BC NDP needs more time to craft election platform
Posted February 24, 2013 7:05 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The NDP’s weekend event was totally different from the one hosted by the BC Liberals the day before; there was no uplifting music, balloons, or giant TV screens at the pre-campaign rally, but that didn’t seem to matter to the crowd at the Hilton in Burnaby.
If you could judge by the boisterous cheers, Leader Adrian Dix still won the crowd over.
Dix touted the party’s “Change for the Better” campaign slogan but couldn’t say when a “comprehensive platform” could be rolled out.
He says his team needs the time to get it right and that the “the budget needs to be assessed.”
“The decisions we make in our platform, should we win the election, and that’s going to be up to the voters, they will be decisions where we spend taxpayers dollars so we have to make sure we have to make the right decisions, says Dix.”
He’s focussing on education and job training to get people working, and criticizes the government’s fiscal plan.
“It’s a budget that really unfortunately for them is not only not balanced but doesn’t address the key issue that they’ve been advertising as skills training,” he argues.
He agrees with the LNG opportunities as pushed for by the Liberals but says you can’t forget about climate change.
In his speech, he takes credit for some ideas in the Liberal budget like corporate income tax hikes.
Election months away but NDP candidate ready to take on Premier
The NDP candidate who’s up against Premier Christy Clark isn’t worried about losing in May.
David Eby who’s running in the Vancouver-Point Grey riding will work hard on getting young people on his side.
He says he’ll be doing the traditional door-to-door knocking, but he also has another strategy.
“We have a particular focus on the University of British Columbia to get students out and voting. During the by-election they basically didn’t vote,” says Eby.
“They’re a major force in the riding but they typically don’t vote so we want to really get them out to the polls.”
The former Executive Director of the BC Civil Liberties Association lost to Clark by 595 votes in the 2011 byelection.
