Where the parties stand on the major issues heading into the B.C. election

Where the parties stand on the major issues heading into the B.C. election

Published 4:00 pm Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Amid the avalanche of policy announcements, platform promises and attack ads, it can be hard to know where party leaders really stand on the issues.

Mario Canseco of Research Co. regularly polls British Columbian voters to ask which issues they care most about. For the past three years, housing has led. This year, it is cost-of-living.

“It’s something that everybody can relate to,” he said.

In a poll conducted on Oct. 13, the economy/jobs was the top issue for 25 per cent of respondents; housing/poverty/homelessness for 23 per cent; healthcare for 21 per cent, and crime/public safety for nine per cent.

Here is a breakdown of where the parties stand on several major topics:

Economy

With the cost of living the top issue for most voters, economic concerns moved to the forefront as the campaigns hit the home stretch.

A back-and-forth emerged as campaigns questioned each other’s math and whether spending or tax-cut promises are realistic.

After 10 years in power, the NDP is defending its economic record amid historic deficits. The party’s main new plank is a proposed income tax hike on the wealthiest 3.88 per cent of British Columbians.

The NDP says it would spend the extra money on new health-care facilities, child care centres and schools, slowly lowering the deficit over the next three years.

The B.C. Conservative Party promises to cut taxes by raising the personal income tax exemption. This would essentially give everyone a $1,000 break.

The party also promises new spending and a reduced deficit. Much of this relies on extremely optimistic economic growth, far beyond what banks and academic experts forecast.

The B.C. Green Party goes in the opposite direction, calling for massive new wealth taxes on the super-rich to pay down the deficit.

This would involve large levies in year one (from five per cent on wealth above $50 million to 20 per cent on wealth above $1 billion), followed by smaller taxes in year two and beyond.

CentreBC would provide economic relief by rolling back the first-bracket income tax hike from 5.6 per cent to 5.06 per cent, and ending a freeze on tax brackets.

Healthcare

All major parties commit to fixing the health-care system but disagree about how best to proceed.

B.C. Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson has announced plans to build a new women and children’s hospital in Surrey and create a $50-million fund to help keep emergency rooms open.

The Tories also plan to create an expert review panel to identify ways to improve the health-care system, and to remove barriers for doctors educated abroad who want to practice in B.C.

The NDP is promising more than a dozen new urgent and primary care centres and to hire more doctors from abroad.

The NDP also claims the B.C. Conservatives secretly plan to cut spending by reducing contingency funds.

This fund helps cover extra health-care costs, such as unexpected surgeries, and tackle other types of provincial emergencies, such as wildfires.

Doerkson says his party will not cut healthcare.

The B.C. Greens continue the push for integrated community health centres, promising one in every riding. These would offer a range of services, from doctors to dietitians. The party also wants to centralize surgery referrals in a single entry list, replacing the distributed list model.

CentreBC says it would create a $25-million stabilization fund, add surgeries each year by opening more operating rooms and create an online public health dashboard to track everything from surgeries to ER wait times.

Public safety

B.C. Conservative candidates blame the NDP, in government for the last nine years, for what they perceive as a worsening opioid crisis and increased street disorder.

Doerkson and the Conservatives commit to safer streets by cracking down on gangs, locking up violent offenders, hiring more police officers and stopping illegal drug use in hospitals and shelters.

At one press conference, Doerkson used a graffitied alleyway in downtown Vancouver as a backdrop when promising to deploy more police to hard-hit neighbourhoods to deal with street-level crime.

He wants to hire 250 more municipal police officers by expanding the police academy at the Justice Institute of B.C., and add 500 more RCMP and 150 civilian staff over five years to work in rural and regional communities.

This may prove difficult. Police detachments and unions have regularly complained about the struggle to recruit and hire more police officers. Doerkson did not say how the B.C. Conservatives plan to address the gap between recruiting and hiring.

Doerkson said the B.C. Conservatives also plan to end the B.C. NDP’s “safer supply” program and expand access to naloxone. Safer supply is a prescription service introduced in 2021 to reduce overdoses.

Since the toxic drug crisis was declared in B.C. in 2016, there have been more than 18,000 overdose deaths, including 1,015 reported fatal overdoses from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31, 2026.

Former chief coroner and safer supply advocate Lisa Lapointe is running for the B.C. Green Party in the Saanich South riding against the B.C. NDP candidate and former Global News legislative reporter Richard Zussman.

The B.C. Green Party’s plan to address the toxic drug crisis includes providing regulated, pharmaceutical alternatives to the illicit drug supply to reduce fatalities associated with substance use.

The B.C. NDP pledge up to $90 million to create 75 involuntary care spaces at the Okanagan Correctional Centre in Oliver for people with co-occurring mental health, addiction and brain injury diagnoses.

The B.C. Conservative Party says the promise is years late and lacks a timeline, but the NDP’s platform does include $43 million for the facility in both the 2027-28 and 2028-29 fiscal years.

CentreBC promises to hire 100 more provincial RCMP officers over five years and expand B.C.-based police training. Party Leader Elenore Sturko is a former RCMP officer.

The party would also add 60 Crown prosecutors with support staff by 2030/31 and make an extortion task force permanent.

For safer streets, CentreBC says it would fund safety and outreach teams in 20 B.C. downtowns by 2028, with municipal and business association oversight and cost sharing.

Child Care

Access to affordable child care burst into the campaign spotlight when it was revealed that NDP Leader David Eby’s children are enrolled in a $10-per-day child care program, despite a high family income and only 10 per cent of care spaces being designated at this low rate.

Eby says he donates the difference between $10 per day and full price back to the centre.

Creating universal $10-per-day childcare in the province was a major part of former NDP premier John Horgan’s platform. This has not come close to becoming a reality, and Eby paused the program earlier this year.

