The Castlegar & District Chamber of Commerce will be hosting an all candidates forum for the federal election on Monday, October 5 at the Sandman Hotel from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
All four candidates from the major parties—Connie Denesiuk for the Liberals, Richard Cannings for the NDP, Marshall Neufeld for the Conservatives, and Samantha Troy for the Green party—have confirmed that they will be attending.
“We will be using a format that has been widely used throughout the province, and we've been using in our last few all candidates forums,” says Tammy Verigin-Burk, executive director of the Chamber. “That is where questions will be written down from the audience and they will be collected into a container, and the questions will be sorted through, and as they come out of the box, they will be randomly picked.”
Providing a question meets the guidelines of the all candidates forum—it is not deemed “inappropriate, offensive or derogatory”—it will be added to the queue of questions to ask the candidates.
Verigin-Burk says the reason the Chamber has chosen to go with this format is because “it's been a tried and tested format throughout the province that we've had great success with because in our last all candidates forum we tripled the amount of questions that were asked from the audience.”
While members of the audience can't stand up to ask their questions at the mike, this format ensures that more audience questions get asked, and that attendees hear more from the candidates.
In addition to answering questions, each candidate will have three rebuttal cards to use throughout the night, and will of course have time for an opening statement.