BC party leaders campaign on transit, the Massey Tunnel and safety

The day after the leaders’ debate, B.C.’s political parties were back on the campaign trail.

BC NDP leader David Eby returned to Surrey for the fifth time on Thursday, promising a plan to eliminate the $45 bus pass fee for low-income seniors and allow more to qualify. He also announced funding for a major regional bus rapid transit project.

“This commitment is backed with $250 million in funding in order for us to work with the federal government to deliver bus rapid transit between Surrey and White Rock,” Eby said.

The BC Conservatives also tackled transportation on Thursday, promising to scrap the Massey Tunnel replacement project and proceed with a 10-lane bridge instead.

“It totally makes sense on saving money for the taxpayers, getting this bridge built faster than they can build this tunnel, and environmentally it’s way further ahead,” Ian Paton, BC Conservative candidate for Delta South, said.

In 2013, former premier Christy Clark announced a $3 billion 10-lane toll bridge that would have been open in 2022.

The new BC NDP government scrapped it four years later and announced an eight-lane tunnel replacement in 2021, but in 2026 fired the main design consortium.

The estimated cost has now doubled to more than $8 billion, with completion slated for 2031.

But Eby said construction of a staging area for the tunnel is already underway and changing course again comes with a cost.

“We’re talking about years of additional waste as they redesign the project yet again, with drivers stranded,” he said.

“It puts $3 billion in federal funding at risk, maybe never to be seen again.”

Eby also attacked his Conservative opponent, Lorne Doerkson, for not yet releasing a costed platform to explain how much his promises will cost or how he will pay for them.

Meanwhile, the BC Conservatives have dumped a candidate after he was accused of posting online remarks about Hitler and the Holocaust.

The party confirmed in a reply tweet on X that Jordan McIntosh, the candidate in Vancouver-Strathcona, will no longer be a Conservative candidate.

“If elected, he will not sit in caucus,” the party stated online.

CentreBC leader Elenore Sturko also campaigned in Surrey and said she is committed to hiring more police officers if she is elected, while helping the fight against extortion crime and dangerous repeat offenders.

“We will hire 500 additional RCMP officers to the provincial business line,” Sturko said.

“Under the NDP and previous governments, the RCMP provincial line stayed stagnant at 2,602 officers. We want to boost that over five years at the rate of 100 officers a year so we can fill vacancies as well as make sure that we’re expanding important units.”

The BC Green Party continued to focus its campaign on Vancouver Island.

Leader Emily Lowan was in North Saanich and highlighted the economic differences between her party and the others.

“For too long, our government has taken workers for granted,” she said. “It has used the NDP brand as cover to enact an anti-labour agenda, evident in Eby’s BC NDP overseeing the longest public sector strike, and longest nursing strike, in our province’s history.”

“When we sat across the table from the BC NDP to try and re-negotiate a deal, we posed a fundamental question: which side are you on? That’s when we pushed for sectoral bargaining, a labour rights model developed by Vince Ready, the same labour mediator Eby has relied on to support his tense relationship with unions. When David Eby refused to support sectoral bargaining, we got our confirmation: he’s not on the side of the workers.”

The Baigent-Ready model of sectoral bargaining would allow unions to reach a collective agreement that covers all workers in a sector of the economy, rather than on a workplace-by-workplace basis, according to a release from the Green Party.

Lowan also said the BC Green Party plans to increase the minimum wage annually, at a rate of inflation plus one per cent, until parity with the living wage is reached.