Scott McInnis, Donegal Wilson, Ward Stamer and Warren Mirko set the example every MLA should follow.

01 The job is about seven levers wide

Almost everything written about an election is about what candidates believe. Almost nothing is about what the job physically lets them do. Those are different questions, and only the second one has a checkable answer, because every one of these levers leaves a dated public record behind when somebody pulls it.

So we went and read the record. All 188 official transcripts of the 43rd Parliament, from the opening on 18 February 2025 to the last sitting on 28 May 2026, taken from the Legislative Assembly’s own document service and searched in full.⁰¹ Committee of Supply is inside that corpus, which matters: estimates is where a member gets hours rather than minutes with a minister.

Here is the whole toolkit: seven things, six of them used on this subject and one not.

Counts from the corpus, not from an index. The Legislature’s per-sitting index is editorially compiled and does not file estimates debate by subject, so an index search misses the richest seam in the record. Every figure on this page comes from the transcripts themselves, and the sweep reproduces: 40 petition presentations across 26 sittings, found twice by two methods that share no assumption.

None of these seven levers repairs a road, and that is the point. What they produce is an answer with a date on it, from somebody who has to own it afterwards. Four people now on the 24 October ballot produced one.

02 Scott McInnis tabled the one petition, then stood on the Incomappleux road

On the morning of 28 May 2026 — the last day the 43rd Parliament ever sat — McInnis stood up during Petitions and said one sentence.⁰²

That is the entire entry. He said nothing else; the next member up presented an unrelated petition about wood-pole preservative. And a single sentence is exactly the right size to measure, because a petition is a procedure with a known cost and a known effect. The cost is thirty seconds of a sitting day. The effect is that a subject and a number enter the permanent record on a date, where a government has to decide in the open whether to answer it.

Across the parliament, members presented 40 petitions. Two of them were about roads. One was Sheldon Clare’s, in May 2025, carrying 1,256 signatures asking the province to recommission the Quesnel-Hixon Road. The other was this one. No other member in sixteen months asked the House to stop a road being taken out. ⁰¹

It is also the largest petition McInnis presented. His other four ran to roughly 500, an unstated number, 487 and nearly 1,000.⁰²

Date	Sitting	Subject	Signatures
24 Feb 2025	Issue 7	Rural retention incentive for health-care professionals, for the East Kootenay branch of the B.C. Nurses Union	approximately 500
26 May 2025	Issue 69	Concerns of residents and business owners in the town of Golden	not stated
21 Oct 2025	Issue 84	A crosswalk in the school speed zone on Highway 95A at Marysville Elementary	487
4 May 2026	Issue 171	Year-round boat launch access at Martha Creek Provincial Park, Revelstoke	nearly 1,000
28 May 2026	Issue 187	Against the deactivation of the Incomappleux Forest Service Road	1,500

Scott McInnis raised backcountry closures for a year before the signatures arrived

Two of the seven levers are speech. McInnis used both. In May 2025 he used an oral question, which the House then filed under its own subject heading — Back-Country Land Use in Columbia Valley and Kootenays:⁰³

That answer is the reason the lever is worth pulling. The minister’s denial, made in two minutes under pressure in question period, is a fixed point. Everything government has done on Kootenay forest service roads since May 2025 now has to be read against it.

Nine months later, in the budget debate, he put road closures in a list of reasons to vote against the budget — between the price of a house in Revelstoke and the shortage of doctors:⁰⁴

A year earlier again, in his first budget speech, he had said that “Unfettered free access to Crown land for recreation is essential in B.C.” and that he would be “unapologetic” about advocating for “the free, unrestricted use of Crown land for all British Columbians.” That passage sits inside an argument about Indigenous title, consultation and the Declaration Act, not about forest service roads, and it reads differently with that context than without it.⁰⁵

