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“I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.” ~~ John G. Diefenbaker

Job Losses and Population Decline Signal Economic Weakness Under BC NDP

New Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data shows British Columbia lost 20,000 jobs in February, including 33,000 full-time jobs, while the province’s population declined by roughly 3,000 people last month, including 2,000 youth aged 15–24, raising new concerns about the direction of the province’s economy. Gavin Dew, MLA for Kelowna-Mission and the Critic for Jobs, Economic Development, Innovation and AI, says the numbers point to a worrying trend for BC’s economy:  “With BC losing 20,000 jobs in February and David Eby on track to lose his own job, no wonder he’s trying so hard to distract British Columbians with silly political games. The NDP jobs minister is seemingly more focused on taking over the Premier's job than protecting private sector jobs for British Columbians." "Here's a simple economic truth: holding the unemployment rate steady by losing both jobs and population is not a success story," said Dew. "Less people chasing fewer jobs is a downw...
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STEPHEN WOODWORTH: Proportional Representation or Democratic Representation?

Describing the basic flaw of Proportional Representation (PR) is challenging because advocates of PR offer at least a half dozen or more PR variations without ever specifying which one they propose should be implemented if we ditch ‘first past the post’ (FPTP), so agreeing to ditch FPTP in favour of adopting PR is like buying a pig in a poke. That said, PR generally assigns legislators to Parties based on the Parties’ share of the popular vote, in addition to legislators directly elected to represent specific constituents, contributing in at least two ways to increased power to Party bosses.  First, the extra legislators are accountable mainly to their Party rather than being representatives for any specific electors, since they owe their appointment to their Party. Legislators who act as if they are beholden to their Party rather than to electors are already a huge contributor to lack of democratic legitimacy in Canada’s electoral system today, and the question is whether we wan...
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WARD STAMER -- The minister mentioned some success stories of early salvage. I have many that I can list to myself that are not successful in my own riding

PART 2 of Budget estimates for the Ministry of Forests – Wildfire Timber Salvage (from Tues March 10th, 2026)   WARD STAMER:   Let’s just move on a little bit from that to wildfire. We can talk about this. If we can, let’s ask a couple of questions around salvage. We know full well that we’ve lost an incredible amount of fibre in the last five years, ten years, on wildfire. I’m looking at the information in front of me, when it talks about the minister’s…. It’s the manual for wildfire recovery. In that document, it specifically says that we have specific timelines when it comes to salvaging fibre from a wildfire. There are implications, even in the minister’s numbers, saying that the expectation is only 10 percent… Ten percent is the number to recover wildfire fibre. Now, there are many of us that would disagree with that number. Part of the reason, I believe, that we’re having that low number is it’s taking an incredibly long period of time to be able to access th...
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WARD STAMER -- It sounds like we’ve gone almost full circle and we’re going to be having the same conversation again (Part 1)

Estimates on the Ministry of Forests operations with Forest Minister Ravi Parmar, for forestry critic Ward Stamer – budgeted with $406,398,000 RAVI PARMAR: It’s an incredible team that I’m responsible for and get the opportunity to work with as well. I just wanted to give them a shout-out as they support me over the course of the next six hours. I’m looking forward to the discussion. Ward Stamer ... it sounds like we’ve gone almost full circle and we’re going to be having the same conversation again. Part of that was when we looked at the current data and how many direct jobs that we had in our industry, we had approximately 56,000 direct jobs with anywhere between 150,000 and 200,000 other jobs that were tied directly to the forest industry, and that we had lost approximately 10,000 jobs in the previous year. That was previous 2025. I would suggest that we’ve lost probably somewhere in that neighbourhood again last year in 2025. So, let’s get right to the crux of some o...
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