Election Candidate Responses – Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke Riding
In keeping with Esquimalt Chamber of Commerce’s commitment to keeping our community informed and engaged, we reached out to all candidates running in the Esquimalt-Saanich-Sooke riding for the upcoming federal election. We asked each candidate to respond to key questions raised by our members in our recent online poll. These questions addressed issues including inflation, housing affordability, labour challenges, taxation, and environmental policies.
Below you will find the responses that the Chamber has received, listed in alphabetical order by candidate first name. The responses are published exactly as submitted.
Ben Homer-Dixon - Green Party
1. What actions will your party take in government to reduce or eliminate intra-provincial trade barriers, especially concerning reciprocal qualification recognition?
Building economic resilience requires real collaboration across all levels of government. That’s why the Green Party supports creating a Council of Governments—bringing together federal, provincial, municipal, and Indigenous leaders to align priorities and work together effectively.
This kind of collaborative forum will give the opportunity for frequent discussions on issues that matter to all orders of government, including a respect for division of powers, public accountability, and trade, with the goal of policy coherence to optimize public spending.
Greens also urge immediate action on removing trade barriers between provinces so Canada functions as a truly unified economy, reducing dependence on U.S. imports and exports. Let’s add value to Canadian resources locally, support Island-based businesses and skilled workers, and eliminate interprovincial trade barriers while ensuring fairness for workers and industries. That could grow Canada’s economy by up to $300 billion.
Real progress starts with collaboration - and putting community before politics.
2. What actions will your party take in government to support private child care providers faced with the rising cost of labour, insurance, and regulation?
The Green Party of Canada’s economic plan is designed to deliver real, lasting support for child care by making it more affordable for families and more sustainable for providers. Quality child care requires skilled workers, stable funding, and policies that empower - not burden - the sector.
By raising the Basic Personal Amount to $40,000 and eliminating federal income tax on the first $45,000 earned, millions of Canadians will take home more of their income. A $50 billion tax return to working Canadians, along with fairer taxation for families and small businesses, will also strengthen household budgets and ease financial pressure on child care providers, supporting economic stability and workforce participation.
The Greens also plan to introduce universal early learning and child care, collaborating to reduce red tape and enabling providers to focus on delivering quality care. These initiatives, combined with broader investments in early childhood educator training and wages, supports childcare providers who are facing rising costs while contributing to a healthier, more resilient Canadian economy.
3. What are your party’s policies to address housing affordability to facilitate labour mobility and allow Canadians to live where they work?
Housing costs are a major barrier to affordability and economic opportunity. The Green Party’s plan will triple Canada’s social housing stock in seven years by building permanently affordable homes. Central to our strategy is a major federal investment in public housing construction - the largest since the 1970s - designed to create affordable homes, generate local jobs, and use Canadian materials.
We’ll refocus the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation on non-market housing, with strict affordability guidelines, long-term covenants, and limits on corporate ownership to ensure that every dollar of public funding benefits the public.
By ensuring housing is tied to people - not profit - we reduce the pressure on workers and families, making it easier to move for jobs, education, or caregiving. This boost in labour mobility supports a stronger, more dynamic economy while ensuring that no one is priced out of the communities where they live and work.
Greens will also support labour mobility through measures such as a national trades training program, tax reforms to support affordability across Canada.
4. Faced with the challenges of the current US administration, what are your party’s policies to support and promote Canadian businesses facing increasing uncertainty?
The Green Party’s plan empowers Canadian businesses by reducing dependence on the U.S. and strengthening our economy through smart, collaborative action.
We’ll eliminate interprovincial trade barriers to create a truly unified market, helping businesses grow and compete across Canada. Strategic investments in small businesses, green innovation, and domestic supply chains - from housing and manufacturing to resource processing - will boost productivity and resilience.
We’ll expand trade with partners who share our values, reducing exposure to U.S. policy shifts, while Vancouver Island’s Pacific location positions us to diversify trade and protect the Salish Sea.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation will help lead a housing strategy that creates jobs and uses Canadian resources to address affordability. We’ll also ensure emergency aid is available for workers and businesses facing sudden economic shocks.
These policies are about more than just weathering uncertainty—they’re about building a stronger, fairer, and more self-reliant Canadian economy.
Maja Tait - NDP
1. What actions will your party take in government to reduce or eliminate intra-provincial trade barriers, especially concerning reciprocal qualification recognition?
Canada has always been its strongest when we work together. We need a united approach to strengthening inter-provincial trade while reducing barriers to qualification recognition nation-wide.
I am proud to have taken the Pledge for Canada, including enhancing Canada’s resiliency in this increasingly turbulent world, reducing our dependence on the United States by diversifying our trade and strengthening our collective tools and institutions necessary to defend and build a Canada that works for all.