The fifth lever is not a procedure at all

On 8 July 2026, more than seventy people — property owners, prospectors, recreation organisations, two village councils and a chamber of commerce — spent a day on the Incomappleux Forest Service Road and at Rady Creek. The society’s own account of who was there, and who was not, is the single most useful paragraph in this record. The society is Warren Mirko’s, so this is one subject’s account of another; the Revelstoke Review’s reporting of the same day is cited below.⁰⁶⁰⁷

Five weeks later a reporter found him at Trout Lake and asked him what the petition had achieved. It had been tabled without opposition, and the province had not acted on it.⁰⁷

Two limits belong here, in his section, where a reader can weigh them. The first is that none of this was his job. Across three assignments — Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation from November 2024, Tourism, Resort Municipalities and the Columbia River Treaty from October 2025, and caucus policy from August 2026 — no portfolio he has ever held covers forests, roads or transport. The second is that his engagement with these particular roads is recent: his own published review of 2025, which runs through health care, housing, seniors and his critic role, mentions neither the Incomappleux nor Rady Creek nor forest service roads at all.⁰⁸

03 Donegal Wilson used the only proceeding that turns a question into a figure

A petition can be ignored. A speech can be ignored. Estimates cannot, because it is the one proceeding that makes a minister produce a number, with the officials who hold the figures sitting behind. It is the slowest, least televised and most productive lever on the list. Two members used it on this subject in the parliament. Wilson used it twice, eleven months apart, and the Forests critic who opened both debates comes next.

In April 2025 she asked the Minister of Forests a question with only one possible kind of answer — a number:⁰⁹

Read that answer again, because it is the clearest thing in this entire record. Asked what the province spends to keep recreation roads passable, the Minister of Forests produced $20.3 million and $47.83 million — and then volunteered that neither figure is for recreation. Nobody had published those numbers. Nobody had put that caveat on the record. One question in Committee of Supply did both, and it is now permanent.

She did not let it go: “While I understand there is budget, I would love to know the actual priority list of where that money goes... At the end of the day, that road to that trail is not protected or included in these budgets, and that’s really disappointing.”

Eleven months later, the question the government still has not answered

On 12 March 2026 she came back to the same minister with the structural question — why a road that could be closed with a sign is instead dismantled:¹⁰

She gave him one. It is the only time in 188 transcripts that Rady Creek is named at all:

There is a detail in her phrasing worth stopping on. “High-value recreation roads” is not her coinage — it is the Province’s, from its own Outdoor Recreation Strategy. That phrase appears once in the whole parliament, in her question. The strategy’s own name appears once, in lower case, on the morning of the very same day, when Tamara Davidson, the Minister of Environment and Parks who signed it, welcomed two visitors to the gallery:¹¹

Hon. Tamara DavidsonMinister of Environment and Parks

“They joined me in my office this morning to talk about the B.C. outdoor recreation strategy, as well as the support and alignment that we have from them.”

Hon. Tamara Davidson, Minister of Environment and Parks · Hansard, Issue 140, morning sitting of 12 March 2026, Introductions by Members — the only occurrence of B.C.’s Outdoor Recreation Strategy in the parliament

So on 12 March 2026 B.C.’s Outdoor Recreation Strategy was mentioned once in the morning, as a courtesy to guests, and one of its own target phrases was put to the Minister of Forests that afternoon by an opposition member. Those are the only two appearances either makes. “Target 8”, the numbered commitment that phrase belongs to, never appears there at all.

What Donegal Wilson did with the rest of the toolkit

Outside the House she has published her own constituency writing on exactly this mechanism: on Recreation Sites and Trails BC walking away from a 67-kilometre section of the Columbia Western Rail Trail in 2020, leaving “no plan, no budget, and no responsible stewardship”; on a point most people never learn, that motorized recreation access is regulated through the same instrument as hunting, so “changes introduced through hunting regulations can directly affect recreational access... even for people who are not hunting”; and on a concrete remedy, recognising the Kettle Valley Rail Trail as “British Columbia’s first linear provincial park.” She has also taken the cross-ministry route, meeting a minister alongside a regional district director about a single trail.¹²

The seventh lever is the one she did not use, and nor did anybody else. No private member’s bill on resource roads, road deactivation or public access was introduced in the 43rd Parliament. A drafted remedy is still the only thing on this list that would survive its author losing an election.

