2025 Federal Election candidate interviews — Teri Westerby (NDP)

For the 2025 federal election, we asked each of Canada’s major parties* to connect us to a local candidate to talk about their policies and offer their perspective on issues of relevance to voters in the Fraser Valley’s five ridings between Langley and Hope.

We spoke to Brad Vis (Conservative, Mission—Matsqui—Abbotsford), John Aldag (Liberal, Langley Township—Fraser Heights), Teri Westerby (NDP, Chilliwack—Hope), and Melissa Snazell (Green, Abbotsford—South Langley).

We asked each candidate questions pertaining to their party’s specific policies and approach to voters. Each candidate was also asked: whether Canadians should boycott American products, their response to calls for federal funding to protect Sumas Prairie, how they reconciled their positions on resource development with the desire to respect First Nations’ traditional territory, and why they personally are running for office.

The Fraser Valley has one riding (Abbotsford—South Langley) in which the presence of a strong independent candidate creates a unique voting dynamic. We have invited every candidate from the riding for an interview. Watch for those later this week.

Below, you can watch our interview with NDP candidate Teri Westerby—or read the transcript.

You can find our interviews with candidates from the other major parties here:

John Aldag (Liberals) | Melissa Snazell (Greens) | Brad Vis (Conservatives)

*In inviting a candidate from the Green Party, we took our lead from the commission overseeing Canada’s federal debates, which defined a major party as one that held at least one seat in Parliament and was running candidates in 90% of ridings. After we had invited candidates, the commission rescinded its debate invitation to the Greens. We decided to proceed with our interview.

Check out our election hubs for more information on the candidates, the parties, and how to cast a ballot on Monday, April 28: Chilliwack & the Eastern Fraser Valley | Abbotsford & Mission | Langley

Transcripts of interviews have been lightly edited for clarity and concision. If you notice an error, email us.

Teri Westerby (NDP) | Chilliwack—Hope

FVC: Tell me why you are running for the NDP.

Westerby: I’m running with the NDP for this upcoming election because I knew I needed to take the opportunity that was presented to get the progressive voice out there and to amplify what I’ve been hearing every day for the last two to five years, being so heavily involved in this community. And that’s that we are being left behind and we’re being left alone by our leadership, especially in the federal sense. We are not getting investments, we are not being stood up for, and our voice is not being lifted up.

Besides that, we have a message of unity and solidarity here in Chilliwack—Hope. We are tired of the division and we are tired of our federal leaders not standing up for what is right and for progress. And I knew that the only way that we were going to raise our voices up and say we’re not letting Canada slip to a more regressive state. We’re going to fight for our progress, we’re going to fight for our rights, we’re going to fight for our freedom and we’re going to fight for our country. We’re going to do that together on the political side and we’re going to do that with the NDP. Because that’s what the NDP have always done. They stood up for the people. It's been a very grassroots campaign here for us, and that's the way we like it, because this is a people's movement, and the people are coming to make change, and we're doing it together.

Housing

FVC: One of the major issues for the last four or five years all across the country has been housing affordability. The NDP, like all the parties, have variety of things they say that they can change to improve housing affordability. The NDP is very focused on, but not exclusively focused on, increasing social housing, increasing housing built by the federal government. Can we be confident that will create the scale necessary to actually deal with this problem?

Westerby: This is an extremely complex problem, and it has been worsened by the privatization of housing, and now we see corporations buying up housing and rental housing and that kind of concentration—of corporations buying up the essential services that Canadians need to live—not just housing, but we see it in their buying up farmland, and they're buying and capitalizing our food and making tons of profit off of our everyday lives, and we see that with housing.

So we understand that building more homes doesn't necessarily mean cheaper homes and doesn't mean affordable rent. The only way to make that happen is to control the market with regulations or creating non-market housing, like co-ops or housing that is specifically only for low-income renting and for maintaining a control of the market.

It's essentially creating or undermining the monopoly of the private housing sector—undermining is not the right word—but working alongside the private sector to provide housing that's accessible and affordable for those who who aren't able to invest in a house because it's extremely out of reach for very many people. Having more housing that costs a million dollars or half a million dollars isn't going to help somebody who can't afford a down payment.

So we need to make non-market co-op housing and other creative solutions that this community knows it needs and lend strength to the community here, who knows what to build and what we need and how it will work, rather than just coming down with top-down solutions and saying, ‘This is what you need in Chilliwack’ when it might not be.