The NDP is in it for working people and everyday families, always. While Carney and Poilievre fight to protect billionaires’ money, the NDP and I will fight to defend our economy.
2. What actions will your party take in government to support private child care providers faced with the rising cost of labour, insurance, and regulation?
As a working mom to a nine-year-old, I know the importance of reliable childcare. Women make up about half of Canada's workforce, economic recovery is mathematically impossible without women going back to work. But, there's no recovery without support for women and for many this includes childcare.
Both Pierre Poilievre and Mark Carney have vowed to make deep cuts to services, and that puts $10-a-day child care on the chopping block. That could cost parents another $8,500 a year. We insisted that this National Childcare program is public, affordable and available to all Canadians.
Early childhood education is important, challenging and future-building work. We need to treat childcare workers properly with better wages and working conditions. Without the NDP at the table, the Liberals would not have prioritized child-care providers.
3. What are your party’s policies to address housing affordability to facilitate labour mobility and allow Canadians to live where they work?
A good job should be enough to get you a decent home that fits your family. Under the Liberals, rent and home prices have doubled, and the Conservative plan is built for corporate landlords, not renters.
As a longtime Mayor for the District of Sooke, I have championed affordable housing initiatives in our region while advocating for the necessary infrastructure we need in our community. That means access to healthcare, childcare, and schools so that people can get the care and support that they need close to home.
New Democrats will make it easier to find a good an affordable place to call home by building more homes that people can afford, supporting first-time homebuyers to reach their dream of owning a home, stopping renoviction and lowering your rent, and helping those with the greatest housing need including workers, families and Seniors and those on fixed incomes.
4. Faced with the challenges of the current US administration, what are your party’s policies to support and promote Canadian businesses facing increasing uncertainty?
We are proud Canadians. Proud of the way we take care of each other and defend our nation. We will never be the 51st state.
People are worried about losing their jobs, high costs of essential goods, the economy and the weakening of the Canadian dollar. Unfortunately, Carney is in it to protect billionaires’ money, and Polievre is playing for the wrong team.
New Democrats have laid out a plan for dollar-for-dollar retaliatory tariffs, cutting off the supply of critical minerals, coordinating a sustained, well-organized, well-resourced outreach campaign to U.S. counterparts, and A Build Canadian Buy Canadian strategy to build more of what we need here in Canada and prioritize products made by Canadian workers in public procurement. In addition, we have called for a worker-centered approach to reforming EI to reduce barriers to those who have lost their jobs.
If elected, I would be proud to champion this plan in Ottawa.
Param Bhatti - Indépendant Candidate
1. Reducing Intra-Provincial Trade Barriers & Qualification Recognition
Push for automatic recognition of Red Seal trades and professional licenses across provinces by 2027, starting with construction, health, and early childhood education.
Make federal infrastructure funding conditional on provincial cooperation with national labour mobility agreements.
Support creation of a “Canada Work Anywhere” credential — a digital, standardized national license for mobile workers (plumbers, nurses, ECEs) recognized across all provinces.
2. Supporting Private Child Care Providers
Ensure private operators receive the same per-child funding under federal-provincial $10/day programs, provided they meet care standards.
Support bulk-purchasing cooperatives for insurance and safety equipment, with federal backing for setup costs.
Launch a Child Care Wage Stabilization Fund to offer $3–$5/hour top-ups for early childhood educators, especially in high-cost areas like ours.
3. Housing Affordability & Labour Mobility
Introduce a $500/month federal rent rebate for working tenants earning under $60,000/year — fast relief while supply catches up.
Repurpose DND-owned surplus land (e.g., near CFB Esquimalt) for modular rental units for health workers, service staff, and tradespeople.
Offer federal tax credits for developers who build 3+ bedroom rentals within 10 km of large employment zones (e.g., shipyards, hospitals, industrial parks).
4. Supporting Canadian Businesses Amid US Trade Volatility
Introduce a federal Rental Support Tax Credit of up to $3,600/year ($300/month) for full-time workers earning under $60,000 and spending more than 30% of income on rent. This would apply immediately in high-cost areas like Esquimalt–Saanich–Sooke, where essential workers — nurses, trades, service staff — are being priced out of their own community.
Create a $1 billion Domestic Resilience Fund to help manufacturers retool or reshore production from high-risk US supply chains.
Expand Global Affairs Canada export concierge services for SMEs — with a local pilot hub in Victoria to help island-based exporters access Indo-Pacific markets.
Robert Crooks - The Communist Party of Canada
1. What actions will your party take in government to reduce or eliminate intra-provincial trade barriers, especially concerning reciprocal qualification recognition?
The Communist Party of Canada believes that the reducing or eliminating the so-called trade barriers would not help small businesses and working people, but would in fact harm them. Before this election cycle it was not small businesses but the representatives of international finance capital that were calling for these trade barriers to be eliminated, including Donald Trump during his first term in office. Trump in particular would love to see them go, in order to facilitate the infiltration of US capital deeper into Canada.
