With the 41st B.C. general election scheduled for May 9 of next year, provincial politics is beginning to heat up in Richmond.
Richmond-Steveston MLA John Yap is taking Twitter selfies whilst knocking on doors, Richmond Centre MLA Teresa Wat has announced her intentions to run again, and the Richmond BC NDP constituency associations met Tuesday evening to approve their new executive officers, and, in turn, name their respective candidates.
In a city dominated by the BC Liberal party, few questions remain for the lead up to the election, save for the intentions of long time Richmond East MLA Linda Reid and each party’s choice for a fourth, new riding.
Next year, Richmond Centre will split into north and south ridings, while Richmond East sheds some parts of the city to absorb New Westminster’s Queensborough neighbourhood to become Richmond-Queensborough. Steveston’s riding remains mostly unchanged.
The BC Liberal party hasn’t lost a seat in Richmond since 1986, when Nick Loenen won the city’s lone riding for the Social Credit party. The closest anyone has come to challenging the party was Coun. Harold Steves, back in 1991, when he came within 610 votes of Allan Warnke, in a three-way race with Loenen for Richmond-Steveston.
That same year, Reid won her first of six straight elections.
Reid, the Speaker of the House, has yet to announce her intentions, but said she planned to in October.
Yap, former Minister of Multiculturalism and present Parliamentary Secretary for Liquor Reform Policy, is seeking his fourth straight term in Victoria, while Wat, Minister of International Trade and Minister Responsible for the Asia Pacific Strategy and Multiculturalism, is seeking her second term for Richmond North Centre.
As for the NDP, expecting to land as president of Steveston’s riding is Roy Sakata, a former elementary school principal.
Sakata said the NDP hopes to soon name its four candidates, following Tuesday’s meeting.
Sakata ran unsuccessfully for city council in 2014 and when asked what issues the NDP plans to raise in Richmond, he only noted a lack of funding for public education and that “everything is still evolving.”
Sakata said his party will “listen in the lead-up to the election and listen to the needs of the people.”
In the 2013 provincial election, NDP candidates Frank Huang, Scott Stewart and Gian Sihota all failed to crack the 30 per cent mark of the popular vote.
Richmond has gradually evolved over the past decade to have notoriously low voter turnout.
Voter turnout rebounded slightly in 2013, after all-time lows in all three ridings were reported in 2009, when only Steveston was higher than 50 per cent, at 52.
Wat’s Richmond Centre riding had the lowest turnout in B.C., with just 43.6 per cent of registered voters casting a ballot.