04 Ward Stamer asked twice how many forest roads were going, and was never given a count

Wilson’s questions in estimates did not arrive on their own. In both years of Forests estimates, the Conservative who opened the subject of road access and then handed her the floor was the party’s own Forests critic. Across the whole parliament, no member used the language of road access in more speaking turns than he did, and that includes the Forests minister.¹³

The count comes from testing every speaking turn in the 188 transcripts for thirteen terms of road access, from “forest service road” to “logging road”. Stamer used them in 23 of his 484 turns. The minister responsible for those roads used them in 21, Wilson in 19 and McInnis in 17. The count flatters him, and it should be read in full: nine of his 23 turns use “Crown land” or “public land” about timber, stumpage or wildfire funding, and eight are about whether people can keep using a road.¹³

Those eight are specific. On the first night of Forests estimates, 9 April 2025, he asked the question that sits under every other one in this article:¹⁴

He had opened by saying that if the numbers did not come back that night, “that’s fine.” What the minister did give was the scale. Of about 60,000 kilometres of forest service road, he said, “roughly 12,000 are roads and sections of roads that we are actively maintaining,” and many of the rest are “just left to erode once they’re no longer used by industry and are eventually deactivated.”¹⁴

The next morning, 10 April 2025, he asked who gets a say before a road goes:¹⁵

The minister answered that forestry roads are “predominantly user-maintained” and that “it’s not always feasible for the province to maintain all resource roads in perpetuity.” Eleven months later, on 12 March 2026, Stamer came back to the count:¹⁶

The answer was a budget, not a count. Road maintenance funding had grown from $6.1 million in 2022–23 to $16½ million in 2025–26, the minister said, and his “long-term vision” was to list every forest service road on a website. He added that the ministry had “some work to do” on telling communities about closures. Stamer then handed the floor to Wilson, and later in the same sitting, when she asked what the maintenance budget would be for 2026–27, the minister said: “It’s the same as last year.”¹⁶

In April 2026, at committee stage of Bill 14, which gave BC Timber Sales new powers to build, buy and lease logging roads, he asked whether the forest operations maps shown to the public would say whether roads were “permanently constructed or they’re going to be deactivated.” The maps would show where the roads go, the minister said, “but not to the extent that you would have in an operational plan.”¹⁷

What Ward Stamer’s questions did not do

The questions did not move the ministry. The count he asked for twice was never given in the House, and the maintenance budget for 2026–27 is the same as the year before. Across all 484 of his speaking turns he never named a road that was being closed: there is no Rady Creek, no Incomappleux and no Trout Lake. The roads were named by Wilson, in time he had set aside for her.¹³

He is also the only person in this article to carry the seventh lever all the way. His private member’s bill, the Dashboard Cameras in Commercial Vehicles Act, received Royal Assent on 28 May 2026.¹⁸ It concerns commercial trucks on the highway rather than forest roads, so on this subject the seventh lever is still unused. On the roads themselves, his record is questions, and every one of them is on the record with a date.

05 Warren Mirko has never been an MLA, so he registered the Public Land Use Society instead

Most levers so far belong to somebody who already won an election. That is the obvious objection to this piece, and the answer to it is the fourth person here, who has never held provincial office and did not wait for one.

He registered Public Land Use Society in March 2025. A society costs about a hundred dollars and a set of bylaws, and what it buys is standing: it can sign a joint release, hold a bank account, commission research and file a freedom-of-information request under its own name.¹⁹ None of that requires a seat, and none of it requires permission.

