The mayor of Clearwater is happy that B.C.’s Electoral Boundaries Commission has put communities in the North Thompson back into a redrawn Kamloops-North Thompson riding.
Merlin Blackwell was a vocal critic of the initial plan to put Clearwater and Barriere in the now scrapped Cariboo-North Thompson riding.
“For myself, Barriere’s Ward Stamer, and the Simpcw Nation based out of Chu Chua there, they wanted to be relatively in this jurisdiction,” Blackwell said.
“We did get Vavenby scooped into our area which is sort of a satellite TNRD community that relies on Clearwater for shopping and doctors things like that but I do feel for the people north of there.”
That would be Blue River which will be moved to a redrawn Prince George-Valemount riding.
“I know there are some who will be unhappy with this,” Blackwell added. “There are going to be a few pockets, I was looking at Williams Lake, that is going to irritate people. But I think this is the way its going to go.”
“I would rather have better lines of sight on representation, doing the hospital business, doing the business business, doing the shopping, the airports and all that sort of thing feeding into the city where we do most of that stuff as centre point of our riding than be attached to somebody that is going to forget we exist.”
Blackwell says while there is a population imbalance with some of the ridings, he feels the proposal – as it stands – will benefit a number of the smaller communities in the Kamloops area.
Speaking on the NL Morning News, Blackwell also said he’s also intrigued by the new Kamloops Centre riding that includes much of the urban core of Kamloops.
“You have a very metro central riding and then now you also have a more rural oriented riding with Chase, Clearwater, Barriere, and then a smaller part of the Kamloops population. What is that going to look like?” Blackwell noted.
“Are you going to have a more left-leaning centre Kamloops riding and a more right-leaning rural riding? Is that going to split the politics even more than it has in the past?”
In all, the B.C. Electoral Boundary Commission is proposing six new ridings – one each in Burnaby, Surrey, Langley, Vancouver, Langford, and Kelowna – taking the total to 93. It is also looking to adjust the boundaries of 72 other ridings while renaming 41 of them.
It is now up to the B.C. Legislative Assembly to decide whether to accept all, some or none of the Commission’s recommendations.
You can find the entire report here and a map of the ridings here.
