All Candidates Debates

Based on their answers to the questions in both of these All Candidates events, it’s clear that Marc and Robyn have a lot of agreement about what the issues are.  They both have been spending a lot of their time listening to residents in Area C and gaining a better understanding of what the issues are.  This is wonderful.

Here is one question from the All Candidates event on Quadra that they answered quite differently.  To find the audio go to about 1:07 of the First Half of the event.

Question:

“During the covid pandemic, Jim Abrams showed strong leadership in supporting a community health response to this shared risk.  What would you do when faced with a similarly contentious public risk?”

Marc:

“Well, I think a person in a leadership position has to lead.  Even if that means advocating for things that aren’t universally accepted.  Particularly in a pandemic, we need to look for the best information that we have.  At the beginning of this pandemic, we were all on a knife’s edge.  We didn’t know what we know now.  And I think I would do very much like I did.  I put forward a voice for community safety.  I put forward a voice that said we need to put our healthcare workers before ourselves, our community before ourselves.  That voice wasn’t very popular with certain groups on this island.  But that’s what a leader has to do, is put forward and look for the best science, look for the best experts.  And I always said, if you are asking the same questions on day one of a situation like the pandemic as you are asking on day 200 and 300 and 500, and you are getting the same answers to the same questions at every point, then at some point there you’re wrong.  You need to be able to modify your position with new information.  And that’s what the leadership that I felt that I brought forward during the entire pandemic, and I would do the same thing again.”

Robyn:

“Thank you for the question, Bernie.  I think I saw you here earlier, you’re out there somewhere.  It was great that Jim was a leader during the pandemic and he was instrumental in ensuring that as islanders, we had priority loading on the ferry during the early days of the pandemic which was really helpful.  It made us all feel a lot safer I believe.  I don’t really feel that it is my current role to tell or compel anyone what to do as far as a health decision goes.  If I’m in a leadership role and that comes towards me, I hope to make that decision at that time.”