Environment

Átl’ḵa7tsem/Howe Sound was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Region in 2021, recognition of a recovery that took forty years and a great deal of unglamorous work, including the Britannia Mine remediation.

That designation is not a museum label. It is a commitment to manage the region so that growth and ecological health are decided together rather than traded against each other project by project.

I do not think this riding has to choose between building housing and protecting what people moved here for. I think it has to stop making those decisions separately.

Cumulative effects, the sum of many individually acceptable decisions, are what actually degrade a watershed. The corridor needs assessment at the scale of the corridor, not project by project in isolation.

The same applies to climate resilience. Wildfire, atmospheric rivers, landslides and drought are operating realities here now, and they intersect directly with the highway, the water supply and the insurability of homes.

Cumulative-effects assessment for the Sea to Sky corridor as a region, developed with the Squamish and Líl’wat Nations and local governments.

Sustained funding for the Howe Sound biosphere work rather than one-off grants that expire between election cycles.

Climate resilience investment tied to the infrastructure this riding actually depends on: the highway, water systems, and wildfire interface around every corridor community.

Properly funded wildfire prevention, starting with FireSmart. Prevention is the cheapest work in this entire file: money spent before a fire season is worth a great deal more than money spent during one, and communities should not be going into a summer without those tools because a grant cycle lapsed.