British Columbians weigh-in on the biggest news of 2014

2014 was a memorable year for news and people across the province are weighing in on what stories mattered the most.

What is the #1 story according to BC? The teacher’s strike and their dispute with the province, according to a year-end survey.

Mario Canseco with Insights West conducted the poll and says the story captured people’s interest to heavily because the dispute took so many months to settle.

“It seemed like it was going to be something that would take a couple weeks, it started at the end of the school year, it continued through the holidays for the kids, then it continued as we went into September,” he explains. “The fact that it took so long to get resolved, is one of the reasons why it stayed in the minds of residents.”

He says the number two story has been in the top five for past few years – the Northern Gateway pipeline, followed by the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

“If you look at the north for instance, many residents are deeply concerned about it and it’s something that really resonates in other areas of the province,” he says. “That’s just one of the reasons for these two stories to be there, because of the ongoing discussions that we continue to have and there’s really no certainty on where those two projects will end up in the next couple of weeks or even months.”

As for “News Maker of the Year”? Canseco says Premier Christy Clark won by a significant margin – 40%.

“It was quite interesting to see Vince Ready in #2,” Canseco points out. “This is somebody who came in out of the blue, everyone was discussing what he could do to solve the BCTF dispute with the government and now he’s become this household name, it was quite interesting to see someone like that make it to the #2 spot.”

Major local news saw our new mayor Lyn Hall get elected, fluoride was voted our of our water, and Cody Legebokoff’s guilty verdict.

Nationally and internationally, 2014 saw missing airplanes, most famously, the Malaysian air flight that disappeared in March and still hasn’t been found.

The shooting in parliament hill that saw one officer killed also made news this year, as did the ISIS uprising and racial tensions erupting from the shooting of a black teenager Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri.