Former Mission, B.C. mayor named province’s ag minister

Pam Alexis handling agriculture; Lana Popham moves to tourism file

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Published: December 9, 2022

Abbotsford-Mission MLA Pam Alexis speaks on B.C. Agriculture Day in the provincial legislature on Oct. 25, 2022. (Legislative Assembly Of B.C. video screengrab via Facebook)

A rookie MLA and former city mayor from British Columbia’s farming-rich Fraser Valley has been named as the province’s new minister of agriculture and food.

Premier David Eby, who assumed the post last month following John Horgan’s resignation, on Wednesday shuffled the provincial cabinet and named Abbotsford-Mission MLA Pam Alexis to handle the ag and food portfolio.

As ag minister, Alexis replaces Saanich South MLA Lana Popham, who had handled the file since 2017. Popham was shuffled Wednesday to the tourism, arts, culture and sport file.

Read Also

Alberta Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation RJ Sigurdson does the ceremonial fire up of Farming Smarter’s new tractor it was able to purchase with the help of the province’s one-time capital grant of $3.2 million to Alberta’s 12 applied research associations. The boost to Farming Smarter’s equipment for potato research helps with the association’s operating costs as a non-profit association. Photo: Greg Price

Farming Smarter receives financial boost from Alberta government for potato research

Farming Smarter near Lethbridge got a boost to its research equipment, thanks to the Alberta government’s increase in funding for research associations.

A teacher by profession, Alexis has previously served as a vice-president for the Mission Chamber of Commerce and for the B.C. Winter Games. After a stint as a school trustee (2005-11), she served as a councilor (2014-18) and mayor (2018-20) for the city of Mission.

She moved into provincial politics with the 2020 election, in which she unseated Liberal incumbent Simon Gibson, whose party had held the Abbotsford-Mission riding since its formation in 2009.

“I am thrilled to get started, rolling up my sleeves now,” Alexis, a first-time cabinet minister, said Wednesday on Facebook, adding that having an agriculture minister in the Fraser Valley “will resonate with local residents.”

Relative to its land base, the Fraser Valley plays a significantly outsized role in B.C. agriculture, representing almost a third of the province’s farms and over a third of the province’s gross farm receipts. It also has over a third of the province’s poultry and egg farms and over half of the province’s dairy farms.

Eby’s other cabinet appointments of interest to farmers include:

  • North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma, leading a new ministry of emergency management and climate readiness;
  • Vancouver-Fairview MLA George Heyman, returning as minister for environment and climate change strategy;
  • Surrey-Fleetwood MLA Jagrup Brar, as minister of state for trade;
  • Stikine MLA Nathan Cullen, formerly minister of state for lands and natural resource operations, now minister of water, land and resource stewardship (fisheries);
  • Parksville-Qualicum MLA and farmer/businessman Adam Walker, formerly parliamentary secretary for the new economy, now parliamentary secretary for sustainable economy; and
  • Boundary-Similkameen MLA Roly Russell, returning as parliamentary secretary for rural development.

B.C.’s ag sector, and the Fraser Valley’s in particular, is still recovering from last fall’s destructive floods, which Eby, in his mandate letter to Alexis on Wednesday, described as the largest agricultural disaster in the province’s history.

The province — and again, the Fraser Valley in particular — has also been battered by outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza in its poultry and egg sectors this year.

The province has seen 75 outbreaks of high-path avian flu in domestic birds (poultry and non-poultry) so far in 2022, affecting an estimated 1.18 million birds in total. That count includes 46 outbreaks on commercial poultry operations in the past four weeks alone.

Eby’s mandate letter to Alexis calls for her to continue to work on recommendations of the provincial Food Security Task Force to “make B.C. a leader in agricultural innovation, resilience and food security in the face of emerging challenges of supply chain disruption, global inflation, rising costs and the impacts of climate change.”

The letter also calls for her to “support the resilience of B.C.’s food system through an emergency preparedness strategy for food security,” working with the emergency management and climate readiness ministry.

It also calls on Alexis to “work with industry to identify agricultural best practices that reduce carbon pollution and support their adoption across the sector.” — Glacier FarmMedia Network

About the author

Dave Bedard

Dave Bedard

Editor, Grainews

Farm-raised in northeastern Saskatchewan. B.A. Journalism 1991. Local newspaper reporter in Saskatchewan turned editor and farm writer in Winnipeg. (Life story edited by author for time and space.)

explore

Stories from our other publications