Rady Creek isn’t in Donegal Wilson’s riding. She took it to the minister anyway.

On 12 March 2026, in the Ministry of Forests estimates, Donegal Wilson asked the Minister of Forests why the Province tears out a road that a sign could keep open. When he asked her for an example, she gave him Rady Creek out of Trout Lake.⁰¹ In all 188 House transcripts of the 43rd Parliament, that is the only time anyone said the words “Rady Creek”. The words appear in none of the 440 House transcripts of the 42nd Parliament, which sat from December 2020 to May 2024.⁰²

Wilson sits for Boundary-Similkameen, and Trout Lake is not in her riding; the road is in Columbia River-Revelstoke.⁰³ She is the Conservative candidate again on 24 October, against Roly Russell of the BC NDP, who held the seat from 2020 to 2024, and Keith Pomeroy of OneBC.⁰⁴ This is what she did about these roads, what it did not change, and how it compares with the two people running against her.

01 Wilson asked why a road is torn out when a sign would do

Her party’s candidate page says her opposition portfolio covered “access to the backcountry.”⁰⁵ On the afternoon of 12 March she spent her time in the Forests estimates on deactivation. She began with wildfire, telling the minister that crews behind Tulameen had needed almost five days to rebuild a road before they could reach a fire. Then she turned to recreation:⁰¹

The minister asked whether she had an example. She did, and it was a road outside her own riding:⁰¹

“The one that does come to mind for me is Rady Creek out of Trout Lake. I think that is one where we’re looking at a complete re-slope, replant. The hazard, I believe, is some unstable slope. It is a mining road that has been there 120 years. Recreation has been using it for all of that time.”

She called the road “an important recreation infrastructure for the community of Trout Lake,” and in the same turn she asked what the landowners up the Incomappleux can rely on when the only way to their property is a forest service road that the Province has now decided to close for good.⁰¹

She knew the road before she was elected. Her party’s biography says she spent more than a decade as executive director of the BC Snowmobile Federation before she entered provincial politics.⁰⁵ In 2021 the federation took Rady Creek to Katrine Conroy, then the minister responsible for forests. It wrote to the Province on 26 May, and on 7 June it escalated to the minister with a letter signed by Wilson as executive director. The letter asked the minister to keep snowmobile access to Silver Cup Ridge open, as the federation said government staff had promised when its clubs signed a caribou stewardship agreement with the Province that March. It offered to work on the engineering concerns, and it proposed deactivating the road only as far as those concerns required.⁰⁶ Five years later, as an MLA, she put the same road to Ravi Parmar.

02 She asked whether it was “buyer beware”, and the minister said it was

Ravi Parmar did not answer the question about the two levels of deactivation. He said that the environmental standard a licensee must meet, and not liability, is the reason for the work:⁰¹

“When a licensee is deactivating that road — mild deactivation to wilderness standards — it has less to do with liability and more to do with the environmental standards that they’re required to uplift. Liability continues to exist as long as that road is activated.”

On the Incomappleux he was plainer. She had asked whether owners should simply consider it buyer beware, and the minister took up her own words:⁰¹

“Without a doubt, any private property owner should know if there is an FSR, that it may not be guaranteed forever. Without a doubt, there’s buyer beware.”

He added that the owners could apply to the land ministry for Land Act permits. Wilson answered that “for lots of people that road has been there for a long time,” and that most owners could not tell whether it was a highway or a forest service road. Her last question was the maintenance budget for forest service roads, and the minister told her the amount for 2026–27 was “the same as last year.”⁰¹

His own district had already answered her question in writing, eleven months earlier. The Selkirk Natural Resource District’s public notice on the Incomappleux, dated April 2025, says that “the province cannot release liability through the use of a sign,” and that the district will continue its deactivation “because it is obligated to relieve itself of liability.”⁰⁷ The minister told the committee that the work had less to do with liability, and his own district had told the public that liability was the whole point of doing the work.

She did not change the outcome. The contract to deactivate Rady Creek went to tender in September, and the ministry told CBC News that “the decision for deactivation is final.”⁰⁸ She told the minister she would send him other examples, and no list has been made public. She said she would take the landowners’ question to the land ministry’s estimates, and when those came in May the word “Incomappleux” was not spoken.⁰⁹ One question in an afternoon of estimates is the floor of the job, not the ceiling. It is still the only time in two parliaments of transcripts that anyone has named this road on the floor of the House.

