A vast majority of British Columbians are feeling the bite these days, and easing financial pressures related to day-to-day life – housing, groceries, bills and transportation – is top-of-mind as the Oct. 19 provincial election approaches.
While the provincial government is of course not solely responsible for the hard times, what it does or doesn’t do certainly does have an impact on the cost of living.
Former Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner (2014-2018), now Conservative MLA candidate for Surrey-Serpentine River, was a city hall employee and manager of economic development before she entered political life as a city councillor in 2005.
“It’s really appalling that almost any topic you chose we’re failing, and affordability is right at the top of the list and a whole lot of that has got to do with regulations that they (the NDP) put in that actually make things less affordable,” Hepner told the Now-Leader. “Some of their red tape on housing and building, they’re actually the problem not the solution.”
If people don’t have good jobs and B.C. doesn’t have a strong economy, she said, that’s “the linchpin for absolutely everything, and if you look at where we are relative to economic success, we have been downgraded financially twice or three times now. We’ve had three downgrades.”
Hepner said mines are waiting to open, stuck in red tape.
While both the Conservatives and NDP are promising to do away with the carbon tax if they form government, Hepner said, the NDP will get rid of it on residents but impose it on businesses, “which circuitously comes right back to you and me.”
The former Surrey mayor noted that part of the reason why groceries are so expensive is our reliance on importation. Conservative policy, Hepner said, is to “make sure that we have our own food security pieces and that is doubling down on our own agriculture production, doubling down on making sure that we can advance the technology and the grants and incentives to make agriculture here and to be able to produce beyond that.
“Oftentimes we get the product and then we send it somewhere else to have the secondary use for it, and what we would be suggesting is that you grow the product, you make the secondary use within the same arena. I don’t know, growing berries make jam at the same place.”
She charged that a top-down NDP governing model is “100 per cent” connected to affordability. “I think many of the policies that they’ve imposed have a direct correlation to affordability. That stupid bag tax, c’mon.”
For her, smaller government is the way. “When you look at 63,000 new public service jobs compared to 5,600 private jobs, that already tells you economic development has not taken a front seat, it’s taken a back seat.”
Hepner considered former NDP premier John Horgan to have more of a centrist approach to governing than Premier David Eby, whom she says is an “extreme socialist” producing “just wingnut” policies like making drugs available in vending machines outside hospitals.
“Their fundamentals are skewed, if you will.”
Jinny Sims, a veteran Surrey NDP MLA and former NDP MP, is seeking provincial re-election in Surrey-Panorama. She offered up a grocery list – pardon the pun – of things the NDP has done while in power to make things more affordable, such as getting rid of the tolls for Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges. “We have to remind ourselves that these were the only two bridges in the province that had tolls.”
If the NDP once again forms government on Oct. 19 savings, Sims said, savings are going to continue with ICBC. “So far we’ve reduced the rates by $500 and frozen them. They will be kept low, moving forward, for at least two years. So it’s not that we’re doing it for the election, this has been our goal since David (Eby) cleaned up the ‘dumpster fire,’ so to speak.”
Her party also put MSP premiums in the rear view mirror, she added. “People are no longer having to pay for their health-care premium, which is big.”
“We’ve frozen BC Hydro rates and we’ve kept them very, very reasonable.”
Sims said the NDP government also increased benefits for families, such as child care. “Let me tell you, in Surrey-Panorama alone, families have saved, back in their pockets, $35 million since we became government, just on child-care costs. And those are real numbers based on those people who have claimed those benefits, and that makes a huge difference, and that’s a program we’re committed to growing.”
It also “cracked down” on real estate flipping, and put a tax on empty homes “so that we can make more places available, and our plan is to create 300,000 new middle-class homes and help bring down costs.”
As for the ballooning price of food, Sims attributes much of that to international trends.
“Grocery prices, during COVID there was a real supply issue, but I think many corporations, big companies rode on that wave and did not make the adjustment afterwards and once again we know they’ve been having huge, huge profits. This is an international problem.”
Conservative leader John Rustad's “Rustad Rebate,” namely a tax reduction of up to $3,000 per month for people paying rent or mortgages, would work out to roughly $1,600 in annual savings, if his party forms government. He said it’s looking at putting an income cap of around $250,000 on household income for the rebate, so for people whose annual income is greater than this it wouldn’t be available.
He called it the “most significant relief that homeowners and renters will have ever received in British Columbia’s history, on top of that of course removing the carbon tax, getting up to 36 cents removed from the cost of energy.”
Rustad said the provincial government needs to do everything it can to help people be able to make a living here, “to be able to stay here.
“This is a major issue that we’re facing right across the province this day, and that is affordability. When you look at the fact that half the people in this province are struggling to put food on the table and to pay their rent, that one in two youth are thinking of leaving this province, that one in three British Columbians are thinking of leaving this province, clearly the major issue that we are facing in British Columbia today is to be able to make life more affordable for people.”
NDP leader David Eby has announced a provincewide plan to offer low-interest loans to middle-income renters if his party forms government. The loans would cover 40 per cent of the purchase price of a new home for those that qualify.
“Everywhere I go, families tell me they dream of buying their first home, but decades of rampant speculation in the market has put it out of reach for too many,” said Eby. “Our plan will make that dream come true for thousands of first-time, middle-class home-buyers by substantially reducing the listing price and the mortgage you will pay.”
Called “Opening Doors to Homeownership,” Eby said the plan will add 25,000 homes over the next five years, or 5,000 per year. He also promises he'll deliver a $1,000 annual tax cut for the average family to apply to more than 90 per cent of British Columbians.
- with file from Malin Jordan
