B.C. party leaders John Rustad and David Eby were both in Chilliwack on Saturday (Sept. 28), rallying their candidates, volunteers and supporters at separate campaign stops.
Eby dropped into a barbecue at the B.C. NDP headquarters downtown Chilliwack, where he greeted candidates Kelli Paddon (Chilliwack-Cultus Lake) and Dan Coulter (Chilliwack North).
At the same time, Rustad met his supporters at an estate in Greendale, alongside his local Conservative candidates Á’a:líya Warbus (Chilliwack-Cultus Lake) and Heather Maahs (Chilliwack North).
The events took place on the final day for all candidates to be finalized with Elections BC. That morning, Eby called on Rustad to "drop candidates with extreme and dangerous views before the 1 p.m. deadline."
In response, Rustad said Saturday that he would "be more than happy to match my candidates against Eby's candidates, any day of the week."
Eby has been to Chilliwack multiple times in the past few weeks, dropping in at campaign events and just prior to the writ being dropped, choosing this city to make provincial government announcement.
"Chilliwack is an important community," Eby said at the barbecue. "We've got two amazing MLAs that have done incredible work advocating for this community. But there's so much more to do when it comes to the schools that people need, when it comes to health care that people need, supporting people with the cost of daily life, and the housing that people need.
"We've got a lot more to do," he added. "We can't stop now."
He said the NDP's concern is that the work they've done will be undone with a B.C. Conservative government.
"My concern is that if John Rustad gets elected or Conservative candidates get elected up here in the valley, that all that progress is on the line, the expansion of Highway 1, building schools," Eby said. "You know, when John was on the radio in Surrey, he said that he wasn't going to build additional schools to deal with portables. He was going to increase class sizes by at least at least 20 per cent because he thought that was a good way to deal with the challenge of overcrowding schools."
He said B.C. has "seen this movie before" when Rustad was a part of the B.C. Liberals.
At Rustad's campaign event, the talking points focused on drugs, agricultural land issues, and sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.
"When it comes to our education system as well, there's big changes we need to have through there," Rustad told the crowd. "Our education system seems to now be all about teaching kids what to think and what it needs to do is, it needs to be teaching kids how to think.
"That means things like SOGI have to be removed from our schools," he said. "We have to make sure that we've got strong anti-bullying programs in place for kids. We have got to make sure that every kid can be safe and welcome in our schools. But we cannot allow this ideology to just degrade our education system."
He said that "reading, writing, arithmetic with numbers are all in decline," and that "we are failing our kids, we're failing their future.
This is what needs to change."
And I want to close with this," he said. "Our our economy is quite frankly, is in real tough shape in British Columbia, real tough shape. I should say we've got a $9 billion deficit in counting... We need to get our economy growing in this province.
"Somebody asked me, you know, what should the theme be for our bureaucracy, should we have that honour forming government? And I said, 'it's really simple. We're just gonna get shit done.'"