Three of the society’s eleven releases are about these roads. On 4 June 2026, jointly with the Quad Riders Association of British Columbia, it asked the Province for a stop-work order on the Incomappleux — with the questions set out so a refusal to answer would itself be on the record:²⁰

That release also put three things into public view that would otherwise have stayed in correspondence: that the stakeholder group had asked the Minister of Forests for a stop-work order on 15 May 2026 and requested an answer within seven days; that the ministry had told affected parties work might begin on 9 June; and that the Selkirk Resource District had written to one landowner that the summer’s work “will permanently remove road access to your private property.”

In August, speaking to a trade publication about prospectors losing access in the Kootenays, he put it more plainly:²¹

Warren MirkoPublic Land Use Society; now the Conservative candidate in Kootenay-Monashee

“Government is going to strand property owners behind this (road) because they’re saying we don’t have the money to maintain the road.”

Resource Works, Nelson Bennett, 6 August 2026 — the parenthesis is the publication’s

Filing, commissioning, publishing

Two further levers, both available to anybody, both used. In May 2026 the society published what a freedom-of-information request returned about the Tahltan Foundation Agreement talks — and, more usefully, what it did not return: more than 400 pages withheld, and no copy of the agreement itself.²² Publishing the refusal is the part that turns an FOI from a private answer into a public record.

In August it published a commissioned survey: 1,002 BC adults, fielded by Abacus Data from 9 to 15 July 2026, online, margin of error ±3.09%, 19 times out of 20, with the full data deck posted alongside the findings.²³ Stating the method beside the number is what separates a survey from a press line.

Here is where that record has to be described accurately rather than flattered. Public Land Use Society’s centre of gravity is not roads. Of the 261 items on its news page, 11 are its own releases and the rest are reposted columns by other people; the survey is about governance of Crown land and reconciliation, not about access; and the freedom-of-information request concerned title negotiations in the northwest. The road work is a genuine but narrow part of a broader campaign about who controls Crown land.

The society’s About page lists four petitions it supports, and one of them names this campaign’s own road: “Deactivation of the Historical Silver Cup Ridge Trail & Rady Ck Road near Trout Lake BC.” Alongside it sits “The Incomappleux Forest Service Road not be deactivated” — the petition McInnis would later carry into the House. Those are change.org petitions the society endorses rather than ones it runs, which is worth knowing before anyone counts them twice.¹⁹

What his biography says, and what we could confirm

He was acclaimed to Warfield council on 25 September 2026, to his inaugural seat; all five seats there were filled without a vote, so Warfield holds no municipal election on 17 October.²⁴ Acclamation is not office. Under the Community Charter, a councillor’s term begins at the new council’s first regular meeting after the general local election — which, for Warfield, falls in November. Both his party’s candidate page and the society’s own board page say, word for word and in the present tense, “He is a Councillor in the Village of Warfield and a public affairs consultant who helps clients navigate government relations and align with regulatory and community expectations.” Until that first meeting he is a councillor-elect, not yet a councillor.

The same shared paragraph credits him with fifteen years supporting public protection mandates “at BC Financial Services Authority, Engineers and Geoscientists BC, Transport Canada, and other regulatory authorities.” The first of those is confirmed by the regulator’s own releases, which name him as media contact, in its communications team, on five separate occasions between 2023 and 2024.²⁵

And when he announced his candidacy on 28 September 2026, the sentence he led with was about the thing this article is about:²⁶

Two more facts belong on the record so the ballot described here is the real one. All four people in this article stand as Conservative Party candidates on Elections BC’s final list, under that exact name.²⁷ Two of them, McInnis and Wilson, left that caucus on 2 September 2026 and returned later that month. It is not what this article measures, but leaving it out would make the article easier to attack than the record it rests on.

06 The ledger — eight entries, and what each left behind

Here is all of it: eight entries over sixteen months, each leaving something a constituent can now point at.

