Saturday, December 1 ~ LANGFORD.
by Mary P Brooke ~ West Shore Voice News
This evening at his holiday season open house in Langford, Alistair MacGregor, MP (Cowichan-Malahat-Langford) addressed a small crowd about the stuff that matters.
He spoke about affordability struggles that so many people deal with, food supply management, and climate change.
“Many policies in Canada are not sufficient for the 21st century,” said MacGregor. “We need to put measures in place now” for a better more sustainable lifestyle in the years ahead, he explained, including “moving older 20th century industries into the future”.
“Housing is huge and constant” as an issue requiring attention, MacGregor said. The rollout of funds through the National Housing Strategy is “too slow”, he told West Shore Voice News. Federal funds are contingent on provincial and municipal levels of government putting their share forward. “That creates a bottleneck,” he said. He suggests the example of what the Canadian government did after World War II, as in building housing for veterans. “We could do that now. It would be a big jolt for the economy.”
For food supply combined with climate change, the idea is to look at changes in farming practices that help farmers economically but also serve to sequester carbon back into the soil. “How much carbon can a hectare hold? That’s what we need to look at. That’s one of our best weapons against climate change,” MacGregor explained. He himself is a farmer with his family in the Duncan area.
“Youth is on top of these issues,” he said, referring to his recent visit at Belmont Secondary School in Langford where he was joined by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and neighbouring MP Randall Garrison (Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke) in addressing a teen crowd. Questions from that audience showed care and concern for a brighter, more sustainable future where human rights and the economy are in balance.
“I speak about this place (Langford) with a lot of pride when I’m in Ottawa,” MacGregor told the open house crowd this evening.
With the Electoral Reform Referendum going on in BC right now, he proposed that BC has an opportunity “to be a leader in our country” by choosing Proportional Representation as the new voting method in this province. Attendees were reminded about the December 7 deadline for submitting ballots.