It was a night of respectful dialogue among four candidates running to represent West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky Country on Tuesday night at the 2025 Federal Election All Candidates Meeting.
The two-hour event was held at the Squamish Capilano University campus on April 8.
In attendance were incumbent Liberal MP Patrick Weiler, Green Party of Canada candidate Lauren Greenlaw, Jäger Rosenberg of the NDP and People’s Party of Canada candidate Peyman Askari.
Conservative Party candidate Keith Roy was not in attendance, which was noted by the candidates and in a question from the audience. Moderator Megan Veck told the audience he was invited, but declined to attend.
Leading up to the federal election on April 28, the debate gave the aspiring MPs a chance to speak on Sea to Sky issues such as housing, health care, fossil fuel projects, child care, transit and U.S. President Donald Trump.
The event, held in front of a crowd of almost 200 people, also touched on broader issues such as the gender divide, lowering the voting age, and the Israel-Hamas war.
On housing
The youngest of the candidates, Rosenberg, 18, tackled the topic from the point of view of many Gen Z aspiring homeowners.
“Housing affordability is one of the most important issues for people across the country, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to afford it. That’s the simple reality for my generation,” he said.
“We need to lower housing costs … and we need to have more options for types of housing.”
Weiler said his party is proposing a plan that would “double the housing construction to 500,000 units per year” to help meet the demand across the country.
Askari, on the other hand, stressed the need to tackle the debt to help people own homes.
Askari, who immigrated to Canada when he was six years old, also said reducing immigration would help to “relieve pressure from the housing market.”
Greenlaw said Squamish needed more affordable housing, and that the public deserved more clarity on how much of the rental space FortisBC and Woodfibre LNG was taking up.
“A healthy market is about 3% to 5% vacancy. Prior to [FortisBC and Woodfibre] coming in, we had about 0.6% [vacancy] and now it’s around zero.”
On what they think are the main concerns in Squamish
Weiler said he wanted to support Squamish’s growing community by supporting infrastructure.
“For a community that’s growing as fast as Squamish is, it’s [important to] make sure that we have the supporting infrastructure to allow that,” he said.
“It’s not just things like Brennan Park, which we absolutely need to expand and the federal government needs to be a partner in that, [but] it’s certainly transportation infrastructure to support more density that’s being brought in.”
Greenlaw said she believed Squamish needed to build more resilience as U.S. President Donald Trump continues to leave Canada in a state of uncertainty with tariff threats.
“Trump’s entire tactic is chaos, and what chaos does is it puts people in a reactionary state, and we need to be able to be responsive,” she said.
“So in order to build resilience in our communities, we need to have that affordability piece. We need to have safe housing, we need to have access to food, [and] we need to eliminate the barriers that companies and small producers are facing. We need to start having that resilience within our riding in order to protect us from, well, lunacy.”
Askari said he believed the biggest concern was the economy because “everything else falls when you have a broken economy.”
Rosenberg said a major concern was the lack of mental health support.
“That’s really the issue that got me involved in politics. Across the province, but especially here, we don’t have enough mental health resources,” he said.
“You know, every single person in this room, I guarantee, has either personally struggled with mental health or has someone close to them who has struggled with it, and we don’t recognize that. At best, we’re treating the symptoms and not the root causes of the problem.
“So I think we need more investments in mental health facilities … and we need to really talk to people and listen to what their concerns are.”
On the environment
While Askari reassured the local audience that the PPC does care about nature as a whole—he noted it wasn’t their top priority.
“We love the environment and we believe in environmentalism. But we don’t believe in destroying the economy,” he said.
As an earth scientist, Greenlaw rebutted Askari’s concern about the economy by saying that it wouldn’t exist without the environment.
“I’d like to point out something that we are learning right now is that we are exceeding the bounds of our planet, and that is clear,” she said.
“I will point out that you cannot have a healthy economy without a healthy environment, that is backwards. All of our wealth, all of our assets, come from and ultimately return to the earth.”
Weiler, on the other hand, noted that through a number of policies introduced during his term, emissions have reduced dramatically.
“Our emissions have gone down to the lowest point that they’ve been since 1996, and it might not be the top of mind issue for a lot of people, but it is affecting us on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
On transit and highway safety
Regional transit along the Sea to Sky has been a hot topic for many years, and Weiler was quick to thank West Vancouver-Sea to Sky MLA Jeremy Valeriote for helping to secure an agreement with the reigning NDP to bring it to reality by the end of this year.
“That’s going to be transformational for this region. so as this goes forward, the federal government doesn’t fund operations of transit, but we can provide targeted funding for the expansion of transit,” he said.
Greenlaw, who has been a strong advocate for regional transit in Squamish as a District of Squamish councillor, said local towns are being designed around the promise of it.
“We are literally designing our towns, waiting for regional transportation. You know you’re feeling this parking crunch downtown—that’s because we’re waiting for regional transportation so that our houses don’t all need to have two cars,” she said.
Greenlaw also suggested adding reflective paint on the Sea to Sky highway could help significantly improve driver safety.
“When you’re driving that highway at night, it’s gross, especially at this time of year, it does not feel safe. And I feel like that’s a ludicrously small ask,” she said.
On Woodfibre LNG
One of the more spicy topics of the evening, Weiler told the audience that his government would hold Woodfibre LNG accountable if they didn’t meet a number of conditions placed upon them.
“Woodfibre was permitted back in 2015 and there are conditions that are binding on that company and that project for what they need to meet,” he said.
“My role, if I’m re-elected, is to continue to hold the company accountable to meeting those conditions. And if they’re not there, there are remedies that are there to ensure that they’re held to account for that.”
Unsurprisingly, Greenlaw who has stood against the project as a local councillor said the community was “never given an opportunity to give consent on that project.”
“We have been busting our little bums to get those pieces and to hold them to account and to get financial benefits from this project, and we have basically no way to get it,” she said.
“The local government piece has almost zero power in this entire conversation, and that right there, to me, is one of the reasons why I’m sitting in this chair.”
On health care and child care
One of the last topics of the night was health care, which all candidates agreed was not operating as well as it could.
Askari took aim at long wait times.
“I talk to several of the voters, and they have to go to the US and pay out of pocket,” he said.
“I want to free up the health care system, remove some of the bureaucracy and streamline it.”
For Squamish specifically, Greenlaw said the town needed a “much bigger hospital” and more investment in child care.
As for how they would fund it? She suggested “defunding fossil fuels.”
In summary
At the end of the night, Weiler summed up the evening as a whole: “While we might disagree on policy, we are not disagreeable.”
All candidates in attendance expressed their opinions on community concerns in a respectful manner, with the crowd reciprocating the same behaviour in return.
Greenlaw slightly led the way with crowd applause, followed by Weiler and then Rosenberg.
The event was put on by the Squamish Chamber of Commerce, Tourism Squamish, the Downtown Squamish BIA and The Squamish Chief.
Election Day is April 28.