Procedure	Who used it	What it produced	Where
Petition to the Legislative Assembly	Scott McInnisColumbia River-Revelstoke	1,500 signatures against the deactivation of the Incomappleux Forest Service Road, presented on 28 May 2026. The largest of the five petitions he presented, and the only one in the parliament against a road being removed.	Issue 187 · 28 May 2026
Estimates questioning	Donegal WilsonBoundary-Similkameen	Asked what the province had budgeted to keep recreation roads passable and was given $20.3 million and $47.83 million, with the minister adding that neither was for recreation. Eleven months later, asked why a sign saying use at your own risk does not discharge the liability a full removal is said to address, and named Rady Creek.	Issues 38 and 141 · 9 Apr 2025, 12 Mar 2026
Estimates and bill committee	Ward StamerKamloops-North Thompson	Asked how many forest roads and bridges were being permanently deactivated and was told “we don’t have a specific answer.” Asked again eleven months later and was given a maintenance budget instead of a count. Also asked whether the public can be heard before a road goes, and whether public maps will show which roads are to be deactivated.	Issues 38, 39, 141 and 159 · Apr 2025 – Apr 2026
Question period and debate	Scott McInnisColumbia River-Revelstoke	An oral question in May 2025 that drew a minister’s assurance that backcountry access was not being turned off, and two budget speeches on Crown land and backcountry closures, one of which lists road deactivation beside housing and doctors as a reason to vote against the budget.	Issues 21, 59 and 120 · 2025–2026
Going to the road	Scott McInnisColumbia River-Revelstoke	Spent 8 July 2026 on the Incomappleux with more than 70 residents, property owners and recreation organisations. Provincial ministers and senior officials were invited and did not come; Natural Resource Officers attended at Ministry staff’s direction.	8 July 2026
Incorporating a society	Warren MirkoKootenay-Monashee	Registered Public Land Use Society in March 2025 and has run it since. Eleven releases, three of them on these roads, including a joint call for a stop-work order on this corridor. One freedom-of-information publication and one commissioned survey.	S0082239 · from 7 Mar 2025
Freedom of information	Warren MirkoKootenay-Monashee	Filed and published, including the count of what was refused: more than 400 pages withheld and no copy of the agreement itself. Publishing the refusal is the part that makes an FOI a public record rather than a private answer.	19 May 2026
Commissioning research	Warren MirkoKootenay-Monashee	A survey of 1,002 British Columbians by Abacus Data, with the field dates, the sample and the margin of error published alongside the findings and the full data deck posted. Its subject is governance of Crown land rather than roads.	31 August 2026

Not one of those eight rows repaired a metre of road. In August the Revelstoke Review reported that the province had not acted on the petition and that work to close the Incomappleux road was under way this field season, with the road to Rady Creek slated for deactivation the same summer.⁰⁷ What the rows did produce is a government position that can be quoted back — two budget figures and the admission that neither is for recreation, a minister with no count of the roads being deactivated, a minister’s assurance that backcountry access is not being turned off, an invitation declined, a written statement that access to a private property will be permanently removed, and 1,500 names on a date.

That is the realistic ceiling of the job, and it is not nothing. It is the difference between a decision that has to be defended and a decision that simply happens.

07 What to ask everybody else on the ballot

There are 355 candidates in this election and four of them appear above. The other 351 are not described here as silent, because most of them have never held office and have never had a procedure to use. What they do all have, starting now, is the same toolkit — and a reason to say which part of it they intend to pick up.

1. Which of these will you use, and by when? Not “do you support access.” A petition, an estimates question, a bill, a letter you will publish, a day on the road. Name the procedure and name the date.
2. Why are there two levels of deactivation? A sign saying use at your own risk is one standard; a full re-slope and replant with the bridges pulled is another. The question was put to the Minister of Forests in March 2026 and the answer was about environmental standards, not about the two levels. It is still open.
3. Before a road goes, will the engineering, the cost and the alternatives be published? Local organisations offered to take on maintenance of the Incomappleux and were told the proposals would not be considered. A published file is what makes that kind of refusal arguable instead of final.

The first question is the one that does the work, because it cannot be answered with agreement. “I support backcountry access” costs nothing. “I will put a written question to the Minister of Forests in the first estimates of the next parliament” is a thing you can check in Hansard a year from now — which is exactly how this article was written.