The BC Conservative leader was in downtown Vancouver on Tuesday to talk about plans to tackle street disorder, crime and addiction.
“The time is now to act; the law must be respected again and human dignity must be restored,” Lorne Doerkson said.
If elected, the BC Conservatives said they would hire up to 1,000 new police officers, crown prosecutors and trial judges, end safe supply, amend and enforce the Mental Health Act and improve access to mental health care.
The BC NDP is asking how the BC Conservatives can pay for those promises while also allowing a tax freeze.
“Unless he has a magic wand, this is just not something that is real,” BC NDP leader David Eby said.
“The only possible outcome of his plan is to slash health-care spending.”
Get breaking National news
In Coquitlam, Eby announced his party’s plans to reduce surgical wait times in the province.
Using money from tax hikes on the top four per cent of wage earners, the plan includes eight new MRI machines and 10 new CT scanners for health-care facilities across B.C., co-ordinated regional wait-lists and recruiting more specialists from the U.S.
The Conservatives argue Eby is trying to fix a mess he helped create.
“This presents the common problem for health care in British Columbia and in Canada is that you can throw a lot of money at it, including a billion dollars, and it’s really hard to assess what value you get for that money,” Jason Sutherland, with UBC Health Sciences and policy research, said.
The NDP’s focus on wait times and senior care so far this week sees Eby moving away from talk of Trump and trade to focus on issues voters say matter most: affordability and health care.
- ‘Local Governance 101’ Okanagan community’s first-ever council trains ahead of inaugural meeting
- Lorne Doerkson says Conservatives committed to all campaign promises
- Feds open to supporting elements of Divorce Act amendments, but fate unclear
- Alberta NDP says UCP cooking riding boundaries ahead of election
“I think the NDP is struggling to find a message track that really resonates, that overcomes this question of why they called the election,” Hamish Telford, a political science professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, said.
It’s now been two weeks since Eby called that snap election, with Thursday marking the midway point of the campaign, but it’s a crucial time as families gather this holiday weekend and next week’s leaders debate.
The BC Greens also announced their plan to reform the province’s health-care system.
“One in every eleven dollars spent in this province is government healthcare spending,” said BC Green Party leader Emily Lowan. “Yet people are getting sicker and conditions for workers are deteriorating, all as we watch millions of dollars flow to private healthcare providers.
“The BC Greens are the only party vowing to end the creeping privatization of healthcare. Instead, we’ll keep public dollars focused on public care through delivering Community Health Centres (CHCs) and cutting down on bloated bureaucracy.”
The party’s plan would include the establishment of an integrated Community Health Centre in every riding in the province, increased funding for nurses in the public system to support safe nurse-to-patient ratios and end reliance on private agency nurses and centralize referrals for surgeries and team-based models of non-surgical and pre-surgical care by introducing a single-entry model, rather than distributed lists.
Introduce Private Health Care act – they will purchase MRIs and provide surgeries.
At K MacQueen:
Thanks but got about 20% thru that and gave up as it all seemed like it was heading towards the obvious.
When the Revolving Door Becomes Policy
Before B.C. voters go to the polls, candidates should explain what happens when addiction, disorder, custody and release keep leading back to the same place.
There is an old saying: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. What do we call it when governments identify the same problems for decades, commission reports, promise improvements, and then confront versions of the same failures again? At some point, the revolving door stops looking accidental.
I spent 25 years working in provincial and federal corrections. As British Columbians prepare to vote on October 24, I want candidates to answer a question that reaches beyond slogans about safer streets: What happens to the person who repeatedly cycles through addiction, homelessness, policing, courts, custody, treatment, release and back into the community?
We need to distinguish between two different situations. Some adults who use illicit drugs retain the capacity to understand their choices and the consequences of their conduct. Addiction may make change difficult, but it cannot become a blanket exemption from responsibility for theft, assault, intimidation or other harm. Another group is different: people whose severe substance-use disorder is combined with serious mental illness, repeated overdose, acquired brain injury or cognitive impairment. Where capacity exists, accountability matters. Where capacity has genuinely been lost, treatment and appropriate containment may be necessary.
Corrections once understood that human contact was part of security. When direct supervision replaced older barrier-based jail design, officers were expected to work among offenders, know the unit, recognize developing tensions, model appropriate behaviour and assist with reintegration. In my early experience, an officer might supervise roughly seven offenders. Over time I saw ratios rise toward 1:30 and, in large units, approach 1:80, with roaming officers providing additional presence when available. Those figures reflect my professional experience, not every B.C. jail. But the operational effect was clear: you can know seven people; you can monitor 30; at 80, much of the job becomes maintaining order.
