B.C. Cons plan to axe election overlap if elected

We are going to start off with so much confusion between two elections happening in B.C. just about at the same time. The Conservatives say they'd make it law not to run a provincial election within 60 days of the municipal elections. B.C. Conservative leader Lauren Dirksen posted a video earlier today announcing this plan. Take a listen.

Holding two sets of elections at the same time is chaotic, opportunistic, and it's not fair to you. So here is my commitment so that this never happens again. If British Columbians choose to make me their next Premier, one of our first acts will be to pass a law. It will be called the Respect Local Democracy Act and it will do two things. First, it will permanently separate the provincial and municipal election calendars in law so they are never scheduled for the same fall again. Second, it will bar any provincial elections, SNAP or scheduled, from being held within 60 days of municipal elections. No premier of any party will be able to do this to you again.

All right. Just for clarification, the municipal elections are October 17th. The provincial election is on October 24th. Let's bring in Jenna Stoner, president of the Union of BC Municipalities and mayoral candidate for the District of Squamish. Jenna, thank you so much for joining us.

Hi, Robin. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.

What are people saying on your campaign? Are people confused?

Yeah, I think myself and other candidates are definitely hearing it at the doorstep when we meet residents. There's confusion of the dates, the confusion of the voting locations. And then there's always been a little bit of confusion or lack of clarity on which order of government is responsible for what. And the dueling elections further complicates

that factor. What about the dueling election signs? I see it everywhere.

Yeah, that's definitely another, if nothing else, an eyesore. But it also just creates further confusion of like which names are going to be on which ballots, depending on which voting location I'm going to be at.

Well, the municipal election is happening this Saturday. And guess what? Advanced polling for the provincial campaign is happening at the same time. Maybe people can get it all done in one shot.

Yeah, definitely. In some communities, you might get a two-for-one pass, but there's also other communities where the voting locations are entirely different. The voting hours are different, and so you're either asking folks to show up at two different voting locations at two different times on the same day, and hopefully they know which ballot's going to be at which location, or they're dedicating two weekends to get out to vote.

Well, let's talk about what Conservative leader Lauren Dirksen is proposing with this 60-day buffer. Do you support this proposal?

Yeah, we definitely support this proposal and we're glad to see that it's been included as one of the commitments from the Conservative Party. This is an ask that came from local government leaders back in September before a snap election was called. There was actually an emergency resolution off the floor at the UBCM convention and we were calling to ensure that this concurrent election never