03 Rady Creek was one of ten times she raised the roads in the House

Wilson took 450 speaking turns in the 43rd Parliament, and 19 of them used at least one of the thirteen access terms we tested.¹⁰ Nine of the nineteen concern Crown land in another sense: houses forfeited for tax in Hedley, illegal dumping and encampments by the river in Oliver. The other ten are about the roads, and she started on them in her first spring in the House, in April 2025.

Two more turns sit between those dates. In May 2025 she asked whether a farmer whose only access is a forest service road has any legal recourse if a wind project cuts it off, and in October 2025 whether volunteer recreation clubs on Crown land could be sued for health-care costs.¹⁴

Outside the House she put the argument in a single statement. On 31 July 2026, as her party’s Shadow Minister for Water, Land, Fisheries, and Wildlife Management at the time, she said:¹⁵

“These roads are far more than forestry infrastructure. They provide emergency access during wildfires, connect people to private property, and support hunting, fishing, camping, and outdoor recreation that rural economies depend on. Yet while communities are being told to diversify through tourism, the government is closing the very roads that provide access to those opportunities. We are seeing the consequences right now, as firefighters are forced to spend days rebuilding roads and bridges before they can get equipment to active wildfires.”

Across the whole parliament, four members used those terms in more than a dozen turns each, and Wilson is the only one of the four whose turns include Rady Creek.¹⁰ Questioning a minister in estimates is an opposition job, so opposition members lead any list like this one. The table shows the top four by count, plus the BC NDP members for Kootenay-Monashee and Kootenay Central from the government side.

Scott McInnis tabled the petition against the Incomappleux deactivation and spent 8 July on the road, and his record is set out in its own piece. The record of Warren Mirko, the Conservative candidate in Kootenay-Monashee, is set out the same way.

04 She has fought for the rail trails in her own riding too

Rady Creek is outside her riding, but two rail trails run through it. The Kettle Valley Rail Trail passes Princeton, Coalmont and Tulameen, and the Columbia & Western runs from Christina Lake toward Castlegar. In her words, the section near Princeton “was abandoned” after the floods of 2021, and the section between Christina Lake and Castlegar “has also been closed.”¹⁶ She has put her name to both in public, and she started before the Province had made its decision on Princeton.

In July 2025 she wrote an op-ed on her MLA site about the Trans Canada Trail, and one passage in it is about the stretch of the Kettle Valley above Princeton:¹⁷

“Look at Princeton to Tulameen: The section of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail washed out by the 2021 floods. Four years later, there is still no serious effort to rebuild it. The Province just quietly turned its back and hoped folks wouldn’t notice.”

On 4 February 2026 the acting director of trails and trail infrastructure in the Ministry of Environment and Parks wrote to her office that the ministry would permanently deactivate the flood-damaged section between Princeton and the Coldwater River. She wrote back to him the next day, in a letter of three pages:¹⁶

Castanet reported the letter two days later. Her MLA site later posted it as her letter to the minister, but the letter itself is addressed to the acting director.¹⁶

Later that month she took the trail to the floor of the House. In the budget debate on 23 February she said: “We could repair the Kettle Valley Rail Trail in Princeton. It has recently been announced that we are losing the section between Princeton and Brookmere, and the province has approved $20 million to deactivate the trail.” The next morning she gave a member’s statement on the trail in the House:¹³

“The Kettle Valley Rail Trail is a provincial treasure. It was entrusted to the province as a recreational asset for the people of British Columbia. With two sections in my riding now being abandoned, this asset is gradually losing its full potential.”

In the same statement she proposed that the trail become “the province’s first lineal provincial park,” so that local groups could raise funds and collect user fees for the trail. On 25 February she set out the proposal at more length on her MLA site, naming both of the lost sections and writing that “each loss chips away at the long-term potential of the entire trail.”¹⁶

She has pressed the Columbia & Western just as hard. Her July 2025 op-ed says: “In 2020, Recreation Sites and Trails BC quietly walked away from a 67-kilometre section of the Columbia Western Rail Trail (CWRT) between Castlegar and Christina Lake… Since then, there has been no plan, no budget, and no responsible stewardship.”¹⁷ In May 2026 she wrote that she had met Tamara Davidson, the Minister of Environment and Parks, with Grace McGregor, a director of the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary, and that “we are pushing for a more coordinated, cross ministry approach.”¹⁸ In June, as deputy chair of the Legislature’s finance committee at its hearing in Castlegar, she said that “a key section of the Trans Canada Trail, our national asset, has reverted to a wilderness status that is not even registered as a recreation feature.”¹⁹

In our view, this record is what gives her question on Rady Creek its weight. She has made the same argument at home, on two trails, in writing, on the floor of the House, before a committee and in a minister’s office.

