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Simple mistake or a telling portrait?
By Wayne Stetski
On July 28, Kootenay-Columbia MP David Wilks released a statement to the media claiming that he had made a mistake on a funding announcement in Revelstoke. As people across the riding will know, Mr. Wilks has spent the last two weeks crisscrossing Kootenay-Columbia, making massive funding announcements with just weeks to go in his mandate.
In Revelstoke, Mr. Wilks made a $156.6 million funding announcement for Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks that has now been proven by a Revelstoke journalist and local residents to include a $54.8 million discrepancy. Mr. Wilks’ ‘new’ money promise included significant work that had already been completed. The people of Revelstoke saw through this false promise, and their outcry resulted in the MP being forced to publicly acknowledge his ‘mistake’.
Was this an accounting error or did Mr. Wilks actually believe he could get away with it? Maybe he just said what he was told to say.
Mr. Wilks’ re-election strategy is dependent on big, flashy funding announcements that attempt to prove he’s doing a good job for the people of Kootenay-Columbia. He’s even stated that he’s too busy making funding announcements to make plans to attend all-candidates debates.
This situation has cast a real shadow on all the announcements made recently by Mr. Wilks. In this case, questions will continue to be asked about whether or not Mr. Wilks knew he was announcing as new funding projects that had already been completed. If not, why didn’t he know what was taking place in his own riding? If the money had already been spent, and he didn’t know, can he really take credit for any new money spent in the riding?
I’ve spent months knocking on doors and meeting with voters across the riding, and I’m hearing what voters care about, and the standards that they set for their elected officials. I believe that if Mr. Wilks spent more time talking to a wide range of voters he’d realize that this kind of overblown announcement about projects at the very end of his term doesn’t tell a positive story.
Instead, the current MP has reinforced all the things that many voters already believe about him: that he doesn’t have any real connections with the communities he represents, that he simply says what Stephen Harper tells him to say, and that he doesn’t put the interests of his constituents first.
Mr. Wilks has not done his re-election bid any favours by playing with voters in this disrespectful manner. And I believe that voters will have something to say about that on October 19.
– Cranbrook resident Wayne Stetski is NDP candidate for Member of Parliament for Kootenay-Columbia.
