Children, Childcare, & Youth in Care
Childcare
BC Greens's promise
- Professional development opportunities to increase qualifications of existing child care workers, and the training of more early childhood educators in certified programs;
- Establishment of professional wages for early childhood educators;
We will maintain child care subsidies and supports as needed to ensure adequate financial support for all families.
We will move the Ministry of State for Childcare into the Ministry of Education in recognition of the importance of ECE in the education outcomes for our children.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Early childhood development
BC Greens's promise
Stay-at-home parents
BC Greens's promise
Youth in care
BC Greens's promise
Climate Change & the Environment
BC Parks
BC Greens's promise
Carbon tax
BC Greens's promise
Climate resilience
BC Greens's promise
Conservation
BC Greens's promise
Prioritize protection of wildlife and their habitat across government including through:
- Establishing a strategy to manage our wetlands;
- Protecting coastal ecosystems with a Coastal Law and Strategy;
- Ensuring appropriate legislative oversight through creating legislated objectives for fish and wildlife;
- Moving the fish and wildlife branch from FLNRO and the Ministry of Environment;
- Urgently match and exceed historic provincial funding levels for the fish and wildlife branch to match the unprecedented challenges we now face;
- Ensuring that science about the status of our wildlife and environment is independent from political interference and made freely available to the public;
Enhance funding for wildlife conservation, habitat protection and habitat acquisition and dedicate all fishing, hunting, guide-outfitting, and trapping license fees for this purpose.
Create an endangered species law that establishes legal protection of species and their habitat to ensure their recovery and survival.
Take action on fish farms to protect wild salmon:
- Support the full implementation of the Wild Salmon Advisory Council recommendations and Cohen Commission recommendations, working urgently to enforce all measures within provincial jurisdiction;
- Negotiate strongly with DFO to complete the recommendations under federal jurisdiction;
- Working with DFO, First Nations, local communities, and industry, provide stimulus and incentives to create a close-containment land based fish farming industry and cancel open-pen fish farm tenures.
Establish a made-in-BC Environmental Charter that lays out:
- Substantive rights to clean air, clean water, and healthy ecosystems
- Procedural rights that allow everyone to participate in decisions that affect the environment;
- Information rights that ensure we all have the access to all information relevant to decisions that affect the environment;
- Application of the precautionary principle to decisions that affect the environment.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Electric bikes
BC Greens's promise
Electric vehicles
BC Greens's promise
Work with industry to set new [zero-emission vehicle] targets for commercial vehicles and on and off-road medium and heavy duty vehicles
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Emissions
BC Greens's promise
Support the creation of a biofuels strategy and clean hydrogen roadmap as part of the energy mix we use to replace fossil fuels in our transportation sector.
Integrate a GHG emissions lens into all government procurement processes.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Enact Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE)-enabling legislation.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Retrofits
BC Greens's promise
Water
BC Greens's promise
Allocate $50 million to create a dedicated Watershed Security Fund that will create sustainable jobs in communities across BC in watershed restoration, monitoring, technology, training, and education.
Expanding the model of the Cowichan Watershed Board across the province and establishing shared decision-making authority with watershed boards, with watershed sustainability as a core mandate.
Conducting comprehensive watershed planning in conjunction with First Nations, communities, government agencies, stewardship organizations and industry and including watersheds as a part of a landscape-level ecosystem-based management approach to development.
Implementing the Water Sustainability Act to secure the environmental flows needed to sustain healthy and functioning rivers, lakes and watersheds.
Working with local governments, school districts and other stakeholders to upgrade municipal infrastructure and replace household pipes through grants and incentives.
Exploring science-based solutions to reduce water acidity.
Implementing a ban on fracking, a [...] process that has been shown to contaminate freshwater, trigger earthquakes, leak methane, and poses an unacceptable risk to human health.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Education
Funding for public education
BC Greens's promise
[...] This would include:
- Addressing the continued disparities in wages, class size and composition between districts;
- Access to speech-language pathologists and school psychologists, and develop new resources for students with special needs.
- This starts with the development of a new funding formula that supports a 21st century education system.
