Harry Lali, a former New Democrat MLA, is hopeful about the party's election prospects in 2017.

Lali lost his seat in Fraser-Nicola as part of the surprising defeat suffered by the B.C. NDP in the previous election. He said he believes that next year’s campaign will be different.

“I think the platform at the time was not really that strong in terms of the economy and jobs,” Lali told the Straight in a phone interview.

For the ex-cabinet minister, this will change with the current leader of the party, John Horgan.

“We have a new leader this time who understands rural British Columbia…[and] the economic side of things,” he said.

According to Lali, Horgan has “traveled quite a bit in rural B.C.” when he worked under the B.C. NDP governments of the 1990s.

Lali recalled that Horgan played a big role in setting up the Columbia Basin Trust at the time. It’s a regional Crown corporation involved in power generation.

Compared to former party leader Adrian Dix, Lali said he believes that Horgan is “a lot more open to protecting blue-collar jobs”.

“I think that will be the big difference in terms of the economy piece,” he said.

Even though the B.C. NDP is opposing a number of huge projects, Lali doesn’t consider this to be a problem in preparing a strong jobs plan for the 2017 election platform.

Case in point is B.C. Hydro’s Site C dam on the Peace River. The $8.8-billion infrastructure project is currently under construction, and the B.C. NDP has declared that it will subject the project to an independent review if they form government next year.

But according to Lali, contracts as well as jobs related to Site C are “not going” to B.C. companies and workers. “They’re going to out-of-province firms and out-of-province workers," he said.

The B.C. NDP is also against the $6.8-billion plan by energy company Kinder Morgan to twin its Trans Mountain oil pipeline.

In the last campaign, then party leader Dix spoke out against the project despite saying in the past that he would wait for the outcome of a federal environmental review. At the time, he was accused by B.C. Liberals of flip-flopping on the issue, a move considered by many to have been a turning point in the campaign.

In May this year, Horgan declared that the Kinder Morgan proposal is not in the best interest of B.C. That came days after the National Energy Board granted conditional approval for the project.

According to Lali, New Democrats want a made-in-B.C. environmental assessment project that is “going to be quite rigorous so it does not damage the environment”.

The B.C. NDP has also registered opposition to a proposed $36-billion liquefied natural gas project near Prince Rupert, called Pacific Northwest LNG.

As a current member of the party’s provincial executive, Lali will have a say in the platform that will be unveiled in the next campaign.

Lali also has a lot at stake. He said he expects to be acclaimed either by September or October as the party’s candidate in his old constituency of Fraser-Nicola.