Image Credit: CFJC Today

By Silvia Senna

Provincial Election

Stamer, Giesbrecht plant their flags for B.C. Conservatives in Kamloops ridings

Mar 15, 2024 | 5:30 PM

KAMLOOPS — The B.C. Conservative Party has officially announced its Kamloops-area candidates ahead of the upcoming provincial election. Ward Stamer, the two-term mayor of Barriere, is running in Kamloops-North Thompson against B.C. United incumbent and house leader Todd Stone. Dennis Giesbrecht, who finished 11th in the 2022 Kamloops municipal election, is running in the newly-formed Kamloops Centre, challenging B.C. United incumbent Peter Milobar.

With the next election set to take place on October 19, the new B.C. Conservative candidates have laid out their priorities. Health care and affordability are in their agenda, but for Stamer, highway safety is an important issue.

“[The government has] made a direct decision to put all that infrastructure improvements on Highway 1 and not on Highway 5. And the crashes and the fatalities have shown that to be true,” said Stamer. “Just because they come up with new policy and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to fix it now,’ I don’t necessarily believe that they will because they haven’t been able to show that in the past.”

Giesbrecht wants to focus on crime and drug issues.

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“The things that we talked about four years ago — about treatment centres for addictions issues, more work on mental health — the same things I talked about four years ago are orders of magnitude worse now than they were then,” he explained. “That’s where we stand. We’re going to work forward on making life a little bit better for the people of Kamloops. It’s going to be a big job. It’ll be incremental steps going forward, but we look forward to working with everybody and moving, pushing that ball.”

He doesn’t believe decriminalization is a solution.

“Safe supply is not the way to go,” said Giesbrecht. “Everybody who’s here, if they had a loved one, a family member who had a drug addiction issue, they would look for treatment. They would want more treatment, not more drugs. And that’s the way our party feels. We need to get more treatment facilities out there and we’ve got to help the people. It’s basically immoral to let someone wallow in this chemical slavery when we can get them into treatment, get them help, get them healthy and get them back into society.”

With both candidates running directly against the centre-right B.C. United, neither Stamer nor Giesbrecht are concerned about splitting the vote.

“There are significant differences between the B.C. Liberal-United Party and our party. And I think that the voters in our riding are looking for a change. They’re not looking for a recycle. They’re not looking for an endorsement of the current government,” said Stamer.

“Every vote you get is very important, so thinking that you’re entitled to a certain percentage of the vote just because you traditionally have been positioning here or there, it’s not relevant. People want change and they want to be heard. They’re tired of being taken for granted,” added Giesbrecht.

While Kamloops councillor Bill Sarai is seeking the NDP nomination for Kamloops Centre, the New Democrats and the B.C. Greens have yet to announce a candidate for either Kamloops riding.