A fourth candidate has entered the race for Powell River-Sunshine Coast for the B.C. election.
Powell River’s Greg Reid is running as an Independent candidate – he was added to the BC Elections candidates list last week.
Someone close to politics his whole life, the exhibiting contemporary artist says he brings experience in education, music and art with a recent focus on economics, finance and government.
Reid says he grew up watching his father work as a career politician at the Ontario Municipal Association, eventually working his way up to association president.
“So we used to live and breathe politics in my household,” Reid said.
After studying science, philosophy and history at Lakehead University, Reid pursued his “first love,” music. Reid spent time as a music videographer, audio engineer, music producer, music publisher, performing singer-songwriter and has also spent time as an educator and consultant. He bought a property in Powell River in 1995 and moved there full-time in 2011.
Reid said he spends much of his time researching and enjoys writing essays, poetry and is working on a screenplay.
He said part of why he moved to the Upper Sunshine Coast was “to basically re-educate and study all the things I never had time to do while I was earning a living, supporting family, paying off mortgages and those kinds of things,” Reid said and became an active advocate for a citizens group.
Reid advocates for integrated solutions, such as agricultural forests and alternative communities, to address housing shortages and poverty.
“What I see going down in politics right now is, I see division. I see combative and competitive approaches. I see exclusivity, and those are the exact opposite things that people want in their lives,” Reid said. “They want to have community. They want to cooperate with their friends and neighbours. They want to be included in things. They don't want to be involved in divisive situations.”
He said MLAs have little opportunity to influence the workings of government, saying they are closer to public relations people in a majority government. “MLAs don't really represent us, they represent their party to us,” he said.
Direct democracy
Saying that once the election is over the public has very little input for the next four years, Reid said he is looking at a new paradigm, proposing an app to enable direct public input on legislation.
He said the app would be “for the public to use so that they could provide me with the information I need on every issue, every piece of legislation that's going to come down in Victoria, and then they could vote on it, and I would collect that vote and carry it down so I would give them a voice in all matters.”
He said the app would be similar to technology used for inner shareholder meetings and by municipalities for collecting polls. He clarified the app would not be for electronic voting, and would be privately run – not through Elections Canada.
“Rather, it would be something that I would privately initiate so that I can accurately get a portrayal of what the people in the riding want,” Reid said.
It would allow individuals to ask questions and be a tool for them to determine their own problems and solutions, Reid said.
“So it's us giving us the opportunity to do something that's never been done before,” he said. “No ridings have ever used direct democracy and voted on every piece of legislation that comes down in the legislature in Victoria.”
Housing
Reid is an advocate for agricultural forest-planned communities, a practice where areas are replanted in a fashion that provides food and wood products for the people working the plots, instead of the commonly used monocultures.
“As a riding, we could form a lobby group, and we could lobby the ministries involved, not necessarily on the legislative side, but on the implementation side, lobby them to release tracts of land for groups here in the province,” Reid said. “They could be private, public, a combination of both of also working to achieve government funding and grants and so on and so forth, to build these alternative communities.”
“We need places where people have desires to use their gifts and talents, doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists, engineers, carpenters, trades, people who would like to live and work in a community that supports all walks of life,” he said.
Calling it “very alternative and deregulated,” he said it would, “cut through all the red tape, allow things like 3D-printing homes and there'd be a community centre for all … there'd be music and art centers, so in essence, a community that can function on its own.”
Water
Speaking to the need for water on the Lower Sunshine Coast, Reid said, “It's not that there isn't water, it's just getting it to the public.” He said he spoke to Sechelt Mayor Henderson and to private consultants who worked in Mexico during its 2008 drought and now live on the Sunshine Coast.
“I talked about how plentiful water is throughout the riding as a whole. We have huge fjords and inlets and mountains and water flowing in, fresh water, vast amounts of it, especially on the upper peninsula, all through the islands and on the Coast,” Reid said. “And I investigated the possibility of getting our hands on a 200 million gallon water tanker to come down and fill cisterns on the lower peninsula while infrastructure is being decided and being built upon.”
He said the idea has come before, “and perhaps now maybe its time has come.”
Reid also mentioned the idea of a bottling plant, “We have some of the freshest water in the world and we could have our tanker ship full of water, and we could be bottling it and taking it to places all up and down the coast of California and who knows where else.”
Other issues
Reid also spoke about health service availability on the Coast and how many people are unable to access the services they need.
“A lot of the people who are struggling to get the services they require can't even find a doctor, are also those who are having great difficulty finding shelter.”
Reid said this touches on another issue close to him, the distribution of wealth and how it has become consolidated throughout the province.
“We have people falling off the scale into poverty and these are the ones who aren't getting the services they needed primarily. We're losing our middle class and small businesses are suffering,” he said. “So, I am in favour of redistribution of wealth by appealing to those very wealthy individuals to develop more of a civic attitude, to become better citizens, to look at the people around them struggling.”
He emphasized the importance of stopping the middle class from diminishing and creating a poverty class where families must choose between paying rent and eating.
“I believe that every party has some good things to offer,” he said. “I appreciate all the people are running, I applaud them for doing so because I believe that people get involved because they do want to do something positive…They do want to find solutions
“I just think that [politicians are] marginalized by the actual way government functions, and they're not allowed to actually exercise their own voice when it comes to voting on an issue.”
The B.C. election is Oct. 19. For coverage of Powell River-Sunshine Coast’s three other candidates, visit coastreporter.net/2024-bc-votes. Coast Reporter and the Sunshine Coast Chamber of Commerce will host two all candidates meetings: Oct. 9 in Gibsons and Oct. 11 in Sechelt.
Jordan Copp is the Coast Reporter’s civic and Indigenous affairs reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