Another word for “trade barrier” is “regulation.” Regulations protect small businesses, working people and consumers from the power of monopolies. These regulations include things like government oversight of safety and quality control, provincial government procurement rights which give preference to local businesses over national or transnational corporations, supply management which ensures farmers in Canada a guaranteed income and protects consumers from unsafe chemicals in our food such as growth hormones. Essentially interprovincial trade regulations are about provincial jurisdiction and the rights of elected provincial governments to make laws and pass regulations that are in the interest of their constituents.
Additionally, there is no conclusive evidence that interprovincial trade is a barrier to Canadian businesses. Between 2007 and 2021, total interprovincial trade increased by 44 percent. A recent Statistics Canada Survey on Interprovincial Trade stated that the main reasons businesses do not have more interprovincial trade is primarily because of the structure of the Canadian economy, its geography and the cost of transportation. The Communist Party has several plans for lowering the cost of transportation, beginning with placing CN and CP Rail under public ownership, and investing in public infrastructure to transport people and goods across the country.
2. What actions will your party take in government to support private child care providers faced with the rising cost of labour, insurance, and regulation?
The Communist Party of Canada calls for the establishment of a universal system of quality public childcare, with Canada-wide standards, that is free to users. We call for the wages of childcare workers to be raised and to make Early Childhood Education qualifications mandatory. We need to increase the number of Early Childhood Educators and ensure they are well-trained.
3. What are your party’s policies to address housing affordability to facilitate labour mobility and allow Canadians to live where they work?
The housing crisis in Canada is a direct consequence of the federal government defunding publicly-owned housing. In the 1970s and 1980s, Canada built 20,000 public housing units a year. The result was that most working people could afford a home and homelessness was practically nil. In the 1990s, the federal government stopped funding public housing and placed the burden entirely on the provinces. Since Trudeau’s Liberals came to power, the strategy has been to subsidize private developers in the misguided hope that more supply would bring down the cost of housing. The result has been that since 2017 homelessness has risen from 129,000 to 235,000. Rents between 2021 and 2024 rose 21% alone. In a recent study, 44% of respondents said they were concerned about their ability to afford their housing costs.
The reason is that the housing crisis is not only a crisis of supply. The crisis is driven by financialization. At the height of the pandemic, in 2021, there were 1.3 million empty homes in Canada. These homes were being left empty for speculation purposes. To be clear, those who rent out a room in their house or who own one or two condos for the purpose of short term rentals are not the issue. Large financial firms own 20 - 30 percent of Canada’s purpose-built rental housing. The issue is that housing has become a source of financial investment over and above its utility as a home.
The Communist Party proposes to enact a federal housing policy that recognizes housing as a fundamental human right and treats it as a public utility. We would ensure that all rent-geared-to-income housing is genuinely accessible to low-income earners by setting rents based on actual income levels, including shelter rates for those on social assistance, rather than manipulated income thresholds that exclude those in greatest need. We call for establishing land banks to preserve land for social housing, schools, hospitals, parks, and public works while preventing developers from inflating housing prices and rents for profit.
By providing housing for society’s most vulnerable, this will bring down housing costs for others as well. The government needs to stop subsidizing high-end condo builds and focus on building publicly owned housing for the lowest income earners.
4. Faced with the challenges of the current US administration, what are your party’s policies to support and promote Canadian businesses facing increasing uncertainty?
Canada needs to re-invest heavily in manufacturing and secondary industry, and diversify trade partners, to no longer rely so heavily on the United States. The first thing we need to do is to fund social programs, increase EI to 90% of previous earnings for the duration of unemployment, and eliminate tuition fees for university and training programs. We have to think about working people, including small business owners, who will be or already have been put out of work because of the tariffs.
Then we need to re-invest in the Canadian economy, especially in industry that was off-shored due to so-called free trade agreements. For example, a Canada-wide program to build public housing would also require appliances, toilets, sinks, showers, furniture, TVs, etc. We should be manufacturing these things in Canada. It would also require carpenters, roofers, plumbers, electricians. Investments in public infrastructure will support the private sector as well.
Canada also needs to withdraw from free trade agreements, which have gutted our economy and placed it in the hands of international capital. Trade deals like USMCA, CPTPP, CETA, TILMA etc, drive down wages, cut jobs, destroy homegrown industry and undermine our sovereignty and democracy. We need international trade that benefits working people, including small business owners, and not the monopolies and transnational corporations.
Stephanie McLean - Liberal Party
1. What actions will your party take in government to reduce or eliminate intra-provincial trade
barriers, especially concerning reciprocal qualification recognition?
