Priority
Cost of Living
There is a cost to living north of Horseshoe Bay that does not show up in any provincial average. Fuel is dearer. Groceries are dearer. A trip to a specialist is a day off work. Insurance and heating in an older home run higher. None of it is dramatic on its own. Together it is the reason people who grew up here cannot stay.
The costs nobody counts
Provincial affordability programs are largely designed around a household that can reach services within half an hour. That household does not exist in much of this riding.
If you live in Pemberton and need a specialist appointment in North Vancouver, the cost is not the parking. It is the unpaid day, the fuel, and the childcare. If you run a small business in Squamish, your input costs carry the freight of Highway 99 and so do your customers.
These are real, measurable costs. They are simply invisible in Victoria because nobody has ever been asked to count them.
Childcare and the second-income problem
Across the corridor, childcare availability is the hidden constraint on household income. A family that cannot find a space does not pay more for childcare; one parent stops working. That loss never appears in an affordability statistic, but it is often the single largest hit to a household budget in this riding.
Childcare space creation in smaller corridor communities runs into the same wall as housing: the operators want to be there, the buildings are not.
What I would push for
A provincial cost-of-living framework that recognises geography, because a program calibrated to Burnaby delivers less to a household in Pemberton, and that gap should be measured rather than assumed away.
Childcare space creation tied to the housing and public-land work above. The same parcels, the same partners, the same deals.
Honest accounting for the commuting and travel burden this riding carries, so it can be argued about with numbers.