Green Party leader accuses Horgan of politicizing infrastructure after Cowichan hospital announcement

NDP leader John Horgan walked into the Green Party leader’s own riding and dug up an old promise on Sunday.

During a campaign stop in Duncan, Horgan promised that a new hospital in the Cowichan Valley would break ground – one day after promising a $441 dollar hospital expansion would take place in Terrace if he were elected once again.

“I am so proud to say that the business plan is complete and that a larger, three times larger, facility is going to be breaking ground next year,” he said on Sunday.

But Horgan’s promise was one he made actually made while on the campaign trail in the 2017 provincial election.

This time around, however, the narrative was that keeping the NDP in charge would mean continued progress on the new hospital in the region, which didn’t sit well with Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau, who was on the Cowichan Valley Regional District Hospital Board and was a Cowichan Valley Regional District Area Director in 2017.

“It is disappointing, although perhaps not surprising, to hear Mr. Horgan try to instill fear in people about a project that has been moving forward since the government announcement in 2018,” the Green Party leader said on Sunday.

Furstenau, whose riding is the Cowichan Valley, said health minister Adrian Dix actually told her “several weeks” before the election that the new hospital was moving forward and called on Horgan to stop politicizing infrastructure.

“We simply don’t have time for this kind of politics in B.C.,” she said.

“For too long in politics in B.C. communities have either been treated as something to be taken for granted or treated as a community that won’t get those critical infrastructure announcements because they didn’t vote the right way.”

During her media availability, Furstenau also said the Greens will have campaign announcements in the coming days.

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