- Double the funding of the B.C. Access Grant to help support post-secondary part-time students, and those enrolled in multi-year programs.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Meal programmes
BC Greens's promise
Proposals would be developed by the district to ensure local needs are addressed;
Funding would be conditional on ensuring the program integrated nutrition into the curriculum and showed how the plan would eliminate the stigma associated with accessing food programming.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Mental health and schools
BC Greens's promise
Post-secondary
BC Greens's promise
Racism and reconciliation
BC Greens's promise
Schools and COVID
BC Greens's promise
Healthcare
Acute and preventive care
BC Greens's promise
The task force will review the funding and range of services covered by the health care system to ensure the mix of services better meets the treatment and prevention needs of the population. The task force will deliver its recommendations to the government by May 2022.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Care homes & assisted living
BC Greens's promise
Support pilot projects that bring young people and seniors together and integrate seniors more deeply into communities;
Give the office of the Seniors Advocate more independence and an expanded mandate.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Contraception
BC Greens's promise
Healthcare staffing
BC Greens's promise
Inclusiveness
BC Greens's promise
Prescription drugs
BC Greens's promise
Sexual assault
BC Greens's promise
This funding would be part of a larger strategy that establishes a new funding model for medical and police integrated sexual assault services, ensuring communities across BC can establish clinics that meet their needs.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Housing & Homelessness
Housing affordability
BC Greens's promise
These steps include:
- Taking a housing first approach and accelerate investments to affordable, supportive and social housing on a priority basis;
- Expanding supports for co-op housing through extending leases for existing co-ops about to expire, create a land bank for new co-ops, and provide security of tenure for co-ops on leased land;
- Work with local governments to expand the "missing middle", such as townhouses and triplexes;
- Establish a capital fund to support the acquisition and maintenance of rental housing by nonprofits to maintain affordable rental units and address the financialization of the rental market;
- Close the bare trust loophole
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Housing speculation
BC Greens's promise
Rent and evictions
BC Greens's promise
Stratas
BC Greens's promise
Human Rights & Equality
Accessibility
BC Greens's promise
Conversion therapy
BC Greens's promise
Gender pay gap
BC Greens's promise
Policing
BC Greens's promise
Restart the police act review [...] This would include a review of: all provincial police force contracts, a comprehensive analysis of funding, the depth of policing activity in BC and the roles and responsibilities of law enforcement.
Review procedures for wellness checks in consultation with Indigenous and BIPOC organizations, with a goal of expanding the use of integrated mental health crisis teams in BC for mental health wellness checks.
Invite the BC Human Rights Commissioner to do a study on the impact of police violence and racial discrimination on Indigenous peoples in BC.
— From _The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC_.
Racism
BC Greens's promise
Indigenous Issues
Indigenous child welfare
BC Greens's promise
Reconciliation
BC Greens's promise
Self-determination
BC Greens's promise
Jobs, the Economy, and Affordability
Agriculture
BC Greens's promise
Incentivize agro-ecological farming practices.
Support small-scale farms to adopt new technologies to reduce carbon emissions.
Identify options to make farming a more attractive and sustainable endeavour:
- Ensuring that farmers have access to local processing facilities and that they share in the returns from processing.
- Enabling the growing of high value crops, such as cannabis, to supplement farm income.
Provide $10 million per year to fund research and establish regional agricultural bureaus to provide expertise and support to local farmers to apply innovations on-farm and adapt to a changing climate.
Restrict and regulate foreign ownership of ALR land.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Employment standards
BC Greens's promise
The task force will include representatives of the technology sector, business, workers, and economists.
The task force will recommend ways to modernize our employment standards to adapt to the changing nature of work and technology, and assess jurisdiction and advise on strategies for working with the federal government to ensure that multinational companies are paying their fair share of taxes in BC.
The terms of reference will include considering profit-sharing as a means to ensure businesses who are profitable are paying their workers a living wage, and that workers benefit from the profits that are too often only accrued at the top of an organization.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Financial assistance
BC Greens's promise
Food security
BC Greens's promise
Infrastructure investment
BC Greens's promise
Restauraunts & hospitality
BC Greens's promise
Small businesses
BC Greens's promise
Sustainable jobs
BC Greens's promise
Develop a clean jobs program focused on enhancing BC's natural assets, tree planting, conservation, remediating environmental liabilities, as well as climate adaptation and improving community resilience to climate change.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Tech & Innovation
BC Greens's promise
Tourism
BC Greens's promise
Work with the federal government to establish a repayable loan program for the hospitality sector and for tourism operators that exceed the criteria for the small tourism operator grant program.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Wages
BC Greens's promise
Work week
BC Greens's promise
Mental Health, Drugs, & Addiction
Mental health support
BC Greens's promise
Invest to build an affordable and accessible mental healthcare system where cost is not a barrier to seeking help.
Allocate $1.0 billion over a four-year cycle to address mental health care within the medical services plan. Funding should be provided for a comprehensive suite of initiatives including:
- Establishing accessible mental health treatment options for all those struggling with anxiety or depression.
- Early intervention, youth mental health initiatives, integrated primary care specific to youth and mental health enabling families to easily navigate resources in a supportive environment.
- Community based options for responding to those who need mental healthcare and their families such as Clubhouse International.
- Enhanced counselling outreach services to work with the homeless community.
