By Jenn McGinn

Vancouver is an amazing city, but we are facing real challenges: small businesses forced to close, homelessness increased by alarming proportions since 2002, emergency rooms overflowing, and our environment at serious risk.

And in my community, many Cambie-area voters are still bitter about how the Gordon Campbell government treated them on the Canada Line project.

As a resident of Vancouver and now as an MLA, I am committed to finding solutions and making our community a safe place to live.

We need real action to reduce homelessness.

Thanks to the policies of the Campbell government, poverty and homeless are rampant—and even B.C.’s independent auditor general has criticized the Campbell government for failing to deal with the crisis.

The Liberal platform makes empty promises and offers no real solutions. There are no commitments to build new housing units, no targets, and no timelines. They have sat on a $250-million housing endowment fund while thousands of people sleep on our streets every night. In their recent budget, the Liberals actually cut housing funding by $96 million.

Carole James and the NDP have real policies and real solutions to address the problem and end the crisis in homelessness in five years. We will set firm targets and build 2,400 social housing units in our first year in government, followed by 1,200 units in each of the next four years. While we build units, short-term shelters will be supported to offset the housing shortage.

Real action on climate change urgently needed

The climate is changing and greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. In B.C. 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are created by big polluters. But while Gordon Campbell’s carbon tax hits ordinary taxpayers hard, it doesn’t apply to these big polluters. Campbell lets them off the hook.

The NDP will put a price on carbon emissions from big polluters by setting a hard cap on emissions by 2010. Our goal is to reduce emissions by a third by 2020.

Our commitment to a continental “cap and trade” system is the same solution President Obama is developing in the U.S. Cap and trade was also recently endorsed by Canada’s National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy, because it’s a better solution than the Liberals’ carbon tax.

Skip past their carbon tax positioning, and the Liberals are environmental dinosaurs. The NDP will end the most destructive of Campbell’s environmental practices.

We’ll stop routine gas flaring in the oil industry, which accounts for 13 percent of emissions in B.C. And while Campbell talks about offshore oil drilling and builds an oil pipeline from Alberta, we will continue the moratorium on offshore exploration and drilling and crude oil tanker traffic on the sensitive B.C. coast.

Protecting people and health care

While wait-lists have grown, emergency rooms overflow, and classrooms become more overcrowded, Gordon Campbell’s priority has been to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on cost overruns on projects like the convention centre.

We have solutions. The NDP will train, recruit, and retain more doctors, nurses, and health professionals. We will expand innovations in hospitals to reduce wait-lists and make our public health system even more efficient. And we will build long-term care beds and expand health services for seniors.

Widespread health care privatization is also another legacy of the Campbell Liberals. It’s created higher costs, poor quality service, and decreased accountability.

My opponent in Fairview—Margaret MacDiarmid—has for years actively supported Brian Day, owner of a private surgery clinic in Vancouver-Fairview. Can you imagine MacDiarmid as Campbell’s minister of health? Will she support her friends and privatize Canada’s public health care system?

Only the NDP will end the creeping privatization of health care.

On May 12, ask yourself who represents you. Gordon Campbell cannot be trusted to keep his promises, like his pledge not to privatize B.C. Rail, or to cap sky-rocketing tuition fees, or his nose stretcher about building 5,000 long-term care beds for seniors.

He kept none of these promises.

It’s time for real solutions, and the NDP has a commonsense plan that addresses the most pressing concerns that Vancouverites care about.

Jenn McGinn is the B.C. NDP candidate in Vancouver-Fairview.