The BC Green candidate for Kootenay Central says she is running again because she has the trust of the electorate and party staff, and is a “known quantity” in the riding.
This is the third consecutive election in which Nicole Charlwood has been a candidate in the riding formerly known as Nelson-Creston. She finished third in 2024, behind the NDP and BC Conservatives, and was runner-up to the NDP in 2020. She was also elected to Nelson city council in a 2021 by-election and served as campaign manager in 2017 for Green candidate Kim Charlesworth, who finished second.
Charlwood said the 2024 provincial campaign was hard personally, but the snap election call “made it easy and obvious” to put her name forward again. “I’m proven electable in the city of Nelson. I’ve been campaigning for so long that the amount I’ve invested, the amount my family’s invested, the amount that I’ve learned, why not be the candidate?”
Charlwood said she was “a little angered” by the election call, given that the NDP already had a majority and that the provincial race is coinciding with local government elections. That was the “last little nudge” she needed to run, she said, adding that she’s trying to avoid competing with the municipal campaign and has been door knocking with local candidates to educate voters that two elections are taking place.
The issues she is hearing the most about are the cost of living, health care, and ferries. She said communities in the riding that rely on ferry service felt abandoned by the government during last year’s ferry strike and have proposed amendments to the Transportation Act to ensure ferries are declared an essential service. She said the Green Party has also been advocating for something similar for coastal ferries, “so an interior Green MLA could expand the voice for protecting our ferry services.”
Charlwood would also like to see enhanced bus service in rural areas. The Blewett resident noted her area isn’t served by any transit. And she said she helped raise $1.5 million in provincial funding for youth mental health in the area and would like to do more.
She believes forestry has been managed poorly in BC. “We can have a working forest,” she said. “But we’ve got to look at our forestry differently. We’ve been promised by our current MLA that we would see change in that regard [but] we’re not protecting species. We’re still cutting down old growth. We’re again moving the boundaries of where we can log and where we can’t log. [The Greens] don’t believe that clearcutting in any form is how forestry should be done in this province.”
Charlwood also said more attention deserves to be paid to budget errors that overestimated revenues from natural gas royalties to provincial coffers by nearly $1.5 billion over five years.
Asked to compare and contrast this election with previous ones, Charlwood said this one seems different because she senses an electorate that’s willing to bring change: “We don’t get much change politically here at the provincial level. It’s been pretty much the same for a long time. And many people aren’t feeling like it’s working for them. I’m feeling this time like Greens are the change vote.”
Charlwood said it helps that her party has been in the legislature since 2013. The Greens had an agreement to prop up the NDP government, but walked away from it earlier this year, because “they just weren’t willing to play fair,” Charlwood said.
“I don’t think they deserve a majority government, especially when this unnecessary election got called. If [NDP leader David] Eby wants a report card, let’s give it to him.”
Charlwood is running against two-term incumbent New Democrat Brittny Anderson, the BC Conservatives’ Gordon Skulnec, and OneBC’s Hunter Corrigal.
