Current Article ∙ Archive ∙ Back to Island Voices

Adam Olsen

Adam was born in Victoria, BC and raised on Tsartlip First Nation in Brentwood Bay, BC.

First elected to Central Saanich Council in 2008, Adam was the first, First Nations Councillor elected in the District. He was re-elected for a second term in 2011 until he resigned his seat on January 21st to run provincially in Saanich North and the Islands. Saanich North & the Islands was the most exciting riding to watch in the May 2013 election ending in the closest race in the Province with three candidates getting over 10,000 votes and only 379 votes separated the eventual winner and Adam’s third place finish.

Adam also consults in First Nation housing and owns a small business, Salish Fusion Knitwear with his mother Sylvia and sister Joni. He has been married to Emily since 2006 and they have two small children — Silas and Ella.

Adam was appointed the interim leader of the BC Greens on August 25, 2013.

Current Article: May 2014

Deregulating the environment is bad for the economy

“If we want to do what the big polluters and their indentured servants in Ottawa or Washington DC want us to do, which is treat the planet as if it was a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity and make a few people billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us, we generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy but our children are going to pay for our joy ride and they are going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge clean up costs that are going to amplify over time and they will never be able to pay.”

-Robert Kennedy Jr, GLOBE 2014 Conference, March 26, 2014

In this session of the British Columbia Legislature, the BC Liberals have introduced environmental deregulation that previous governments would never have considered.

They launched a full attack on the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) and changed the BC Parks Act to allow feasibility studies for transmission lines, roads, pipelines, telecommunications or “a prescribed project or a project in prescribed class of projects.”

Provincial revenues fall as the government slashes corporate tax rates and provide subsidies so their donors can (as Kennedy said) “externalize the cost of production” on the backs of tax/ratepayers. Continue