He now promises to build more spaces for before- and after-school care, while still keeping costs down. But he no longer promises $10-per-day child care for all British Columbian families.

The B.C. Conservative Party says it would keep the current $10-per-day spaces, but means-test future ones. The party also wants to ensure independent child care offerings formerly left out of the subsidy system can get funding.

The B.C. Green Party is now the only holdout still promising universal $10-per-day daycare.

Indigenous rights

Much of the campaign discussion of Indigenous rights has centred on the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and property rights.

DRIPA requires B.C. to align all laws with a United Nations declaration on Indigenous rights. The law was recently used to invalidate parts of the Mineral Tenure Act in a landmark court decision that the province has appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

This court decision opens other B.C. laws to challenge, even though Eby, who helped create DRIPA in 2019 (it passed unanimously in the legislature), says that was not the intention behind it.

Eby says the government was supposed to align provincial law with the U.N. declaration over time, and shouldn’t be forced by the courts.

Eby promised to amend the law, but couldn’t move those changes forward last spring amid staunch First Nations opposition and some of his own caucus members refusing to vote with the government.

The B.C. Conservatives will stop at nothing short of full repeal.

But with First Nations opposed to even changing the law, it is unclear how repealing it can avoid protests. Doerkson has not articulated how he would respond to this opposition, although he says he still strongly believes in working with First Nations.

At the other end of the spectrum, the B.C. Greens promise to keep the laws as is, and to work harder to align B.C. laws with DRIPA instead.

OneBC Leader Dallas Brodie has repeatedly said she wants to take down what she calls the “reconciliation industry” in B.C. and to protect landowners’ property rights, making opposition to Indigenous sovereignty a core stance for her party.

Car insurance

In the third week of the election campaign, it was revealed that Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson had sent a letter to the Insurance Bureau of Canada (ICBC), the Law Society of B.C., the Trial Lawyers Association of B.C. and the Canadian Bar Association signalling that, if elected on Oct. 24, his party would do away with ICBC’s no-fault insurance system.

ICBC launched no-fault insurance, known as “Enhanced Care,” on May 1, 2021. It provides anyone injured in a crash with care and recovery benefits, but eliminates the ability to sue.

The Crown corporation says that moving to a care-based model “largely removed legal costs from the system” and saves $1.5 billion, leading to more affordable rates for customers.

Doerkson’s letter says “everything’s on the table,” including opening auto insurance to private competition to drive down auto insurance rates and bringing back sensible limits on minor-injury claims.

When asked about the letter, Doerkson said he was “not promising anything.”

Eby brought up the letter at multiple press conferences, even holding it up at one and pointing to Doerkson’s signature.

Two days later, Eby promised to freeze car insurance rates for three years, claiming a Conservative government would double car insurance costs in B.C.

Doerkson countered that a Conservative government would take measures to limit costs and the amount lawyers can charge.

Housing

Eby promises an NDP government would increase the province’s speculation tax and create a new tax on unsold, empty units.

The proposed “unsold condo tax” would start at two per cent of a unit’s assessed value after one year of vacancy, rising by one percentage point for each additional year it remains empty.

The NDP wants to raise the speculation and vacancy tax by one per cent, bringing it to two per cent for domestic buyers and five per cent for foreign purchasers.

The B.C. Conservative Party’s platform says new homes “cost more and take longer to build because of the taxes, government fees and red tape piled onto every project.”

The party wants to reduce “construction taxes and charges,” and to simplify the building code.

The B.C. Green Party’s housing platform seeks to help renters by preventing landlords from dramatically increasing rents after a tenancy ends. The party also wants to scale up non-market housing with $1.5 billion in annual funding to build 26,000 new units each year.

The Greens would also introduce legislation that formally recognizes housing as a fundamental human right.

Centre BC promises to build homes faster by setting provincial standards for rezonings and capping the wait for building permits at eight weeks by Jan. 1, 2028. The party would also double the number of BC Builds projects, adding 20,000 below-market homes by 2031.

Education

SOGI – or Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity – has continued to be the main focus of education discussions along the campaign trail.

Doerkson says SOGI has become “an absolute lightning rod for division” and a “challenge.” He wants it repealed.

The then-B.C. Liberal-run Education Ministry introduced SOGI 123 in 2016 to guide teachers and schools in creating inclusive and safe spaces for gender-diverse students.

The provincial government recently ended its relationship with the ARC Foundation, which helped develop the program, saying the service is no longer needed because the resources are now in place to support those children.

Eby says that while the B.C. NDP ended its relationship with the foundation, his party hasn’t “abandoned the essential work to prevent bullying in our schools.”

B.C. Conservative candidate Heather Maahs has come under fire for conflating SOGI with grooming and pedophilia, and for mistakenly identifying it as a curriculum, rather than the anti-bullying resource that it is.

The NDP called for the Conservatives to drop her as a candidate ahead of the Oct. 3 registration deadline for this and other previous remarks about LGBTQ+ people. She is still running in Chilliwack North, but did not show for a recent all-candidates forum.

OneBC also promises to repeal SOGI, listing it as a top priority on its party platform.

The B.C. Green Party says it would continue supporting and expanding the SOGI 123 initiative to create inclusive school environments that support 2SLGBTQIA+ students and address the topics of gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Green Party would also review the per-pupil funding formula and develop a new needs-based model to fund costs, while eliminating inclusive education funding gaps,

CentreBC says it would open 25,000 new school seats by 2031 using standard designs and pre-fabricated additions. The party also promises to add 1,500 education assistants by 2030 and ensure there is one counsellor for every 400 students.

The party’s platform also promises to invest $100 million a year in family support and early intervention by the 2030/31 school year.

The NDP promises a new middle school in Coquitlam, but the party’s platform costing doesn’t mention education otherwise.