Retired school counsellor Bill Forst is the new NDP candidate in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country.
Currently the president of the NDP riding association, Forst became the NDP candidate after Dana Larsen stepped down suddenly, on Sept. 17. Larsen’s past involvement with the B.C. Marijuana Party and old videos available on the Internet showing him taking drugs and driving led to his resignation.
The NDP riding association responded quickly, holding a new nomination meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 19. Forst, 59, was selected as Larsen’s replacement and started his campaign over the weekend.
A resident of Gibsons for the past 35 years, Forst is a former president of the Sunshine Coast Teachers Association and B.C. School Counsellors Association, and an active member of the arts community.
He wasted no time in attacking Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party for, in his view, favouring tax cuts and giveaways to corporations over average Canadians — a plank from the “boardroom tables to kitchen tables” platform that has been Jack Layton’s catchphrase throughout the campaign. Forst’s personal issues include child care, the cost of post-secondary education, and reversing almost $60 million in federal support that was cut from arts and culture funding.
“(Arts) is absolutely a big issue for me because I’m very involved with it and familiar with it. But my biggest issue since I joined the party has been the environment, and the success that Jack Layton and the NDP have had,” said Forst.
While he acknowledges that he’s at a bit of a disadvantage entering the campaign two weeks late, he says he has family and business connections in all of the communities in the riding that have allowed him to get up to speed.
One theme that has emerged so far in the campaign is leadership.
“You have to have strong leadership and… I have no doubt whatsoever that people think that leadership should come from Jack Layton, and not Stephen Harper. It’s not coming from (Liberal leader) Stephane Dion, who has had one and a half years to provide an effective opposition to the Conservative Party but sat on their hands on 44 confidence motions. There is no opposition from the official opposition.”
Meanwhile, former candidate Larsen made no secret of his views on drugs and drug laws, as a founder of the B.C. Marijuana Party, founder of End Prohibition, and both founder and former manager of the Vancouver Seed Bank — a store that sells, among other things, marijuana seeds, opium poppy seeds, peyote, Peruvian coca plant, and other psychoactive plants.
In the end, however, it proved too much for his campaign.
Last week the activities of Vancouver Seed Bank — namely selling coca plant seeds — were brought to light, as were old videos posted online that show Larsen smoking marijuana, taking hallucinogenic drugs and driving after consuming DMT (dimethyltryptamine).
“Clearly it was a hit job,” Larsen said, suggesting that the revelations were timed specifically to derail his campaign. “It’s not that there was anything secret about this stuff — at least to anybody who knows me.
“The videos were 10 years old, although I still stand by most of the stuff… but maybe I was naïve to think I could get through an election campaign without this stuff coming forward.”
Once it was out, he said it would be impossible to go on as a candidate.
“I stepped aside for the good of the party and for the good of the national campaign,” he said. “I’m willing to defend what was in the video or my past and to explain my reasons, but in the end I didn’t want Jack Layton to have to answer questions about what one of his candidates did 10 years ago. I didn’t want to divert focus from the national platform, so I took one for the team in that sense.”
Larsen had been the NDP candidate for the riding since April of 2007. He says he has been honest from the beginning about his own drug use, and his goal to legalize or decriminalize drug use and to treat addicts as health care cases rather than criminals.
Larsen did make some appearances on television and spoke to reporters about his decision to resign, but said he has since turned down several requests for interviews to make the story “go away.”
“I want Jack Layton to be Prime Minister, and I don’t want to screw this up for him or for any of the other candidates. It’s an important election, there are some real issues, and this is a distraction,” said Larsen.
Larsen ran three times to be selected as the NDP candidate, and hasn’t ruled out running again in the future.
“Maybe in another four years, when those videos are 14 years old, and hopefully nobody will care anymore,” he said. “It was a happy 11 days (of campaigning), and maybe next time I’ll get all the way through 40 days. This time it’s best to step back, regretfully.”
Given the statistics on drug use, Larsen says most Canadians, including MPs from all parties, have probably experimented with drugs at some point in their lives, or have friends or family who have used drugs. He finds it interesting — and hypocritical — that politicians are publicly held to a higher standard than most citizens, and wants an open and honest debate about drug laws and culture.
“While I’m always ready to talk about these issues, and my reasons for supporting alternative drug policies, the middle of a campaign is not the time you want to be clarifying things or getting into the subtleties,” he said.
Larsen was the first of three NDP candidates to step down. On Tuesday, Saanich-Gulf Islands candidate Julian West stepped down after a report surfaced that West skinny-dipped in front of teenagers at an environmental retreat 12 years ago. No complaint was ever made, and police did not lay charges.
Kirk Tousaw, the NDP candidate for Vancouver-Quadra, also resigned last week as a result of the same Pot.tv videos that brought down Larsen.
