Saturday August 24, 2024 | SOOKE, BC
BC Election Political Analysis by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
BC Green candidate David Evans (Juan de Fuca-Malahat) held a small Friday early-evening event with Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau as his guest at the old stomping grounds that was his business domain for so many years.
They met with folks at the former The Stick in the Mud Coffee House. Evans sold that business last year; the operation there now is called Cafe VOSINO (which runs as a cooperative).
The cooperative nature of the BC Green Party seems to appeal to Evans, who told the folks gathered that his ‘slow burn’ of awareness about environmental and social issues and the role that politics can play. He has gone ‘from awareness to activation’.
Why go into politics?
Shifting from a ‘listening tour’ phase to now his ‘activating the vote’ phase, what’s it gonna take for Evans to win?
“Why would you do this? What would you go into politics?,” he says he’s been asked over the past few months (he became the BC Green candidate for Juan de Fuca-Malahat in mid-May).
“I want to represent, I want to bring voices to the table that haven’t been heard,” said Evans to room of about 30 people remaining, having waited for Furstenau to arrive amidst traffic delays in the rain on Highway 14.
“I want to stop the zero-sum politics of ‘you’re right or you’re wrong’, I want to focus on the nuance,” Evans told the gathered group.
Furstenau picked up on that theme and pummeled hard about how it’s important for constituents to be represented by their MLA in a way that truly represents their needs and concerns — rather than being an MLA who ends up being almost nothing more than a government mouthpiece.
Some of the long-time Sooke folks who lean Green were there in the cafe for the skit-style chit-chat delivery by Evans and Furstenau, including Sinclair and Frederique Philip, Diane Bernard, John Boquist, Ross Reid, and David Mallett.
Long-time government communicator Alan Dolan is on the Evans support team. Former District of Sooke Councillor Ebony Logins (now an SD62 trustee) is his campaign manager.
Four-way race:
The 4-way provincial campaign race in Juan de Fuca-Malahat will give voters their options from among:
- David Evans (BC Green),
- Dr Marina Sapozhnikov (BC Conservative),
- Dana LaJeunesse (BC NDP),
- Herb Haldane (BC United).
Three of those candidates have strong community profiles in Sooke, while one is better known in the Cobble Hill/Cowichan side of the new riding.
- Evans of course has his notoriety and connections through building The Stick up from a hole in the wall to a well-known pit stop in Sooke for locals and visitors alike. He further expanded his coffee-roasting business into the west shore and Victoria.
- Haldane has strong connections in the business community through his home-construction business and his two terms on District of Sooke municipal council.
- LaJeunesse is ‘the Horgan pick’ as the successor to Horgan-then-Parmar representation in Langford-Juan de Fuca (due to boundary changes that riding name now dissolves away as Juan de Fuca-Malahat claims a similar but expanded space), with deep local roots through his work in the forestry sector.
- Sapozhnikov has begun to become acquainted with the Sooke community but there is no time for that to compete with the deep roots that Evans, Haldane and LaJeunesse have now embedded in their socio-political DNA. As a medical doctor she is weighing in on the problems with BC’s health-care system.
Sooke at the core:
Sooke does seem to be the de facto political core of the geographically huge Juan de Fuca-Malahat riding that includes Metchosin, Sooke, Otter Point west to Port Renfrew, and the Cobble Hill/Mill Bay/Malahat side of the island to the east. It’s also geographically closest to the portal that leads beyond to Langford and Victoria.
The Juan de Fuca-Malahat riding has (at 2023) a population of 44,980. The geographical area is 3,116 sq km (the largest of any with a growing urban core, surpassed only by Pacific North-Rim and North Island).
Meanwhile, Furstenau still seems stubbornly steadfast about Evans running his campaign out of his car, which has not helped to ground the David Evans campaign in Sooke where — if he’s to have a campaign edge — he needs to capitalize on his nearly two decades of in-community connections.
Every campaign has financial challenges (donation intake can be small-dollar amounts) but somehow this simple campaign office challenge will need to be resolved for Evans. Sooke is his home base in every respect.
Evans has already issued one news release about the frustrations of spending most days travelling lost distances in his car, when time would be better spent meeting with voters who know where to find him.
All about the highway?
Evans is already hearing complaints about Highway 14 traffic backups but that is ‘old news’ (this journalist was already reporting on that back in 2008). When Horgan was premier he delivered on multi-million-dollar upgrades to Highway 14 (the one road in-and-out of Sooke); it’s unlikely any government will spend more for a long while to make any further significant changes to the highway.
At least from what the crowd was chatting about with Evans last night at Cafe VOSINO it seems the broader provincial issues have not made a dent in their concerns — no mention of housing, child care, education, the cost of living, or any specifics about the health-care crisis.
This gulf of what locals want and what the province needs as a whole could well be frustrating for a candidate who seems genuinely etched in enthusiasm for wanting to make a distinct impression in the next BC Legislative Assembly.
To be fair, the Firday night cafe gathering was intended almost entirely to rouse up the Sooke-area door-knocking troops for the Evans campaign. There was more talk about chatting with people at the door and more enthusiasm for Evans bumper stickers than the deeper issues that would motivate a candidate to represent his community.
Election timeline:
The official BC Election 2024 campaign period starts on Saturday September 21. Advance voting comes up fast after that on October 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16. Election day is Saturday October 19, 2024.
There are 93 electoral areas across the province; 15 of those are on Vancouver Island.
The next session of the BC Legislative Assembly is scheduled to convene in February 2025.
===== RELATED:
- BC Green JDF-Malahat candidate David Evans travels to meet voters (August 10, 2024)
- Summertime Victoria office party for South Vancouver Island BC Greens (August 2, 2024)
- Sooke businessman David Evans now BC Green candidate for Juan de Fuca – Malahat (May 11, 2024)
- Three provincial electoral areas for west shore (April 18, 2023)
- NEWS SECTIONS: BC ELECTION 2024 | POLITICS
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===== ABOUT THE WRITER:
Island Social Trends Editor Mary P Brooke has been covering political news of the west shore since 2008, starting with MapleLine Magazine (2008-2010), then the weekly Sooke Voice News (2011-2013), and then the weekly West Shore Voice News (2014-2020) before publishing daily online at IslandSocialTrends.ca .
News is covered through a socioeconomic lens including political analysis.
Ms Brooke has reported alongside the BC Legislative Press Gallery since 2020.