The first British Columbia NDP leadership candidate to officially visit 100 Mile House arrived on Feb. 9 and talked about his platforms.
Fraser-Nicola MLA Harry Lali is currently the longest running MLA in the province, and his riding expanded in 2009 to include Clinton and 70 Mile House.
The candidate has lived in Merritt for 45 years, and says he is running on a platform that responds to issues affecting rural British Columbians.
"I'm a rural boy. I came right out of the rural Punjab to rural Merritt."
Lali worked 11 summers in Interior sawmills to finance his education, and as a big supporter of the forestry industry, he says most of his family also had local forestry jobs.
The MLA favours a grassroots rather than a top-down approach, and says he dislikes tight party disciplines and the current adversarial approach to parliamentary democracy.
He plans to get his party back to its traditional bottom-up policy and "tap into the human resources" in rural B.C., including First Nations, to manage resources and funding, and to develop policies relating to ranching, forestry, health care and education.
Forestry has been "totally mismanaged" and there needs to be a return to forest inventory and silviculture, as well as ending all raw log exports, he explains.
Lali says the B.C. Liberals absolved themselves of responsibility by changing the Forest and Range Practices Act and "gave everything away to corporations." He adds this resulted in the closure of 78 sawmills and pulp mills and the loss of 42,000 permanent forestry jobs.
Only 25 per cent of the land has trees that are aged 25 years or older, and Lali notes this means a lot more silviculture is needed very quickly or else, 25 years from now, there won't be forestry jobs for the children in the province, or for their children.
"The B.C. Liberals keep saying it's only 240,000 hectares of non-sufficiently restocked lands, when now all the studies coming in ... say it's 9.1 million, because the B.C. Liberals don't count the pine beetle [devastation]. They're doing nothing to reforest that."
The ranching industry has been unfairly hit by the federal meat regulations that are driving the family ranches out of business, he adds.
"All [the province] had to do was change one wording in the Agricultural Act, and instead they allowed the large meat-packing plants to basically kill all the local abattoirs."
Education has an $800 million annual shortfall in B.C. from keeping up with the inflation rate, and health care is second from the bottom in per capita spending as a province, Lali says.
He notes when the B.C. NDP governed the province back in 2001, health-care spending was the highest in the country.
The B.C. Liberals say they have the highest health-care spending in history, but this only means that it is up from previous years, Lali explains, and it still doesn't keep up with inflation growth and overhead costs.
Health care is especially inadequate in rural areas with services pulled out of small communities, such as Ashcroft, Lytton and 100 Mile House, to centralize them in the larger regional hospitals, he says.
Lali notes this leaves lengthy wait times for procedures and deters doctors and other professionals from working in small communities.