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Virender Dass
Biography
Virender Dass grew up in Ambala Cantt in northern India, the son of a steelworker, and built an 18-year career in visual effects in senior creative and technical roles. He came to Canada in 2014 as a technical director at Industrial Light & Magic's Vancouver studio, and went on to work at DNEG and Digital Domain on films including Blade Runner 2049, First Man and The Revenant.
In 2017 he founded Wellness Extract, a natural health products company that sells in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The company has operated from Abbotsford for four years, employs about 40 people worldwide, and is planning a packaging and manufacturing facility that would add around 50 local jobs. He and his wife Upasana also run SmartVeda, an Abbotsford learning centre that teaches mental math and creative activities to children.
He founded the Santosh Care Foundation, a registered Canadian charity named after his mother, which supports nutrition for low-income people living with chronic illness and runs tree-planting and habitat restoration drives. He is a member of the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce.
Virender is running for OneBC because he believes British Columbia has become a place where it is harder every year to build a business, afford a home, or get a straight answer from government. He is running on the OneBC plan: lower taxes, balanced budgets, safer streets, and schools and health care that work.
Reason for running
I came here in 2014, built a company, and started a learning centre for children with my wife. I am a father of two daughters in our schools, an employer of 40 people, and I have spent a year trying to get a permit to bring manufacturing jobs to Abbotsford. I have learned how much a province can get in the way of ordinary people trying to build a life. I am running on the full OneBC plan, but four things come first for me.
1. Safe schools, strong anti-bullying rules, and parents in the room. I run a math school for children in this community and I have two daughters in the system. Every child must be safe from bullying at school. That is not negotiable, and I will strengthen it. SOGI 123 was introduced as an anti-bullying program, but it has grown well beyond that, and parents have been left out of decisions about their own children. I will work to remove SOGI 123 from our schools and replace it with clear, enforceable anti-bullying policy that protects every child. And I will put classroom time back into reading, writing and math, where BC has lost more than a full year of learning since 2003.
2. Health care that works when you need it. Nearly 1.3 million British Columbians have no family doctor, and in Fraser Health the median wait on the registry is 241 days. Mission Memorial’s emergency room closed overnight 51 nights in a row this spring. Abbotsford Regional Hospital runs over capacity day after day and is not on the province’s expansion list. Seniors in this riding are waiting a year or more for hips, knees and cataracts. I believe in public health care: your care card, not your credit card. Provinces of every political stripe, including Saskatchewan, Quebec and Alberta, use accredited clinics to clear surgical backlogs: publicly paid, with patients taken off the same list in order. BC has fallen behind and has the waits to show for it. Health care funding is protected from any tax cut and will keep growing with our population. ARH expansion will be my first ask in the legislature.
3. A 25% tax cut and 2% off the PST. This year the government raised the lowest income-tax rate, the one every working person pays on their first $50,000, froze the brackets so inflation pushes you into higher rates every year, and extended the PST to more services. The deficit still hit a record $13.3 billion. A 25% cut to every bracket means a two-earner Abbotsford family keeps about $2,000 a year in provincial tax, and a retiree on a fixed income pays less on every bill at the till.
4. Clear rules on land: repeal DRIPA. Every party voted for DRIPA in 2019 with good intentions. Seven years on, no one can tell a farmer, a builder or a business what it means for their land or their permit. I would repeal it and replace it with consultation rules written in plain language: when consultation is required, how long it takes, and what counts as done. That is better for First Nations too, because a rule you can rely on beats a promise you have to litigate. We are on Stó:lō territory, and good relations are the only route to certainty for everyone.
Everything else in the OneBC plan comes with it: balanced budgets within four years, an end to safe supply with consumption sites converted into recovery centres, repeal of the Step Code, a crackdown on repeat offenders, and an audit of 176,000 regulations so people like me can get a permit in months, not years.
Many roots, one valley. I am not running for one community in this riding. I am running for all of them.
Virender’s Community Contract:
- Reply to every constituent message within 24 to 48 hours.
- Hold timely town halls in Mission and Abbotsford.
- Not vote for new provincial consumer taxes.
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