Image Credit: BC Legislature

By Michael Reeve

CABINET SWORN IN

Milobar questions delay in mandate letters for new NDP cabinet

Nov 18, 2024 | 4:25 PM

KAMLOOPS — In the coming week, the official opposition BC Conservatives will announce a critic roster, tasked with holding the NDP’s new cabinet to account during the next term.

Premier David Eby made several key changes to his executive council, including changes in health with Adrian Dix out and Josie Osborne in. Osborne will now be thrown into the middle of the Kamloops cancer centre build, and far-too-routine closures of rural emergency rooms around the Interior.

“I would hope that Minister Osborne would be willing to take a second look at the cancer centre and get it built properly right from the get-go so we are not saddled with something that will be a problem to recruit oncologists and other cancer professionals into Kamloops for the next 30 years,” said Peter Milobar, BC Conservative MLA for Kamloops-Centre. “And then of course… the rural ER closures are putting a strain not just on Kamloops but those local communities with the worries of whether an emergency room will be available to them.”

While Milobar believes there will still be a brief session held before the end of the year for the election of a speaker, he’s concerned that cabinet, which includes newly formed or adjusted ministries and a handful of new ministers, will not be receiving mandate letter for months to come.

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“The premier has made it very clear that there won’t be new mandate letters for this ministers until the spring. What does that mean when people are struggling to figure out what the responsibilities and what the focus of these ministers is supposed to be over the next four years? We are going to have to wait another three to four months to find that out,” said Milobar. “It simply doesn’t make sense when you are a returning government, a returning premier, that there wouldn’t already have been this type of initial thought process in place to begin with.”