Election 2024: Campaign Roundup - Day 2

Welcome to Day 2 of our British Columbia 2024 Campaign Roundup!

With the 2024 BC election underway, we'll be bringing you daily updates on all the policy proclamations, platform promises, and political point-scoring from the campaign trail.

We hope you'll find these updates engaging and informative, but if a daily email is too much for you, you can always find an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email that will stop just these daily updates without removing you from our regular weekly newsletter.

Campaign Roundup - Day 2:

• There are six new ridings in the province for this year’s election, after the riding boundaries were updated. This is a regular process that occurs every ten years, to ensure that ridings are reasonably balanced population-wise. This means that the number of seats in the Legislature will rise to 93 from 87 after the election, and any new government will need at least 47 seats to form a majority government.
  
  
• The current list of candidates running for election is available here, but the list will not be final until September 28th, when nominations close. There are a record number of independent candidates running in this election, among them a number of well-known former BC United MLAs.
  
  
• Conservative Leader John Rustad and Richmond-Bridgeport candidate Teresa Wat addressed a crowd at the Lingyen Mountain Temple, a Mahayana Buddhist monastery in Richmond. Both candidates decried “safe supply” and demanded a shut down of Richmond’s “drug dens”.
  
  
• The BC Green Party released a new campaign ad. “Healthy people and a healthy planet” are the theme of the ad - though there are very few concrete platform promises as of yet to indicate how the party plans to achieve this goal.
  
  
• Chris Sankey, Conservative Party Candidate for North Coast - Haida Gwaai, shared a powerful personal story about overcoming addiction. Sankey said that there is no such thing as safe supply, and that recovery is the way to end the drug crisis in British Columbia.
  
  
• Bowinn Ma, BC NDP Candidate for North Vancouver - Lonsdale, took an interesting scarcity-based strategy to distributing lawn signs, suggesting that only a few hundred would be made available. Ma campaigned with NDP Leader David Eby, and spoke about affordable housing.
  
  
• In Kamloops - North Thompson, Conservative Party candidate Ward Stamer drew attention to the closure of the Nicola Valley Hospital’s emergency department. The closure was due to lack of physician availability, and Stamer asked voters to consider his party’s “Patient First” policy.

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