Bowinn Ma Quotes

I want to sincerely thank everyone who has reached out to encourage me to enter the leadership race. I've been humbled and overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to pledge their support; your faith in me means more than I have the words to describe. Politics is a weird and often frustrating arena to work in. What keeps me centred, grounded, and *going* is being able to spend time face-to-face with the people of our North Vancouver community. With everything that keeps me busy as an MLA and Minister of State, I really cherish the limited time I have to connect with and directly serve local community members. I know that being Premier isn't for me. I've been speaking with David Eby. He's a person of great integrity and someone that I've respected and admired since before I was elected. I've made my priorities around action on climate very clear to Dave. I believe that he can lead our province into a thriving future and will support him if he runs.

Here's the thing: I'm not in politics to play games. I try to be thoughtful about when, where, how I express myself, but I'm obstinate on some issues; even recalcitrant at times. So I want to be up front to whoever becomes our new leader about what they can expect from me. When I envision a hopeful future, I see a sunset to the fossil fuel industry; complete, walkable & bikable communities connected by mass transit throughout the province; universal housing for everyone who needs it; families who don’t have to worry about their kids’ futures. For a future everyone can thrive in, we need to act on #ClimateChange as a Grand Challenge of our time. As important as it is to cool people down, put out fires, rebuild infrastructure, it's also not enough. We have to prevent these catastrophes from occurring to begin with. I want a leader who believes that addressing the #ClimateEmergency is a moral imperative; who will take an unambiguous stance against the expansion of fossil fuel extraction, including LNG, and end measures designed to incentivize the industry. I'm really worried about the serious environmental, social, and economic impacts of car dependency and believe that we can't afford to further entrench it. I’ll be pushing you for legislative reform and increased investments to make 🚍🚶🚴🧑‍🦽 truly viable choices for people. Expect me to be outspoken at the tables you appoint me to. Know that I hate bullshit and being pushed around. We need to be unafraid of facing down established power, especially when the stakes are high. Let's challenge the failures of capitalism with public solutions.

British Columbia has experienced an extreme weather event and we are seeing the impacts of the climate emergency in real-time. Although the atmospheric river has now passed, floods and mudslides continue to impact safe travel throughout the province.

Climate change is real. Climate change is deadly. Climate change is here. The changes we must make to address this crisis will at times be as difficult and uncomfortable as they are necessary. It won't be easy, but I've found reasons to be hopeful. People are demanding more to be done and pushing govts (incl ours) to deliver that change...

Right now, the region is more interested in looking at options for rapid transit than they are for more lanes on those bridges, especially given that our local road networks can't quite handle more volume of traffic. People on the North Shore want choice.

Sad and disappointed to see campaigns underway to cancel supportive housing for vulnerable women and their children. I know that #NorthVan is more compassionate than this. Join me building support for this project: https://letstalkhousingbc.ca/north-vancouver-west-16

Do not despair, my dear friends; instead, let us redouble our commitment to life beyond the pandemic in the actions we must take today.

Votes are not owned, they're earned. And I will continue to work hard every single day for as long as I have the honour of serving North Vancouver-Lonsdale to deserve their support.

Campaigns are normally very, very social. Politics is absolutely a team sport. And doing all of these campaign activities from separate homes and not being able to gather … it’s far more challenging to feed off each other's energy, even on the Zoom call.

Young women deserve a province that encourages them to take on leadership roles without fear of sexism. If we want more young women, and more people of colour to enter politics, we must commit to creating environments that respect that.

As a woman who has worked in male-dominated industries my entire life so far, I am sadly no stranger to casual sexism. Like many women in these situations, I found myself making choices about the way that I act, dress, or carry myself to avoid having sexist interpretations read into my interactions – interactions such as, for instance, deliberately speaking closely with an elder who is very hard of hearing. It is a burden that women should not have to bear while they are simply trying to live their lives and do their jobs. The video of BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson watching on as a multi-term BC Liberal North Shore MLA sexualized my interactions with another multi-term BC Liberal North Shore MLA is a deeply uncomfortable characterization of my efforts to extend kindness across partisan lines. However, this is not about me. Young women deserve a province that encourages them to take on leadership roles without fear of sexism. If we want more young women and people of colour to enter politics, we must commit to creating environments that respect them. The comments and reactions in that video do the exact opposite.

The choice we made to support TransLink in ensuring that public transit service is available to people as we restart will play a critical role in supporting the workforce as they return to work. Our government’s steadfast commitment as a funding partner in the Mayors’ Council’s 10-Year Vision, the largest transit investment in history, will result in continued transit improvements throughout the region, making life better for everyone.

As the Parliamentary Secretary for TransLink, I have the privilege of supporting a government and an organization committed to public transit. As a public transit and SeaBus user myself, I love encouraging people to take and support environmentally and socially responsible modes of transportation. Public transit is good for urban mobility and good for people—health-wise, mobility-wise, and to enable strong economic and social justice through the reduction of inequality by providing mobility to all.

I come from a generation…. I’m a millennial, an elder millennial, probably on the earlier end, in terms of the years that millennials are considered to be millennials. I remember when we, as a generation, sounded the alarm on intergenerational inequality — not just financial inequality, not just on wealth and income, but also on climate and the environment. As a generation, we were told to shut up. We were called “lazy, entitled, naive.” We were told to stop whining, to go get a job. “Come back to the table when you have more experience. Then talk to us about what’s going on. Go out and work really hard, and stop being lazy. Give up your avocado toast and your lattes, and then everything will be fine.” You know what? That’s what we did. We went out, we got jobs, and we put our concerns aside for a while. We lived in smaller homes, rode our bikes, took public transit, composted and recycled, and it didn’t fix the problem. It did not fix the problem, and now we are back. But this time, we won’t stay silent, and you can’t get rid of us. We are in your workforce. We are in your streets. We are supporting people who are even younger than us and encouraging them to speak up, not sit down. We are also in your city councils, and yes, we are in your legislatures. Not that many of us, mind you. Out of 87 MLAs in the B.C. Legislature, only three of us are millennials, despite making up the largest voting bloc today. We make up only less than 3.5 percent of the people who sit in this House and make laws for future generations.

Our economic and financial system is captured by the fossil fuel industry, and I say this extremely seriously. It’s not just B.C. We see it across Canada. Canada was economically built on resource extraction. I think that it’s important to acknowledge that, and it’s important to respect and be grateful for what resource extraction has done for our country and be grateful for what petroleum products have brought to civilization. But just because we have come from a place where fossil fuels have been embedded into our economic and financial system doesn’t mean that we need to continue forward in that way. We have to transition. We have seen…. I have seen in my time as an MLA here how captured our entire system is by this industry, how it influences the way that individuals see their options for prosperity in certain parts of the country. We have seen the way that it limits the kinds of choices that governments feel like they can make. I have learned about how many wars, how many regime changes, how many sanctions have been placed on countries around the world, based on whether or not they will or won’t play ball in terms of fossil fuel and gas and petroleum exports — in particular, with the United States. This is something that we all need to grapple with as we go forward into actually meeting our climate targets, because it’s not just about emissions. Emissions on their own won’t release us from the grasp of the fossil fuel industry.