Priority
Economy and Jobs
This riding’s economy is stronger and more fragile than it looks. Tourism and recreation drive enormous activity, and that activity rests on a workforce that increasingly cannot afford to live near the work.
The small business squeeze
Small businesses across the corridor, in Ambleside, in downtown Squamish, in Whistler Village, in Pemberton, are running into the same three things: they cannot find staff, their staff cannot find housing, and their input costs carry the freight and uncertainty of a single highway.
I have run a small manufacturing business. I know what a permitting delay costs when payroll is on Friday, and how much of a founder’s week disappears into compliance that could be simpler without being any weaker.
Beyond the season
A tourism economy with a thin shoulder season produces thin annual incomes. Diversifying the corridor economy (technology, light manufacturing, film, professional services, trades) is not a rejection of tourism. It is what makes tourism survivable for the people who work in it.
That diversification needs the same three things everything else here needs: housing, reliable connectivity to Metro Vancouver, and a permitting environment that does not punish small operators for being small.
What I would push for
Regulatory simplification aimed specifically at businesses under twenty employees, which is most of the businesses here.
Trades and apprenticeship capacity in the corridor, so the people building the housing can be from here.
Provincial procurement that is actually reachable by small corridor firms rather than structurally reserved for large ones.