Political parties start the campaign days before election writ is dropped
By Nelson Daily Staff
Let the campaign begin.
With the election writ set to be dropped Tuesday, campaigns kicked off over the weekend with both major parties, NDP and Liberals, doing their best to score some early points.
The election is Tuesday, May 14.
Liberal Leader Christy Clark renewed her call to debate NDP leader Adrian Dix one-on-one while accepting her party’s nomination in front of about 100 supporters in Vancouver on Saturday.
Dix has said it’s unfair to exclude the leaders of the Conservative and Green parties and only agreed to debate if all four party leaders can take part.
Clark, the only Liberal to apply for the riding of Point Grey, has a 30-minute television appearance Sunday night to convince voters to give her government a fourth term in office.
Meanwhile, in Vancouver Sunday, Dix announced that, if elected, an NDP government will ban union and corporate donations and strike a legislative committee to examine and make recommendations on other issues around the financing of politics in BC.
“The influence of big money continues to hurt our democracy, which we see in public cynicism about politicians and politics in general” said Dix.
“Returning individual citizens to the centre of our political process is at the core of efforts to restore faith that those we elect are acting in the broader public interest.
“Citizens vote as individuals and they should contribute as individuals too,” said Dix.
An NDP government will pass legislation in a fall sitting of the legislature and the ban will take effect January 1, 2014.
The legislative committee will have representation from each party and a representative from elected independents. In addition, any party that garnered five percent or more of the popular vote in the 2013 election but failed to elect an MLA will have a formal role in the committee.
The committee will be struck in the fall of 2013, with a mandate to provide its report to the legislature by October 1, 2014.
“The ongoing decline in voter turnout has been driven in large part by the perception of citizens that their vote does not matter,” said Dix. “These reforms will help encourage individuals to return to the voting booth and increase participation in our democracy as a whole.”
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