GRAND FORKS– BC NDP candidate for Boundary-Similkameen Roly Russell stated:

“People in my communities faced wildfires and evacuations twice last week.

As a BC Liberal cabinet minister, John Rustad spent just $7.6 million a year on wildfire prevention. David Eby and the BC NDP have massively expanded prevention work and are now investing 10x what John Rustad did each year to prevent fires.

Rustad doesn’t believe in the science of climate change - the same science firefighters use to fight wildfires. How can you fight fires and keep communities safe when you believe that the science is a ‘hoax’?

David Eby and our team will keep taking real action, working with communities to prevent fires and keep people safe.”

David Eby and the BC NDP are taking action to prevent wildfires and to protect communities and forests. David Eby’s Action Plan for You builds on our work by:

• Helping protect homes, communities and local watersheds by ramping up active forest management across BC.
• Strengthening work with communities and First Nations to proactively remove highly flammable woody material, prune tree stands and remove debris.
• Strengthening our restoration work by planting more than 300 million trees every year – with the right tree species in the right place - to reduce wildfire risk.

David Eby is also launching a new world-class Wildfire Training and Education Institute at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops and moving the BC Wildfire Service to year-round so they can do prevention work on the ground. John Rustad and the BC Liberals kept them seasonal.

The BC NDP government is taking action to build a stronger system of disaster response, recovery, and readiness through a new Emergency and Disaster Management Act so people across this province are safer, and get better support after disaster strikes. We also created the Cooperative Community Wildfire Response program to help support local teams engaging as partners in keeping communities safe.