BC Greens first to drop full election platform focused on citizen well-being, taxing the rich

The BC Green Party is out with its full election platform focusing on how the government can provide services that contribute to the well-being of citizens.

Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau announced the platform in Victoria Tuesday, saying her party’s platform is built around four pillars: thriving people, resilient communities, a flourishing natural world, and good governance.

It includes doubling existing property tax rates and adding a two per cent tax on homes over $3 million.

“More and more wealth has moved into fewer and fewer hands, where the billionaires now global have over $14 trillion in wealth,” Furstenau said.

“That wealth goes up into those hands, and it stops moving in the economy. It stops fueling a healthy economy and as that wealth has travelled up, we’ve seen the other end of the spectrum and deepening poverty.”

The Greens also plan to invest $650 million annually in “municipal infrastructure to support new housing.”

“We create that supply of fully affordable, truly non-market housing that is protected from these forces that have enormous wealth and capital that are affecting the ability where they’ve grown up, where they want to go to school, where they work and where their families live,” the party leader said.

Furstenau says this platform puts people’s well-being first.

“We need to ensure that governments aren’t only measuring GDP, only how much they’re spending but how that money is accomplishing outcomes governments should be striving for,” she said.

Among other things, the party says it also wants to maintain a carbon tax while upping the size of the rebate and pledges to establish a network of 93 community health centres across B.C., it’s committed to providing free public transit, increasing tax rates for those who make $350,000 a year or more, and for corporations with revenues above $1 billion.

“An economy is meant to serve people, and when our economy is producing the kinds of outcome we’re seeing, a growing gap between rich and poor, a growing number of people who aren’t getting by, and a growing number of people who have so much wealth they’re not even sure what to do with it. We need governments to step in and play the role.”

Furstenau says the Greens will increase social and disability insurance and “wraparound support” for youth aging out of care to combat poverty.

The Greens also want to remove all tobacco sales from pharmacies and make all vaccines free for British Columbians.

Meanwhile, BC NDP Leader David Eby was in Castlegar Tuesday, and Conservatives Leader John Rustad was making announcements in Squamish.

Eby promised to expand health-care access for those living in remote areas, and job protection for people facing a serious illness like cancer.

Rustad announced his party’s plans for the province’s energy section, saying he would denounce the NDP’s electric vehicle and heat pump mandates while looking into solar, nuclear, and natural gas power methods.

—With files from The Canadian Press and Maria Vinca.