So what we need is a leader who will say we need a diverse array of housing options that control the rent and control the housing prices, so that those who are invested in housing still have opportunities to make some money, but those who can't get into housing can still have a place to live and aren't forced out of their own community.

FVC: The NDP plan talks about cutting development cost charges, which many housing advocates say is needed because those charges add to the price of housing. But those charges are also used to pay for the infrastructure that cities need to build to accommodate that new housing. So if the federal government is saying to cities you need to cut those development cost charges, where's the money going come from to pay for that infrastructure?

Westerby: I agree that sometimes we rob Peter to pay Paul. So it's always people who are left holding the bag, and they're like, ‘Who's downloading the cost on the who?’

Again, these are very complex issues, and there's a lot of ways that we can invest in housing and invest in lowering costs for builders or developers. But I think what matters is that Canadian products are being used, and that would help reduce the price by not over-complicating our imports and exports, where we produce some stuff here, and then we export it out, and then we pay like double to bring it in.

The plan is to streamline trade and help provinces trade with each other, so that we're cutting costs that way, and not allowing the tariffs [to increase] the cost of building and also the cost of living. The ultimate plan is to tax the people who make the profit off of us. So if you're making money off of housing as a corporation, and you're making more than $10 million as an individual off of the dividends, the money you're making off of the profit of our communities should come back into our communities, and we can do that through targeted tax dollars.

So people who have pay their fair share, and that's basically it. Because you nailed it when you said, ‘If it's not the developers who are paying it, then who's paying it?’ We need infrastructure when we move into these houses. It's not the individual who can make that decision. It's us as a whole. We have to work together. So if you're siphoning money out of our community and you're not paying it back, then we're left holding the bag. So we need to find a way to return the profits back into the community, the people who live here, because when we all have what we need, we rise together.

FVC: Can you incentivize housing, though, at the same time that you're saying you're going to potentially increase taxes on people who build houses?

Westerby: Not so much on the people who build the houses, but if you're making over $10 million in income, and we raise the tax a little bit, a couple of percentage points, that would raise more than enough money to reinvest back in our communities, and it wouldn't put the cost on either developer or the purchaser.

Sumas Prairie and the Nooksack River

FVC: I want to move to some of the things we've seen locally with the natural disasters, flooding and landslides and wildfires we've seen in the area. First on the flooding, would the NDP support paying the roughly $2 billion that the City of Abbotsford has asked for to pay for a new Sumas Prairie pump station and dike system?

Westerby: My understanding of the way NDP operates is that if a community needs something, especially in the way of prevention of further disaster and mitigation of extraordinary damage that costs way more to clean up than it does to prevent, we are going to make wise and strategic investments into communities when and where people are asking for, and when and where they need it. We're not just going to ignore them and say, ‘Oh, sorry.’

You know we're not the major party, so that's on them. That's not what our leadership is about. It's about going in and saying, ‘The people of Chilliwack—Hope are desperately asking for a pump station, because if we don't have it, and we don't have it now, we're going to see another flood. We're going to see millions of dollars in damage to Highway 1, we're going to see prevention of imports into our community, and we're going to see jobs disrupted. It's going to cost us way more money.’ So we need to make these investments now, and the NDP and I will always fight for that, because that's the right thing to do.

FVC: Can that have any impact, though, because the NDP has been a a supporting partner of the Liberals ever since 2021, and the federal government hasn't committed to that funding yet?

Westerby: I don't like to talk negatively, but I'm going to speak about the education and the history, and try not to knock on the previous current leaders, but I do need to highlight the fact that I think a lot of the rhetoric we hear about NDP propping up Liberals is Conservative-speak.

The reality is the NDP were the unofficial party that held the Liberals to account and actually pushed them to do what Canadians need. So the unofficial opposition, if you will. What I see over the last 10 years is not us propping up the Liberals, but us making the Liberals do what we know needs to get done, like dental care, pharmacare. And we didn't win all the way, but that's why we have to keep fighting.

What we've seen from the Conservatives is that Pierre Poilievre is telling his MPs, ‘You do not work across the aisle, you do not work with any Liberal or anyone in the NDP, and that's why we've had 10 years of inaction: because two major parties is not going to serve small communities like Chilliwack—Hope. Only the NDP can have MPs that can talk to anybody and make it happen. And that's why we need to have an NDP MP here.

