Liberal Candidate Jennifer Lash Comes To Cortes Island

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - More island residents turned out to hear Liberal candidate Jennifer Lash than could fit into the Pioneer Room at Mansons Hall. Half a dozen were looking on from the hallway. The Wednesday April 9 event was co-sponsored by the Cortes Island Seniors Society and Cortes Island Climate Action Committee.

Karen Mahon, the MC, began, “I met Jen 25 years ago.” 

To which Lash responded, “I don't remember life before Karen.” 

Karen Mahon: Yeah, it was a long, long time ago. I was working at Greenpeace on forests and Jen wanted to really take on marine conservation in Canada in a big way. So she started an organization called Living Ocean Society, which became Canada's leading marine conservation organization.She led that and really spearheaded the notion of marine conservation in Canada. So we worked alongside each other. I was the forest and she was the fish, for some decades.”

Lash was living in the little island community of Sointula throughout that period and still does. She raised her two children there. 

More recently she became a Senior Advisor in the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change. It says something about her effectiveness in that role that four other government staffers have become the backbone currently of her campaign staff in North Island Powell River. One of them, Deputy Campaign Manager Holly Johnson, recently told Cortes Currents that 150 people had come forward as volunteers. A critic suggested some of these were probably just people who set up lawn signs,’ which is probably equally true of the ‘well over 50, maybe more’ volunteers that the NDP campaign manager recently said were helping them.

Jennifer Lash: “I have voted NDP for my entire life, but in 2021 I voted NDP and I really struggled with it. The reason for me was that they had no climate plan. I feel like if we don't deal with that issue, all the marine protection areas in the world are in vain.  This was a really important issue.”

“The NDP had no plan and the Liberal government did. They had a plan that was mapped out and it was backed by economists and scientists. I'm not gonna stand here and tell you that the Liberal plan fund is perfect, that is a conversation that I'm sure can go on forever. But it was something, and it was designed to reach a specific target.”

“So I started to kick the tires of the Liberal party, see what it was and I liked what I saw. Again, I am not going to defend everything. Yes, you can bring up electoral reform, I'm just as disappointed as probably everybody in this room that that was dropped. I'm happy to also criticize 'em for the things that didn't work. What I liked about them was that they understood that advancing on things like climate change, like social programs, like biodiversity conservation also requires building an economy and shifting an economy towards one of the future. That doesn't happen overnight and that it's hard to do and they really try to put together thoughtful policies that would drive that change.”

“About a year ago, I started thinking about running. It was a really big decision for me to do this. It's kind of like being in a popularity contest in high school, but the results are printed all across national news in the whole country. I'm feeling very vulnerable right now, but I just really felt like it was important to have a conversation in this riding because this writing has been an NDP/Conservative split forever. To me, this riding has so much more to offer than just getting caught up in that tension.”

She submitted her application to become a Liberal candidate last October: