On Oak Bay Avenue, if you ask four people what they want in an MLA, you can sometimes get four different answers.
So far, for the upcoming election, two candidates have been named: Roxanne Helms for the BC Liberals and Murray Rankin for the BC NDP.
Voters in Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding, according to Royal Roads University communication theorist and historian David Black, do politics differently.
“We may think of Oak Bay as kind of a comfortable and a little sleepy. But it’s anything but,” he said.
In the past 50 years, voters here elected MLAs from four different political parties, more than any other place in the province.
“This is a riding that in the last thirty to 35 years is going for four very different parties, parties which have different ideological postures, very different internal cultures,” Black said.
In 1979, Brian Smith won the first of three elections for the Social Credit Party. Then the BC NDPs Elizabeth Cull won in 1991. The BC Liberal’s Ida Chong won in 1996, one of two Chinese Canadians ever elected to the provincial legislature along with the NDP’s Jenny Kwan.
Chong held on to the riding through four elections. Then there was the historic win by the BC Green Party’s Andrew Weaver who held on through two elections until stepping down from the party and politics. It’s a battleground riding the candidates are prepared to fight for.
The Liberal candidate, lawyer Roxanne Helme is a 30-year resident of Oak Bay.
“This riding is my home. I’m passionate about it. And I want to serve the residents, my neighbours. I think I bring some real governance experience. And I want to offer it up to the residents, and my neighbours,” Helme said.
Former NDP MP Murray Rankin defeated former Oak Bay councillor Michelle Kirby to win the nomination.
“People living here, I think, need to know that this could be the determining riding in determining whether Mr. Horgan gets the majority government. Which of course, I hope he does,” Rankin said.
So far the BC Green Party have yet to nominate a candidate in one of the three ridings they won in 2017.
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Mary Griffin