The power of the NDP

FVC: It sounds like the NDP wants to have it both ways a little bit [with] the party saying, ‘If you give us enough seats, we can use those seats to push for important policies and things we feel are needed.’ At the same time, they've had those seats for the last four years, and we've seen what has happened. And for some people, that's enough, and for some people that's not enough. So how would voting NDP create any more change than we've seen for the last four years?

Westerby: The way I look at it is I can only imagine how our country would be right now if it wasn't for those small but mighty NDP team. Because we wouldn't have dental care for seniors and kids, we wouldn't have pharmacare, we wouldn't have cheaper pharmaceuticals for people who need blood pressure medication; having to choose between pills and bills is life sentence that you're asking for yourself.

Even with CERB, I myself was laid off and if I didn't have the full $2,000 CERB, I would have eaten through my savings and had to go back to work and risk myself and my community's lives sooner. Remember, thousands of people died from COVID, and if it wasn't for that action from the NDP to push the Liberals to get more CERB and more dental care coverage and more pharmaceutical coverage, we probably would be in much worse off spot than we are today.

So the way I look at it is we're small, but we are mighty because of the way we're structured. And if the Liberals have a full majority, and the Conservatives are the opposition, and there aren't very many diverse seats in there by the NDP, there are no strong left voices saying, ‘Please protect trans kids, please protect our rights, please stop the Conservatives from running roughshod over our Constitution and our freedoms.’

And right now, we see the Liberals moving more center, they've already dropped the Women and Gender Equity Minister from the cabinet, and I'm just scared to see what they do when they become a majority. So if it isn't for somebody like me and a strong NDP, free MP, who's able to stand up in Ottawa and say, ‘Liberals, you need to stand up for our beliefs and to make this a more unified country that stands in solidarity with each other and our needs,’ then I don't know what the future is going to look like without our voices there.

Health care

FVC: We'll move on to health care: many of the NDP promises revolve around the need to recruit more health care workers, which is a nationwide problem, I don't think there's much dispute about that. But in the Fraser Valley, many of the health care issues we've seen date back a decade to before we had such a health care worker shortage. What would the NDP do to reduce crowding in hospitals beyond just recruiting more health care workers?

Westerby: We just need to continue putting our money where we know it needs support in our communities, and not just target giant cities. Especially in rural and remote areas like Chilliwack and Hope and Agassiz, we've been seeing a complete lack of investments in the infrastructure, and it's not without attempts by the province and the municipalities to continue to bolster our health care spaces and clinics, but they're doing it without any federal support, because we are always put last because of the situation between the two major parties. And we also have a MP who's locked up by his leader for making real change here and so building not only in our health care workforce, by eliminating—people who are trained from other countries coming into this country and wanting to put their healthcare to work, their medical training to work, that should be done much faster and much easier—but also again, investing in communities to build what's needed, not just top-down approaches where it's like, ‘Oh, you need a hospital, boom,’ and it's like ‘Oh, actually, this community would be far better served with some mobile clinics, because we have a lot of community members that live out in really remote areas, and it actually still takes them an hour to get into town, which is what we see a lot in areas like Boston Bar and Spuzzum.

It would actually maybe be more beneficial to say, ‘Here are some grants in the health care sector so that you can develop something that actually serves your community the way you need and the way you see it, and lift people up and lift up the voices of two of Chilliwack-Hope people who who already know what they're doing and just need more support,

FVC: When you talk about grants, health care is a tricky issue because it's a provincial jurisdiction, but obviously the federal government provides a lot of the money that the provinces use to pay for it—

Westerby: They can also be providing oversight and regulation and assistance. They could be saying, ‘Here, provincial government, is additional funding for rural and remote communities to create community-led solutions that actually help people get what they need, when they need it, where they need it.’

Should Canadians boycott American products?

FVC: Moving onto tariffs and the trade war with the US. A lot of what happens will depend on what the US does, but there's different perspectives that a party or leader, can take in how you respond to what the the Americans do, and each person feels differently about how we should react to that. Do you think Canadians should boycott American products or travel to the US?

Westerby: It's a really tough one because I think about the people of America who didn't vote for the current president and the kind of suffering that they are going to continue to have to face because of the actions of their leader.

