In addition to being the Green Party candidate, Catharine Kendall is the Executive Director of the Connaught Youth Centre in Prince George, a recreational and educational facility where she works with at-risk teens.
What follows are excerpts from our conversation.
How did I get the nomination? I am not a political person. But I’m all about action for people. I was called because I was doing work with the British Columbia Council for International Cooperation in Vancouver. I had a contract here called Global Neighborhood Network, and one of our network individuals that does work over in northern India, Hillary Crowley (who ran as a Green Party candidate in the last provincial election. -ed), she phoned me and asked me if I was interested. And I said, think about that, because it’ll take a little bit organizing because I have a large family. And within a month, we had a yes. And now we’ve been rolling.
There was actually somebody else who had registered, and I don’t know how it how the decision was made, but the Green Party decided that they weren’t a fit. That person is now my agent, actually. Okay, so we’re still a team.
My background is in community development. I’ve been doing work in the VLA—our hazardous neighborhood in Prince George—for over twenty years. And so that work basically is about asking community members what it is that they need, and then finding a way to create programs for them, finding funding. And so that’s always been exciting work, because once the program starts manifesting, then it rolls and other community groups might take it on.
Some of the work I’ve done is gang correction work, which has morphed into this facility, with these Children, Youth and Family Programs. I was also doing a music event called Coming in From the Cold, with the Coldsnap music festival. Integra is taking that over. It takes music events into our highest risk neighborhood. So they might sit and talk about culture, they might start talking about musical instruments, they might talk about how people from India and people from our indigenous communities and why drums are similar and all kinds of really interesting cultural pieces.
This is a big riding. It goes all the way up to the Yukon. We’ve got climate issues with the heavy oil and gas infrastructure up there, we’ve got agriculture, we have the dam going in for our hydroelectric project. So we have lots of overlap with special interest groups that don’t want those things to happen. We have a transmission pipeline coming through Prince George, we have homeless issues and vulnerable children, youth and families and employment, and because we do feed the North, you know, our first nations are coming from the north, our workers are coming from the north, so that we see, you know, a mishmash of all kinds of issues. It’s all over the map, which makes it really exciting. My top three, issues are climate change, indigenous issues, and then agriculture. Those are my key strengths.
Hillary basically told me straight up: don’t worry, Cat. You’re not gonna win. That didn’t exactly make me want to leap up and embrace the position. Okay, I’m jumping for a losing role.
I worked in Blueberry River, and I worked in Kluskus First Nation. And those First Nations communities were heavily impacted by resource industry. Blueberry River is still in the midst of, you know, getting this compensation for the sour gas, well leaks in their community. Their whole community was moved. So I was there with Health Canada, ten years after they were moved to assess the population to see you know, whether or not their health effects change. And my experience at that time—which was the same with a project with Kluskus nation, looking at gold mining and leaching of various chemicals and fish being contaminated—was that the government’s hands were tied. They couldn’t actually do anything for the people. And so I felt that if I could reach out to our First Nations people and have conversations with them around that, then you know, maybe there’s a chance for more votes.
I can only speak to my experience, and how I’ve seen the seasons and how they’ve changed, and how the water tables have changed and how our oil and gas industries have changed those things: water tables, and desertification.
I traveled across Canada to different farms. At one farm that I went to in Alberta, there were wells on the property that they were leasing from the land owner. And she didn’t feel like she had much of a choice whether to host them or not, they were coming anyway. And she’s seen directly over the last 30 years, her water tables start to disappear. And her maple trees don’t provide maple syrup anymore. They’re just getting drier and drier. She used to have cattle on the property, she went from 50, head to 10. Because the gopher holes and the dryness of the land does not provide the grass to actually provide the feed for the animals. She would have to irrigate. Those kinds of things start pointing toward the fact we’re changing the landscape, and we need to recognize that. It may not be Vancouver, but we’re still affecting it.
In Prince George, we have more and more community members coming from elsewhere in the north and finding Prince George’s being the centre, so we have more and more homeless people.
It comes down to family dynamics. There is one community—Fort Ware, which is within the riding—where some community members that are third generation Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder. Now, right, so there are high capacity issues with our community members that are being affected by fetal alcohol syndrome, drug addictions… those kinds of things. We have generational traumas that affect those things, that make people make these types of choices to not have to face what is happening in their life or what is happened to their families. Those those issues have never gone away. Right. We’re now generations upon generations that have seen that experience that.
We’re going to have a conversation about the impacts of all those industries. And we’re going to assess the type of damage that they’re doing on the ground, to our wildlife, to our environment, and to humans that live on the environment. Those conversations need to be had where people are at the table, and they aren’t coming with their intense emotion about us showing up and shutting things down. At the end of the day, we still need to have a GDP. At the end of the day, we still want to live a luxurious Canadian lifestyle. At the end of the day, we still want to be able to have a vehicle, a home, raise our children in a safe environment, we want to have healthy food for them. And I think that I think all of those things are possible if we start to think about scaling down and diversifying and spreading things out, starting to think of what new industry might look like. Dealing with waste: waste from agriculture, waste from industry, not allowing spewing of effluent and not having accountability for that. Those direct accountabilities need to come right back into the communities.
In a rich forest-based community like Mackenzie, why do we need to say we don’t want more forestry? I know that there’s an issue right now where the mills have been shut down. We could phase down, scale up, create cooperatives where the wood comes in, we process it here, we make amazing products, right? I’m in a family with six children. And I could think of a gazillion products that I could use that might come locally that I can’t buy from even Costco from beds to furniture to you just really nice wooden boxes for blankets. Things like that are very hard to come by. They’re going to come out of China. And I don’t think that needs to happen. And they’re coming out of China with our wood. And we have lost a lot of that skill base. And I think that it’s time to retrain the people that are interested in those kinds of fields and create infrastructure.
We all have these amazing ideas. Let them light up, you know, and actually build on them. And I think that there’s no reason why we can’t provide small grants? Even micro loans to someone who has an idea. And you can create. You know what resources are around you live in a particular environment, and you know how you might be able to access certain things to do things. You may be able to hire a few people and start a little shop and making more from there. I’d love to see a shop here that had Mackenzie wood products and furniture.