Mark Carney has a plan to remove barriers to internal trade. We will reduce internal trade costs by up to 15% and expand our economy by up to $200 billion, that is up to $5,000 for every Canadian. We will also build trade corridors that stitch this country together more tightly – where people can work anywhere, where businesses can sell their products anywhere. These actions will grow our economy and offset the impacts of Trump’s tariffs. Our plan will lower costs for consumers, create new jobs and careers, open new markets for our homegrown goods and services, improve our energy independence, and increase labour mobility, including for health care workers and construction workers.
We will ensure mutual recognition of credentials with provinces and territories so Canadians can work wherever they want. This includes health professional credentials, professional qualifications in financial services, and trucking safety certifications, amongst others. In cases where mutual recognition is not attainable, we will harmonize regulations to enhance labour mobility. Following Nova Scotia, Ontario, New Brunswick, and PEI’s initial actions, we will drive down costs for Canadians and businesses, strengthen supply chains, increase productivity, and bring new opportunities.
2. What actions will your party take in government to support private child care providers faced
with the rising cost of labour, insurance, and regulation?
As the parent of a school aged child, I know how vital affordable childcare is to families. We are committed to working with the provincial government to ensure there are accessible spaces where families need them. To that end, a Mark Carney government will require provinces, territories, and municipalities to expand child care in public infrastructure wherever possible, including in schools and community centres, and in community infrastructure that receives federal financing, so families can get child care close to home. We will also ensure Early Learning and Child Care providers have good wages, which is critical to keeping child care centres staffed. We will work with provinces and territories so that workers have predictable wage increases and investments in pensions and benefits programs.
3. What are your party’s policies to address housing affordability to facilitate labour mobility and
allow Canadians to live where they work?
I know we need to get affordable housing where people want to live and work. This focus is central to the Create Build Canada Homes (BCH) to get the federal government back into the business of building homes. We have a plan to build faster, smarter, sustainable, more affordable homes by providing over $25 billion in financing to innovative prefabricated home builders in Canada, including those using Canadian technologies and resources like mass timber and softwood lumber. BCH will also issue bulk orders of units from manufacturers to create sustained demand.
To achieve this goal we take a number of steps including: cutting municipal development charges in half for multi-unit residential housing for five years by working with provinces and territories to keep municipalities whole (these revenues will be offset by federal investment in housing infrastructure like water, power lines, and wastewater systems), reintroducing a tax incentive for home builders known as the Multi-Unit Rental Building (MURB), which, in the 1970s, spurred tens of thousands of rental housing units across the country and facilitating the conversion of existing structures into affordable housing units. We will also build on the success of the Housing Accelerator Fund and speed up approvals by reforming and simplifying national building codes; eliminating duplicative inspections and streamlining regulations for prefabricated and modular housing.
4. Faced with the challenges of the current US administration, what are your party’s policies to
support and promote Canadian businesses facing increasing uncertainty?
President Trump’s tariffs are fundamentally restructuring global trade and Canadian businesses are anxious about lost customers and jobs. In this time of crisis, Canadian businesses need to know that domestic demand is there. It’s time for the Government of Canada to give Canadian companies due consideration in federal procurement. Buying Canadian gives companies the confidence to build, to hire, and to stand strong in the face of this crisis. At a time when our economy is under threat, consumers want to do their part as patriotic Canadians, buying things that are truly made here. But sometimes figuring out what is a Canadian product is hard.
We have a plan to make it easy for Canadians to Buy Canadian. This includes working with retailers, producers and manufacturers to maximize Canada's supply chain to increase transparency and increase stringency in origin of product labelling so that it is simple, clear, and easy to identify what is a truly Canadian product. We will deploy a made-in-Canada procurement strategy that prioritizes, whenever possible, Canadian suppliers and supply chains, and limiting bidders from foreign suppliers to bidding only on what we have agreed to in Canada's Free Trade Agreements.
In the food sector, we will build more domestic processing capacity, including food processing capacity in rural and remote areas, with a new $200 million Domestic Food Processing Fund, applicable to both agricultural and fisheries products. Farmers, ranchers, and producers will see increased support, including in the fish and seafood sectors, to access new markets for their food products with an additional $30 million in the AgriMarketing Program. This will build on recent successes, including the recent opening of new Agri-Food Offices abroad, which helps our farmers access new markets and diversify away from the United States.
Safeguard our economy and our values and protect Canada from attempts to buy up our businesses, our core public health care, intellectual property, critical minerals and other resources by strengthening the Investment Canada Act. We will make more transactions reviewable, as well as modernizing standards to capture manipulative transaction models – including by reviewing the potential impacts to Canada’s data sovereignty. We will also make clear that any transactions involving core infrastructure in our public health system, such as long-term care facilities and family health practices, will be subject to stringent review and protection under the Act..