I really do struggle with that as somebody who did not vote for the major party and has been suffering underneath their leadership for last 10 years, myself, so it's hard to say, ‘Boycott America, they all are terrible.’ I have friends who live down there. Their families live down there. I know they're good people, and so it's hard to be like ‘They should all be hurt because of his actions.’ I get that reaction, I understand it fully, I'm a human being, and I have negative emotions that I associate with people to try to heal. And we want to try to, more than anything, protect our own country and protect each other in our own communities. But it is this divisive kind of rhetoric that gets us into the same trouble we're in now, and I really worry that we're feeding into Donald Trump's game, especially seeing how he tweets, one thing, says one thing, has one phone call, the stock market goes up and down the next day. It's, ‘Oh, I changed my mind, and nothing even really happened.’

It's all just fun and games for him, but for us, it's our lives and our livelihood. I want our leadership to be more emotionally intelligent about how we navigate someone like Donald Trump, because we've never seen a leader like him before who just comes in and does whatever he wants and says what he wants, manipulates the economy and manipulates major countries, that really watches people die and tweets about it.

So we need to be a lot more wiser and a lot more intelligent in how we handle this going forward. More importantly, I don't think it should have taken Donald Trump's presence for Canada to realize that we have been slowly selling off all of our Canadian assets and privatizing and corporatizing. We've been doing it for the last—I couldn't even know when we've started doing it. We've been doing it since the dawn of Canada, and realistically, we need to be taking back and protecting what is what is ours, not just as Canadians, but as human beings who live here and who plan to live here for the next hundreds of generations; we need to take care of what is ours as if it is going to be ours and our children's forever, not just in economic sense, but in, you know, the environmental sense and in the cultural sense.

So as far as tariffs go, which was the original question, whenever and whenever we have a trading partner who decides to play games with our economy, we should be ready and armed, in a metaphorical sense, to fight back and be protective of what we already have here and say, you know, we don't need you, we've got other friends. So if you don't play ball with us, that's fine. We've got other people. We're just going to live our lives, and when it does happen, we're going to reinvest any and all money raised off those tariffs back into the affected industries, so most people and most communities shouldn't feel anything from our trade because it's not up to them, they're not making the decisions in Ottawa, we are, and it's more important than anything that we protect the people in our communities, our businesses, our farmers who live here and plan to live here forever.

Economic development and reconciliation

FVC: I also wanted to ask you about kind of how you think about the issue of economic development and First Nations’ control over their traditional territories. Every party has policy preferences that could conflict with First Nations’ own desires for their for how they'd like to use it land. The NDP has generally supported, or at least backed, First Nations that say, ‘No, we don't want certain projects on our land, or we don't want pipelines going through our land.’ But there's also instances where there are First Nations that want to create economic development projects that could conflict with environmentalist beliefs or policy preferences. How do you balance that and where do you put the priority when it comes to consulting with and hearing from First Nation communities?

Westerby: Naturally, the NDP have always stood on the side of the truth and—I mean, I don't think it's fair to say always—but the NDP stands firmly on the side of truth. I know I do 100% and we'll always stand up for reconciliation. And that I would say, is probably one of the biggest reasons why I'm standing up here is because I'm tired of watching our neighbors and the original people have their treaty rights—and in the case of BC, we have no treaty rights—seen them be treated like less than and not like human beings by Canadian policy. And I personally have had enough of it, and I'm willing to stand up and say, I'm not going to let this happen anymore.

I do find it kind of ironic that people are like, ‘Oh no, the First Nations, people might do things without our consultation.’ It's like, ‘Well, how does it feel?’ You know, maybe now you get a little taste of what they've been experiencing for a while here, and maybe we can all start doing what they've asked us to do this whole time, which is work together in a collaborative sense for our mutual futures and our mutual gain. Because that's what this has always been about, and that's what this should be about. I believe that for most of the people in Chilliwack—Hope that I've spoken to, that is their belief as well. We should be rowing our boats together, not fighting against each other because our outcomes are tied right? If we destroy this land and then leave, who's left to pick up the pieces? The people who want to stay here, who want to live here—and that's who we should be considering. It's the long-term impacts of our actions here. So as far as UNDRIP goes, we and I fully stand with UNDRIP and with First Nations people and their rights and their title and when and if they want treaties, I will stand beside them and say, ‘This is what you want. I'm willing to listen and we're willing to work together,’ because as somebody who's had my rights trampled on and taken away within my own nation, I can understand how it feels. So the importance of working together now and into the future is more important than ever, and our unity is in our solidarity is number one, top of mind.

