By Amy Chen

A four-minute video entitled “BC Don’t Split the Vote” produced with no budget is going viral on social media, with over 360,000 views on Facebook and Youtube.

The video by independent environmental filmmaker Twyla Roscovich, who says that Premier Christy Clark’s government is destroying the environment and economy by selling out BC to rich corporate interests, calls on British Columbians to vote effectively in order to remove the BC Liberals.

“This trend has to change or we’re in big trouble,” the video argues. “So what to do? Vote Green, right? Vote with your heart, right? Wrong. To get what we want this election, we have to vote with our heads.”

“Let’s be realistic,” the video adds. “The Greens are not going to suddenly sweep the election and beat out the Liberals. The chances are literally zero.”

The video highlights NDP’s John Horgan’s electoral reform pledge as a way for the Green vote to have power at subsequent elections.

“The best thing that could happen for the Green supporters is if we had electoral reform to ditch this dysfunctional system. Luckily this is what the NDP is offering. This change could forever empower green voters and never allow the kind of corrupt government we are seeing to hold power again.”

The video goes onto explain, “Take BC Hydro for example. Rewind to 2006. BC Hydro was our crown jewel of a public corporation, BC had the second lowest hydro bills in North America. So what happened? why are we now experiencing these monster hydro bills? Well the Liberals made deals with private power companies, locking us into ridiculously high rates, which means big profits for those private companies. How did BC Hydro go from making money to owing 76 billion dollars? Back-room deals at our expense, that’s how. “

When asked why she produced the video Roscovich explains, “because I kept hearing people say ‘vote with your heart, go Green’, which sounds like a nice idea, but in reality, if you vote with blind sentiment in our current system the terrible irony is that you’re much more likely to end up with exactly the opposite of what you want. The voting system absolutely needs to change if we want a true green government and the only possible way we are going to get that anytime soon is if the NDP win this election and we get electoral reform, we’re never getting out of this mess otherwise. As it is, the system is et up for us to fail, and for the corporate interests to win.”

The video also urges voters not get lulled into a false sense of security.

“I just wanted to encourage people to vote with their brains this election,” Roscovich concludes. “BC is too special to let it be exploited and destroyed by corporate interests.”