good for society in general, so we’re going to have to balance people’s rights and how they live as they wish and the rights of other people not to be walking all over discarded needles and all these other problems around people’s rights to enjoy playgrounds and inner cities without feeling like some addict is going to jump on them.” Gibbs said the party did not have a particular addiction treatment model to follow at the time, but did note they would work with Alberta as that province was “looking into some involuntary treatment too. We would have to look into what’s working in different places because I can’t imagine you could just cold turkey someone off of drugs, it would probably have to be some sort of weening process, and it would have to be somewhere where you don’t have drug dealers coming by in secret and managing to get them more drugs.”

The candidate also stated the party would want to crack down on repeat and violent offenders, saying “we don’t think people should get off just because they’ve had a bad upbringing or are part of a minority group or any of those things. If you see any old statues of Justice she’s blindfolded, it’s blind. Very simply it’s administering justice where you’re not showing favouritism, it should be a system just simply entrusted in assessing the evidence, getting a fair hearing, determining guilt of innocence, and then having minimum sentencing. Especially if somebody’s previously offended, then the sentencing should go up.”

Gibbs acknowledged the justice system falls under the federal government’s purview, and said OneBC would advocate for changes to the system and work with other levels of government to bring about changes. However, she also stated that “if some of the federal rules are nonsensical, we might have to use whatever we can to override it.”

OneBC’s full platform can be found online here.

In closing, Gibbs told Vernon Matters believed there should “one rule for everybody, applied equally; fairness; and transparency,” and believed OneBC could deliver that result for British Columbians.

Votes for the provincial general election will be cast Oct. 24, with early voting opening Oct. 16.

by Liam Verster

Vernon-Lumby OneBC candidate hoping to see government go “back to the basics” if elected

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