Thursday, October 2, 2008

Federal Candidates Question and Answer

We at South Fraser OnTrax sent requests to all the Langley federal candidates asking them two simple questions: What will your party do to improve public transportation in the South of Fraser Region? Will your government support the restoration of the Interurban Rail Line? As you are well aware the federal government does not have jurisdiction on public transit in Canada, but it does have the ability to contribute money and deal with related federal infrastructure. We will be posting the responses in the order in which we received them.

Today we wanted to inform you that we won’t be receiving a response from the Conservative Party candidate and Langley MP, Mark Warawa. He told us that they have a policy of not responding to questions unless it is major media outlet or local media like the Langley Times or Langley Advance. He also added that he does not read blogs and apparently does not view them as legitimate media or a place for constituents to find helpful information.

Our first response will be from Liberal Candidate Jake Gray.

2 comments:

Joe Zaccaria said...

I spoke with MP Warawa about this project at the debate last night and was the one that received his reply. I would like to express my disappointment that MP Warawa does not appear to value our local community service organizations that are giving massive amounts of their personal time, resources,and money to our community. In this age of information technology it saddens me to see that a leader would fail to recognize the value of grass-roots local news gathering and dissemination.

South Fraser OnTrax started in mid-April of 2008 and we already have over 60 people that voluntarily signed up for our mailing list and approximately 1200 people per week read this blog. On behalf of our loyal members, readers and myself, I am very disappointed in the fact that our current elected federal official's response cannot be posted here and that the official policy does not value a free and democratic local press.

Light Rail Guy said...

Why should Warawa care, he flies Business Class weekly on the taxpayer's dime. Until MP's and MLA's pay for their transit out of their own pockets, nothing will change.