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North Shore business leader and philanthropist Yuri Fulmer has joined the provincial election race in West Vancouver-Sea to Sky as the Conservative candidate.

Fulmer, 50, a prominent businessman and founder of Fulmer & Co., is also and is known for his community and philanthropic work including his role as chairman of the worldwide United Way charity and co-chair of Vancouver’s Honda Celebration of Light.

Fulmer is also the recipient of the Order of British Columbia and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, among others.

He announced his nomination as the Conservative candidate for the riding Monday.

Fulmer said up to now, politics hasn’t been on his agenda, but “to be honest I felt a need to do it,” he said. “I just feel our province is at a point where we need to correct the path we’re on.”

“We’re running a huge deficit. We’ve got a health care system in crisis. We’ve got an education system that’s no longer the example for the rest of the world that it once was,” he said.

Fulmer has previously been a member of the Conservative Party of Canada and the B.C. Liberal Party. He said he was only a member of the B.C. Conservatives for about 48 hours before being nominated.

“I’m a big believer in [Conservative leader] John Rustad. I think he’s a pragmatic guy. I think he’s a straight shooter,” he said. “I have a lot of confidence in his leadership.”

Fulmer lives with his family in West Vancouver, just outside the boundary of the riding (which was moved further west following the last provincial election).

“It’s a fascinating riding,” he said, noting that the concerns he’s heard are different depending on the community. People in Whistler/Pemberton are worried about wildfires, he said, while availability of housing tops the list in Squamish, and West Vancouver residents are concerned about issues like their taxes rising to pay for Metro Vancouver’s North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant.

“It’s a big riding with very different communities,” he said.

Riding one to watch

Fulmer’s candidacy adds a new twist to a riding already considered one of the more interesting ones to watch.

B.C. United MLA Jordan Sturdy has announced he will not seek re-election after narrowly hanging on to his seat last time, squeaking out a win over second-place finisher Jeremy Valeriote of the Green Party. Valeriote is running again for the Greens, while Whistler councillor Jen Ford has been nominated for the NDP. BC United has not yet named a candidate.

On Monday, Valeriote put out a statement welcoming Fulmer to the race but questioning why “he’s chosen to run for a party of climate change deniers who are deploying U.S.-style culture war politics, including transphobic and homophobic rhetoric.”

Gerald Baier, a UBC political scientist, said the West Vancouver-Sea to Sky riding will be one to watch, with potential vote splitting between both the NDP and Greens, and the BC Conservatives and BC United, if that party nominates a candidate to replace Sturdy. Some of that could also depend on name recognition of various candidates in different parts of the riding, he added.

Another change potentially impacting results in a close race are the redrawn riding boundaries which moved a chunk of West Vancouver east of 28th Street – including Altamont, West Bay and Westmount – to the West Vancouver-Capilano riding.

The change moved about 3,650 West Vancouver residents into the adjacent riding.

Conservative Jaclyn Aubichon nominated in West Van-Capilano

Another Conservative candidate has also recently been nominated on the North Shore, in the West Vancouver-Capilano riding.

Jaclyn Aubichon, a mom of three young children who moved from Alberta to B.C. in 2019, has been nominated as the Conservative candidate in that riding. She joins political commentator Caroline Elliott who is running for BC United and nurse practitioner Sara Eftekhar who is running for the NDP.