NDP says it opened or expanded 250 schools while B.C. Liberals closed 250. Is that accurate?

During this provincial election, the B.C. NDP has touted building or expanding more than 250 schools over nine years, while criticizing the former B.C. Liberal government for closing 250 schools, rhetoric a former education minister says is misleading but the teachers’ federation says is accurate.

NDP Leader David Eby repeated the often-used line while in Coquitlam Friday to celebrate the construction of a new high school on Burke Mountain and outline his promise to build a new middle school in the community. He lumped the present Conservatives and its interim leader, Lorne Doerkson, in with the B.C. Liberals, despite the two parties being different and only sharing a small number of MLAs.

“We’re building schools, 250 newer expanded schools across the province. The previous government, they closed 250 schools,” said Eby. “Mr. Doerkson was a member of the B.C. Liberals before he was a member of B.C. United and then a member of the Conservatives. When they were trying to pay for their promises, they sold a parcel here of property worth $2 million. They sold it for $100,000 to a major donor. They sold a whole suite of properties here on Burke Mountain that could have been used for schools.”

The last time the Tories were in government was in 1933, before they formed a coalition with the provincial Liberals during the years leading up to and immediately following the Second World War.

Doerkson was elected as a member of the B.C. Liberals in 2020, three years after the NDP formed government.

Mike Bernier, B.C. Liberal education minister from 2015 to 2017 and briefly the leader of CentreBC, said it’s true that schools were closed under the government he was a part of but most were in communities where enrolment was dropping and it didn’t make sense to keep funding them. He said school boards decide what schools should be closed, not the provincial government, and pointed to the closure of two rural schools in his own riding.

“We had one school, a rural school, that was down to eight kids. There were more teachers and principals and vice-principals than there were kids in the school,” said Bernier. “What would happen is the school districts, through the school board, would have to make the determination of how they use that money that was coming to them, and so a lot of school districts would look at cost-saving measures when enrolments went down.”

Carole Gordon, president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, disputed Bernier’s characterization of events and said that the per student funding the B.C. Liberals brought in placed pressure on school boards to close schools.

According to data from the Education Ministry, 300 schools were closed between 2001 and 2015, with 42 new ones built and 70 replaced. A total of 67 school properties were also sold or leased by the province during that time.

Gordon said that she wants to see a government elected that will increase funding and support for students, not cut it.

“As someone who was teaching in the early 2000s, a lot of schools closed because of the financial pressures, because school districts who don’t control their revenue had to make really difficult decisions with less money, and so closing schools was one of the ways to do that,” she said. “That’s not always best for kids, and it’s not always best for communities, especially those smaller communities where maintaining a space for families to send their kids to, a space for communities to rally around for the Christmas concerts, for the back-to-school barbecue, for the spring fling.”

Jason Ellis, an associate professor of education at the University of B.C., sided more with Bernier, saying that schools did close under the B.C. Liberals but it wasn’t usually the province requesting a school district close a school. He said that some were replaced and others were built, and it isn’t a very accurate attack line for the NDP to be using.

“To say that the previous provincial government closed 250 schools, I don’t think is a terribly accurate claim because some of those were closed by school boards, others were replaced with other buildings,” said Ellis. “I can think of maybe one where the province directed the school board to close it.”

For Green candidate Carolyn Howe, current president of the Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association, neither the NDP nor the B.C. Liberals have done a good job when it comes to education. She pointed to promises Eby made in the 2024 election to put an educational assistant in every classroom and a psychologist in every school that have still not been fulfilled.

As for building new schools, she said it isn’t just fast-growing regions like Surrey and Langley that are having problems, but also places like Victoria where many schools are old and falling apart.

“I do agree that the B.C. Liberal government clearly showed in their time in government a complete disinterest in the importance of education, but the NDP, they haven’t stepped up to the plate in the kind of ways that are required for us to move forward,” said Howe. “We have 13 per cent of kids in B.C. now that aren’t going to public schools, and the reason for that is parents don’t trust that their kids are going to get the kind of excellent education that they (government) should be providing.”