Juan de Fuca-Malahat

Juan de Fuca–Malahat is a newly created riding for the 2024 election that traces a long arc along the southern and western coastline of Vancouver Island, from the growing community of Sooke through the rural reaches of East Sooke and Metchosin, over the Malahat summit, and down into the Shawnigan Lake, Cobble Hill, and Mill Bay communities on the Saanich Inlet. The riding covers approximately 2,400 square kilometres of terrain that ranges from the rocky shoreline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the dense second-growth forests of the Sooke Hills and the steep, winding ascent of the Malahat section of the Trans-Canada Highway. Sooke, the largest community, has experienced significant population growth as families and retirees have moved west from Greater Victoria in search of more affordable housing, while the Malahat-area communities retain a quieter, more rural character centred on hobby farming, forestry, and lakeside living.

With boundaries closely mirroring the former Malahat–Juan de Fuca riding that existed from 1991 to 2009, the new constituency had no incumbent. NDP nominee Dana Lajeunesse, a Sooke councillor and mechanical engineering technologist, faced Conservative candidate Marina Sapozhnikov and Green candidate David Evans in a race that proved to be one of the closest in the province, ultimately requiring a judicial recount to determine the outcome.

Candidates

Dana Lajeunesse (BC NDP) — Lajeunesse was a third-generation Sooke resident who was elected twice to Sooke district council. He worked for eight years in the forest industry before a career-altering injury led him to retrain, earning a diploma from Camosun College and spending twenty-four years working as a Mechanical Engineering Technologist. His deep roots in the community and his practical background in both resource-sector work and technical engineering informed a campaign focused on healthcare access, transportation improvements, and housing affordability for the growing West Shore and Malahat corridor.

Marina Sapozhnikov (Conservative Party of BC) — Sapozhnikov was a family physician who had operated a practice in Cobble Hill for more than a decade and had been a doctor for thirty-seven years. She ran on a platform that emphasized healthcare reform, including her firsthand experience with the challenges facing family doctors in rural and semi-rural communities, and the need for greater support to retain and recruit physicians outside urban centres.

David Evans (BC Green Party) — Evans had been a business owner in Sooke for more than twenty-five years. He opened The Stick in the Mud Coffee House in 2007 and later sold the cafe to a community cooperative while retaining The Stick's Roastoreum, a wholesale coffee roasting facility. He lived, worked, and raised a family in the riding for a quarter-century and campaigned on water protection, the environmental impact of biosolids application, solar energy adoption, and the broader climate crisis.

Local Issues

Transportation infrastructure along Highway 14 (Sooke Road) and the Malahat section of Highway 1 was the most pressing practical concern for residents across the riding. Commuters travelling between Sooke and Greater Victoria endured daily congestion on the narrow, winding highway, and collisions on the Malahat regularly closed the Trans-Canada, stranding travellers and disrupting commerce. The NDP government invested in Highway 14 corridor improvements between 2020 and 2022, including widening a section from Glinz Lake Road to Connie Road to four lanes, building a new park-and-ride facility at Gillespie Road with fifty parking stalls and bus bays, constructing 600 metres of new sidewalks through Sooke's town centre, and resurfacing eleven kilometres of highway west of Sooke. On the Malahat, repaving of a 5.5-kilometre stretch from the summit viewpoint to Bamberton was completed in 2024. Despite these investments, candidates faced persistent demands for more transformative solutions, including bus rapid transit between Sooke and Victoria and long-discussed but unfunded safety improvements on the Malahat.

Healthcare access was a defining issue in a riding where growing communities lacked adequate medical infrastructure. Sooke's population had expanded significantly, but the community did not have a full-service hospital, and residents requiring emergency or specialist care faced a lengthy drive to Victoria. A community-based health care facility for Sooke had been discussed and advocated for since 2016 by the Sooke Region Communities Health Network, but as of the 2024 election the project remained in planning stages. Candidates debated the pace of primary care expansion and whether the NDP government's investments in nurse practitioners and team-based care were sufficient for a community that felt underserved relative to its growing population.

Housing affordability had been the primary driver of Sooke's population growth — families priced out of Greater Victoria moved west in search of more affordable homes — but the resulting demand pushed prices upward in the community itself, creating a cascading affordability crisis. Renters faced particular difficulty as vacancy rates tightened, and food banks in Sooke reported running out of supplies when schools reopened as families struggled with the combined burden of housing costs and other living expenses. Infrastructure in the community — including water supply systems, sewer capacity, and road networks — strained under the pace of growth, and candidates debated whether provincial investment was keeping pace with the demands placed on a community that was transitioning from a small rural town to a commuter suburb of Greater Victoria.