Okanagan one-on-one with David Eby

Okanagan one-on-one with David Eby

Published 12:31 pm Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Black Press had a chance to speak with David Eby on a range of issues facing the Okanagan during a recent stop in Summerland on the campaign trail.

After coming to Summerland from a policy announcement earlier that morning in Kelowna, he stopped at the Beanery Cafe for lunch, where he also met with Summerland’s Mayor Doug Holmes.

After lunch, he sat down with a Black Press reporter to talk about the region, the recent wildfires, and other topics.

Some of the questions and answers have been edited for clarity.

Black Press:

I saw the BC NDP had made an announcement about supporting uninsured homeowners with recovery after recent wildfires, and the BC Conservatives also did an announcement this morning as well about proactive efforts, do you feel there’s more room for efforts to be proactive, and what would they be?

Eby:

After every fire season we look back, how do we react to the fire season? Was there anything that was missing? Was there anything that didn’t go well? Was there anything that we need to be looking at for the next fire season? We always do that post review, and a number of the recommendations that we identified in previous fires really benefited the community here in terms of how we responded to this one, so we were able to avoid large-scale travel bans, keep things very focused, and also provide as much accommodation as people required.

The year-round operation of the fire service and the doubling of our night fleet – we have helicopters that can operate at night – meant that we were able to fight the fire all the way around the clock. So those are all significant improvements, but there are always opportunities for us to do better, and, and I know that a lot of the conversation rightly focuses on how do we minimize the fuel load that’s out in the woods, and how do we make sure that we’re grappling with that.

Black Press:

Probably one of the big pieces that’s coming out of this, and I think one of the things that I heard about this fire in particular, was the speed that it moved, with how dry the forests had been. BC, and the Okanagan in particular, have been under, I think it’s three years running at this point of droughts and drought conditions. Last year the Similkameen River was at a record low, this year was close.

WBecause it’s another El Nino winter, it’s going to be another drought next year I think that’s already fairly easy to say, what can be done to protect our water?

Eby:

It’s pretty crucial. I was just speaking with the mayor of Summerland here and he was outlining for me the dual challenge that the community faces. First of all, that the watershed burned and so no one really knows yet what the impact’s gonna be on the water supply, and, for Summerland. And the second is that even before the fire, there was a recognition of the need to draw water from the lake to have a backup water supply for the town and enable growth to take place.

That’s an issue that is not unique to Summerland. There’s lots of communities grappling with “How do we pay for the water infrastructure that we need with increased drought?” The agricultural communities are incredibly worried about it, and so we’re gonna have announcements during the campaign about how we’re going to go about this, but part of the conversation is about how do we establish a consistent flow of financial support for communities to do this infrastructure work that they have to do in order to respond to the new realities of water shortage.

The other piece is land use planning, making sure that we’re working with communities to identify watershed areas so we’re not logging them and we’re making sure we don’t have adverse long-term effects on water supply through short-term resource work.

Black Press:

With the fire, one of the things with the aftermath that they’re looking at locally is what will happen when there is finally that rain. They’re going to be installing rainfall monitoring because the ground won’t be able to absorb it, and that’s not isolated just to Summerland, there were floods in the Similkameen in 2021, and a lot of concerns with flood mitigation and all the many orphan dikes.

Eby:

So we passed laws that require local governments and regional districts to work with their neighbors, work with First Nations to develop plans and identify those weak links in either flood prevention or other potential emergency impacts.

That inventory work, that baseline work of cooperation between jurisdictions recognizing that a flood doesn’t say, “Oh, I’m at the municipal boundary now,” is absolutely crucial and it’s been essential to us to understand the scale of the infrastructure that’s needed.

The need for flood mitigation, fire prevention, infrastructure, and other emergency preparedness work is infinite. We could do this work for the rest of your life and my life, and our kids would still be working on it. So the point is to prioritize the areas that are the really acute points of failure, the highest risk areas, and work out from there.

Our government, and the federal government has been providing funding for that work. I know that the need dwarfs what we can reasonably do, but we have made progress on those particularly urgent areas, and we’re going to continue to focus on prevention where we can to mitigate some of these impacts.

Black Press:

The weather is getting increasingly more volatile, whether it’s through atmospheric rivers, heat domes, so on, and many of our industries are very dependent on temperate or at least moderated climates, so what can be done to mitigate or support those industries that are getting really hit by this?

Eby:

I think there’s a whole lot of unpredictability for business and industry right now. It’s definitely climate-related, in terms of just dramatic weather shifts. We talk about the tourist season here in the Okanagan, we talk about going to Big White to go skiing and the snow that’s gonna be there or not, and all these other weather-dependent industries, but also the instability around the input costs for businesses, the tariffs, all these other pieces.

The crucial piece for us is responding to the challenges that businesses face and trying our best to partner with them to ensure that they’re able to withstand the temporary pressures for the long term, and the long-term pressures to be able to restructure how they’re operating.

By way of example, forestry has been hit really hard by forest fire climate impacts, pine beetle climate impacts, tariff war impacts; some of these things we hope are temporary or manageable through diversifying business, so supporting them with equipment to be able to turn the trees that are available into more jobs, or supporting them with access to new markets like the work we’ve been doing with India to get rid of the tariff on BC wood products with the federal government.

We can’t solve all of the problems, but there are steps that we can take to strengthen our businesses, and where we can do that, we are doing that.

Black Press:

What the wildfire here really emphasized and brought home again after previous years is the need for communities to have multiple travel routes in an emergency. I know some people have been calling for the [Forest Road] 201 to be paved. Other people have talked about connecting Garnet Valley up to the [Highway 97] Connector as a bypass route. Is there appetite to look at providing these alternate routes for communities, so that they aren’t cut off in the case of an emergency?

Eby:

One of the things about having an MLA, for Penticton Summerland, is that we’ve heard that advocacy around, for example, the 201 loud and clear in ways that we haven’t before. Amelia [Boultbee], when she crossed over, this was one of her big issues she was pushing us on, and Tina coming in, is another champion for us to pave that road and ensure that people have that access.

This is why it matters to have a local MLA in the government and not fighting culture wars but instead prioritizing the needs of local communities. We are in fact, looking at how we can move on paving roads and getting access for people in the region because of that advocacy, and I’m grateful that we have those voices from this area that are helping us understand what the issues are that people face on a day-to-day basis.