Allocate $200 million per year to invest in facilities to provide mental healthcare services and community-based centres for mental health and rehabilitation; and, accelerate capital plans for construction of tertiary care facilities and detoxification beds. Protect operating funding for facilities.
Develop and implement a Loneliness Strategy.
Conduct a public information campaign to increase awareness and provide information on where to get help.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Overdoses
BC Greens's promise
Policing of drugs
BC Greens's promise
Safe supply
BC Greens's promise
Resource Extraction & Export
Forestry
BC Greens's promise
Reform forestry management in BC so that it serves the long-term needs of local communities and supports a truly sustainable industry, where community and ecosystem values are the primary focus of management.
Take back control of our forests from major corporations, ensuring forestry is meeting the needs of local communities. Our forests are a public resource that belongs to the people of BC, and we need to start managing them that way. To achieve this goal the BC Greens would:
Reinstate government authority in decision-making at provincial and local levels, beginning with enhancing the authority of district managers to refuse or amend permits.
Begin a process of tenure reform to redistribute tenures from a few major companies and grow the proportion of tenures held by First Nations and community forests.
Establish a forester general position, an officer of the legislature who is non-partisan and reports to the House annually.
Establish a Chief Scientist as a counterpart to the Chief Forester to ensure multiple values are adequately incorporated into timber supply analysis.
Enhance capacity in FLNRO and establish more community based Ministry of Forests staff, to support the sustainable management of local forest resources and provide well-paying community jobs.
— From _The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC_.
Shift the management framework through reforming legislation, away from an exclusive focus on timber supply to managing for all the values that our forests hold.
Adopt a wider variety of logging practices, including selective logging and longer stand rotations.
Undertake landscape-level ecosystem-based planning, reforestation and restoration in partnership with local communities and First Nations.
Protect communities from wildfires and flooding through landscape level ecologically-centered, forest management and fuel treatment projects.
Restore government capacity to ensure forest stewardship, monitoring and enforcement, and enhance funding for forest inventory research and primary research.
— From _The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC_.
Immediately move to fully implement the recommendations of the old growth review panel in partnership with First Nations. This includes:
- An immediate end to the logging of old growth forests in high risk ecosystems across the province.
- Enacting legislation that establishes conservation of ecosystem health and biodiversity of BC's forests as an overarching priority.
Establish funding mechanisms to support the preservation of our old growth forests.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Ensure that small producers have access to fibre and incentive value-added product innovation, including non-traditional uses of wood fibre including bio fuels, and productive uses of residual fibre.
Apply the carbon tax to slash-pile burning to reduce carbon emissions form our forestry sector and ensure that we use residual materials.
Put an end to raw log exports.
Ensure the benefits of B.C. resource flow to local communities by directly sharing more resource revenues with local First Nations, municipalities, and regional districts.
Better support (sic) forestry workers and communities, including through expanding investments into retraining and support finding new job opportunities.
Investigate opportunities to diversify milling and secondary manufacturing to better use existing timber.
Promote more sustainable development of forest resources, including investing in tourism opportunities and low-carbon economies.
— From _The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC_.
Fracking
BC Greens's promise
Government support for workers
BC Greens's promise
Transit & Transportation
BC Ferries
BC Greens's promise
Emissions
BC Greens's promise
Infrastructure
BC Greens's promise
Transit service
BC Greens's promise
Work with local governments to establish a vision for sustainable transportation in an era of expanded population grown on the South Island, including through:
- A regional transportation strategy;
- Establishing a regional governance body to overcome fractured decision-making and deliver integrated planning for the growing region;
- Investing in support expansion of public transit options to help people move around more easily;
- Building frequent and affordable public transportation links between cities, such as between Cowichan and the CRD.
Prioritize investment in transit service coming out of COVID-19 to support economic recovery, improve livability of communities, and reduce GHG emissions.
Ensure that the projected long-term losses facing TransLink, BC Transit and BC Ferries are dealt with so that service levels are maintained, allowing ridership to quickly bounce back through the economic recover period.
Ensure no disruption in future expansion due do the pandemic.
Work with local and regional governments to redesign the transit funding model and establish an equitable, stable long-term funding model for transit.
- This review would include consideration of mobility pricing.
Develop climate and sustainability criteria, including consideration of cumulative impacts, that will be applied to all future capital projects including transportation infrastructure investments.
— From The BC Greens' Plan for a More Equitable and Sustainable BC.
Misc. topics
Local government funding
BC Greens's promise
They may still in the future!
In the meantime, you can learn more about them on their website.
In the meantime, you can learn more about them on their website.
Ask Bill Masse anything
bcgreens.ca/bill_masse www.bcgreens.ca/bill_masse