A decision to suspend the BC Rural Dividend Program indefinitely has sparked some backlash.
Joining the BC Liberal Leader and other local government officials Tuesday morning in Vancouver was Mayor of Williams Lake Walt Cobb.
“We’ve used rural dividend many, many times but in this particular case everybody knows that the federal and provincial governments have just brought down new regulations in manganese,” Cobb said.
“The money, the $500,000 that we’re going to lose or will be put off for a couple more years is our water treatment plant for the City of Williams Lake. We’re on a boil water advisory right now from Interior Health because of the manganese in our water. We can’t wait another two years to get our water treatment plant started and planned and get it in place so that we don’t have to boil our water.”
Leader of the official opposition Andrew Wilkinson said the recently announced $69 million support package to assist displaced forestry workers which they believed to be new means of funding is not.
Last week, Forest Minister Doug Donaldson said that all Rural Dividend applications received in this fiscal year’s intake period from June 15 to August 15 are suspended until further notice in order to support workers and communities in the interior as they face an unprecedented situation in the forestry sector economy.
“We are using the funds that we have now to support families and communities that are going through some very, very difficult and challenging times,” Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations, and Rural Development, Ravi Kahlon told Vista Radio.
“The applicants who have applied will be in the queue for the fund once it becomes back online. My hope is early in the new year but at the latest, it will be in the new fiscal year which is April.”
Kahlon said it’s not ‘robbing peter to pay paul’ as Wilkinson had suggested and said the amount of funds that were allocated for the 2019 wildfire season has been spent with the majority of it going towards fire preparedness.
“The Rural Dividend fund is $25 million and the announcement was $69 million, so clearly his [Wilkinson] math is off,” Kahlon said.
“But what I would say to that is all that $69 million is going to help rural communities. In fact it’s going towards helping many of the communities that his MLAs represent, and so when he says that it’s phoney money, he should go talk to the workers that are going to be affected by the pension bridging or the direct job placement or the contractors who will be getting the contracts for fire prevention so they can keep their workers working.”
With files from Rebecca Dyok, MyCaribooNow