Housing and reconciliation

FVC: One of the NDP’s housing platform planks is to use federal land to build housing. At the same time, there are First Nations that are saying, ‘We would like you to be returning this federal land to us. Maybe we'll build housing. Maybe we won't’—but many of them do end up building housing. Does the NDP saying, like the Conservatives, ‘We'd like to build housing on this federal land’ jeopardize or conflict with ideas that this actual land should be, when possible, returned to First Nations?

Westerby: I think it does conflict actually, because if we realize that what's considered Crown land is unceded traditional territory of these nations that have never been signed over the Crown by treaty, then technically they are not the Crown's land. And so the way we approach Crown land here in British Columbia, more importantly than any [other place] is going to require time and care and co-operation, is the big thing.

Because you said it. You look here in Chilliwack—Hope, we’re actually on Tzeachten territory, and I've seen them, I think, build a couple hundred houses in the last couple years. Skynest is kitty-corner to me and if it wasn't for the investments of Tzeachten to build these houses, we wouldn't have these houses.

So I don't think that they're against building houses. If the federal government's plan is to say, ‘Hey, we'd love to invest in building houses on this land, and we work together to make sure it serves everybody,’ and that it's a long-term solution that they agree to and ownership, whatever it is, they must be leading the conversation so that what is agreed to is agreeable for everybody now and into the future, and not in a sense that's pulling the wool over anyone's eyes, or backstabbing later on. It has to be full, complete and done well as a cohesive plan together, and, more importantly, that it is reflective of the rights of First Nations people.

Strategic voting

FVC: I’ll wrap it up with one more question. Strategic voting is a thing, whether we like it or not, and from polls that suggests many NDP voters might think about voting for the Liberals to keep the Conservatives of power. I looked it up, the last time there was a large Liberal surge in 2015 we saw in the Chilliwack—Hope riding the Liberals take almost twice as many votes as the NDP. Why should somebody who is considering voting strategically vote for the NDP rather than Liberals?

Westerby: I'd actually pivot on that, because it's not so much that I'm saying, ‘Oh, if you're going to vote for the Liberals, you should vote for me instead.’

What I want to say is that if you want to vote for the MVP, you should vote with your values, because that's how we make change. We don't make change by giving up our voice and agreeing to something we don't actually want. We need to fight for the future that we know we deserve and that we know we believe in, and we do that by voting the way we want to vote. So I just encourage whoever wants to vote to vote, and to vote the way you want to vote, and that's all that matters.

Don't let national polls and people who really want the Liberals to win to convince you to not vote with your values, because I've done that before, and I regretted it. I voted for Liberals in 2015 when they promised to end this conversation and end first-past-the-post. But they didn't. They lured us all, and I will not believe them or trust them again, not now and probably not in the future. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

But that doesn't mean we can't make change now, because we can. We do have the opportunity. What really sits with me is that 40% of Chilliwack doesn't vote, and it's likely because of this exact conversation. They're told: ‘Your vote doesn't matter if you're going to vote NDP, it's a waste’ so they don't vote. It's not that you're convincing them to vote Liberal. You convince them not to vote at all, and that's how we destroy our democracy and slip into a two-party system that allows us to slip further to the right and further into a regressive state where we're fractured and we're not unified, and we're not moving towards something better, which we all know we need.

So I'm asking you that if there's something in your heart that says, ‘I really want to vote NDP, I really want change here, I believe Teri is the best leader for us, and I see how he can lift up our voices in Ottawa,’ listen to that voice, because it's telling you something. What we're trying to do here in Chilliwack—Hope is not radical. It's basic movement towards progress that we all know we need. Movements don't wait. We're not asking permission. We're building something bigger and more importantly is that everybody gets out and votes. I want to see 90% of people voting because they know that they have someone that they feel represents them, even if they don't know if they're going to win or not. Because that's not what voting is supposed to be about. And I want us to send a message loud and clear to Ottawa that Chilliwack—Hope wants better representation, and we need a change, because it's dividing our community. It's putting friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, and it's enough. We don't need this anymore. So I'm hoping you can be brave and vote with your values.

The interview concluded.

You can find our interviews with Fraser Valley candidates from other major parties here:

John Aldag (Liberals) | Melissa Snazell (Greens) | Brad Vis (Conservatives)