With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1514012
20 BC BU S I N E S S .C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 A li n a Il y a s o v a from the Cowichan Valley electoral district to Juan de Fuca-Malahat as the lines are being redrawn. How do you feel about that? My whole political existence is because of what happened in Shawnigan [the dump- ing of toxic soil close to the water supply]. It was hard for me to come to terms with this riding I've devoted myself to being split in half. But we started the Cowichan Leadership Group—the MP, MLA, mayors, chairs, chiefs, public health officer, we all meet and work together on the issues that face Cowichan. That's the approach I've taken ever since being elected in 2014 and I'll continue to do that. We'll build it again in two different sections of this riding, two regional districts. There are things I have control over and things I don't. This interview has been edited and condensed. years we had in a minority government. For the times we're in and the challenges we're facing, we need governments to be much more focused on a collaborative and consensus-building approach to govern- ing. We could have, for example, regional caucuses in the B.C. legislature, made up of people from different parties. You look at the wildfire situation—if you had the MLAs from the Interior, regardless of what party they're in, working together with ministry staff, they would bring an understanding of their communities and areas that would benefit the decision-making that's happen- ing in the legislature, right? We're not stuck in this long-standing view of B.C. politics, which has largely been a two-party system with an adversarial approach. When you actually orient your work in the legislature toward more cooperation and more cross- party work, you get better results for the people we are there to serve. How's recruiting Green candidates going at the moment? Well, we're miles ahead of where we were in the last election, which was a kind of excitement I don't want to repeat [laughs]. Our intention is to have candidates running in every riding in B.C. and to be present- ing an alternative to BCers that is rooted in recognizing the reality we're in and focused on solutions that solve more than one cri- sis at a time. We have to be connecting the dots between crises. We can't just look at the housing crisis in isolation from our economic conditions, the health-care crisis isolated from climate change. Or the drug- poisoning crisis in isolation from the lack of access to mental health supports and counselling. All of these crises are inter- connected. We need to have an approach to government that is looking at those con- nections and solving more than one thing at a time. And there's a big change coming for you in the next election. Shawnigan Lake, where you live, is moving " We're consistently seeing that revenues from businesses that adopt a four-day workweek either stay the same or go up."