Neither outcome has changed. In March she told constituents that she would present the Princeton mayor’s petition to save the Kettle Valley trail “in the Legislature once signature collection is complete.”²⁰ The House rose on 28 May, and no member had presented a petition on the trail.²¹ On 18 June the ministry narrowed its plan. It agreed to consider three of the four repairs the regional district had asked for, and it will still decommission a 17-kilometre segment from near Coquihalla Lakes to near Brookmere. That bulletin names no MLA.²² The House transcripts do not name the Columbia & Western at all, and the Province’s position is the one it set out in December 2025: it is unable to fund or manage the corridor, which “remains open to the public at the users’ own risk.”²³ Her record on both trails is one of advocacy, and the decisions she opposed still stand.

Each trail has its own piece: the Kettle Valley and the Columbia & Western.

She did all of this as a Conservative member. On 2 September 2026 she left the Conservative caucus to sit as an Independent, saying she had lost confidence in the leader. She joined Peter Milobar’s new party on 14 September, and she rejoined the Conservatives after that leader resigned on 20 September. She is on the 24 October ballot as the Conservative candidate.²⁴

05 We found no public record from her two opponents on these roads

Three people are on the ballot in Boundary-Similkameen: Keith Pomeroy for OneBC, Roly Russell for the BC NDP and Donegal Wilson for the Conservatives.⁰⁴

Roly Russell held the seat from 2020 until Wilson took it in 2024, by 11,935 votes to 10,497. He holds a PhD in ecology, chaired the board of the Regional District of Kootenay Boundary and served as parliamentary secretary for rural development.²⁵ In his four years in the House he took 135 speaking turns by our count, and none of them used any of the thirteen access terms. He sat on the government side, where questioning ministers in estimates is not the job, and in October 2021 he spoke for a protected-areas bill by reading out a list of trail benefits “to demonstrate the suite of benefits that we get from outdoor recreation.”²⁶ His campaign page speaks to costs, agriculture and the rural economy, and it does not mention roads or access.²⁷

Keith Pomeroy is OneBC’s candidate. His candidate page carries four headings, from Professional Background to Priorities for the District, with no text under any of them, and we found no public office held and no public statement from him on any subject. OneBC’s forestry priorities are the allowable cut, stumpage fees and permit times, and none of them mentions public access to Crown land.²⁸

Boundary-Similkameen, on backcountry road access

Question	Donegal WilsonConservative	Roly RussellBC NDP	Keith PomeroyOneBC
Public office held	MLA since 202404	MLA 2020 to 2024, and chair of the Kootenay Boundary regional district board before that25	None found29
On the floor of the Legislature	19 of 450 turns used the 13 terms, and 10 of those were on the roads10	0 of 135 turns used the 13 terms26	Has never held a seat
On Rady Creek and the Incomappleux	Named Rady Creek in 202106 and 2026, and pressed the minister on behalf of the landowners in the Incomappleux valley01	No statement found on either road29	No statement found on either road29
On the road, 8 July 202630	Not named in either account of the day	Not named in either account of the day	Not named in either account of the day
Does the 2026 campaign name access?	Not in her 8 October profile31	Not on his campaign page27	His candidate page carries no text at all28

That is the difference, and it should be read fairly. Russell sat for four years without a reason to question a minister in estimates, and Pomeroy has never held a seat. No member named Rady Creek in the House during the parliament in which Russell served, so his silence on it was shared by every member of that House.⁰²

We searched the candidates’ own pages and their parties’ published priorities, the House transcripts of both parliaments, the Grand Forks Gazette, Keremeos Review, Similkameen Spotlight and Boundary Sentinel, and the accounts of the 8 July field day, from 2020 to 9 October 2026. Facebook, Instagram and X require a sign-in, so none of the three was searched.²⁹

06 Ask all three candidates the same three questions

Wilson has already asked the first of these questions, and the minister did not answer it. Put all three to every candidate in Boundary-Similkameen:

We found no all-candidates forum for the provincial race in Boundary-Similkameen as of 9 October, so write to them.³² The three campaigns publish these addresses: donegal.wilson@conservativebc.ca, roly.russell@bcndp.ca and keith.pomeroy@1bc.ca.³³ The letter below sends the same three questions to every party at once, from the community you actually live in.