Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 21:38:51 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [KCUTS] We'll miss you, Corky
From: "Moe" <meadow@netidea.com>
Always colourful Corky Evans won't run again
By Charlie Smith
NDP Leader Carole James issued a statement this morning saying that
veteran Nelson-Creston MLA Corky Evans will not seek reelection.
The colourful former horse logger was first elected in 1991 and was
returned to the legislature in 1996. He lost in 2001 but was back again
after the 2005 election.
“I have often been exasperated with the tendency of modern politicians to
try to tell the people what they think the people want to hear, instead of
telling them what they believe in," Evans told the Straight in 1996
shortly before he entered the NDP leadership race.
He lost to Glen Clark. Evans ran again for NDP leader in 2000, losing to
Ujjal Dosanjh.
Evans also said in 1996 that his major goal in B.C. politics was to
achieve tenure reform, which would open up access to lumber to smaller
wod-products manufacturers. He didn't succeed.
However, as B.C.'s agriculture minister during the Glen Clark era, he
oversaw a revival of farming and booming growth in the Okanagan wine
industry.
He found himself caught up in controversy, however, when his government
supported the removal of land at the Six Mile Ranch near Kamloops from the
Agricultural Land Reserve.
Evans had a long-running battle with environmentalist Colleen McCrory over
the government's forest policies. McCrory, who died last year, ran against
him in the 2001 election for the Green party in one of the most colourful
contests of the campaign.
Evans was one of the few B.C. politicians of the modern era with the guts
to criticize big media. In a letter in a party newspaper in 2000, Evans
wrote that he put away his television set and no longer reads the
“monopoly press”.
“I quit watching television in the first mandate when Mike Harcourt
dedicated $250,000,000 to the people of South Eastern B.C. to finally deal
with the Columbia River Treaty and we couldn’t get such historic ‘news’ on
television,” Evans wrote. “I quit reading the newspapers when I realized
the Press Gallery wouldn’t walk 100 meters to listen to farmers unless
they were bribed with free liquor and wouldn’t print a story anyway unless
the farmers would agree to attack the government.”
Evans also described the B.C. Liberal Party as a “wholly owned subsidiary
of the BC Business Council”.
--
Food is the rare moral arena in which the choice that's best for the world
and best for your community is also the best on your table.
- Barbara Kingsolver
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