When meaningful supervision recedes, informal authority fills the space. In earlier years, institutional leverage often revolved around tobacco, debts and common privileges. Today the illicit economy is far more dangerous. Drugs, gangs, experienced recidivists and institutional ‘heavies’ can exert enormous influence over weaker offenders. That environment can work directly against rehabilitation.
BC Corrections now reports that almost 70 per cent of the people it supervises have diagnosed mental-health or addiction needs. Yet the Auditor General has questioned correctional programming for years. In 2015, appropriate core programs were recommended in only 27 per cent of the files examined, and only 15 per cent of sampled offenders fully or partly completed them. At the time, only one of five core programs had demonstrated a reduction in reoffending. In 2019, the Auditor General returned and described progress on the earlier recommendations as mixed.
That does not mean rehabilitation is unreasonable. It means we must stop confusing attendance with results. A completion certificate is not rehabilitation. Abstinence while incarcerated is not proof of recovery. Outcomes should be measured after release: housing stability, treatment engagement, overdose, repeat offending and return to custody. Serious addiction, trauma and cognitive impairment also require confidential individual clinical treatment, not only group programming that may expose personal vulnerabilities inside a predatory environment.
Then the gate opens. A person is told to avoid drugs and former associates, attend counselling, take medication, obey probation, find work and secure safe housing. In today’s housing market, some leave custody for shelters, unstable rooms, couch-surfing or the street – environments that may put them immediately beside the same drug use and relationships they have been told to avoid. Housing is not separate from public safety. It is part of whether rehabilitation survives.
We should also be willing to ask what taxpayers are purchasing with the supports already being provided.
In British Columbia, a single employable person on income assistance may receive up to $1,060 per month: $560 in support plus a maximum $500 shelter allowance. A single person who qualifies for the Persons with Disabilities designation may receive up to $1,483.50 per month: $983.50 in support plus a maximum $500 shelter allowance. The shelter amount depends on actual circumstances; it is not simply an additional $500 cash payment to every recipient, and a substance-use disorder does not automatically qualify someone for disability assistance.
The point is not that these amounts are excessive. In today’s housing market, they may be insufficient to obtain safe independent accommodation. The harder question is whether income assistance without housing, treatment, supervision or measurable progress can reasonably be described as a rehabilitation strategy.
If a person receiving public support remains homeless, severely addicted, repeatedly involved with emergency services, unable to maintain treatment and cycling through police, hospitals and corrections, government should measure the total public cost of that cycle – not merely the cost of each service in isolation.
Simply issuing financial assistance and returning someone to the same street environment is not rehabilitation. Nor is it fiscally responsible if the same person then requires repeated ambulance responses, emergency treatment, policing, court appearances and incarceration. The question should not be only how much government spends, but what measurable outcome that spending produces.
The consequences return to the community. Police must prioritize violence and immediate danger. Lower-level theft and disorder may be reported later, reported online or never reported. Statistics Canada has long recognized this ‘dark figure’ of crime. Kelowna’s own community-safety work has also found substantial non-reporting. A theft that a retailer does not report is still a theft. A frightening encounter that never produces a police file still happened. Police statistics matter, but they are not a complete census of community experience.
Public space raises the same issue. Homelessness is not a crime, and addiction does not make every person violent. But behaviour matters. When open drug use, trafficking, intimidation or violence makes families, seniors, workers or people in recovery avoid a park, sidewalk, library entrance or transit stop, that space is no longer equally available in practice. The vulnerable person is not always the person creating the disorder. It may be the retail employee, the elderly pedestrian, the teenager waiting for a bus or the recovering addict trying to avoid the environment that once controlled their life.
Kelowna is already debating safer streets, but municipalities cannot create provincial mental-health law, correctional policy or secure clinical capacity. Local leaders have called on B.C. to examine the Okanagan Correctional Centre as a site for secure, health-led treatment for people with severe mental-health, addiction and brain-injury needs. OCC has substantial secure infrastructure and an existing mental-health unit. That does not mean relabelling jail cells as hospital beds. It means examining whether part of the site can support a properly separated, medically governed service with psychiatry, addiction medicine, nursing, neuropsychological assessment and individual treatment.
Not everyone who uses drugs belongs in secure treatment. The legal threshold must remain high and subject to independent review. But for the smaller group whose serious mental disorder, substance-use disorder or brain injury leaves them unable to remain safe in the community and who meet the Mental Health Act criteria, repeatedly returning them to the street is neither treatment nor public safety.
Before candidates ask for our votes, they should tell us what happens after the overdose, the police contact, the court appearance, the jail sentence, the treatment program and the release. We cannot incarcerate our way out of addiction. We cannot tolerate or subsidize our way out of its consequences either. We need accountability where capacity exists, effective rehabilitation where it is possible, secure clinical treatment where serious impairment meets the lawful threshold, correctional staffing sufficient for meaningful supervision, transitional housing that supports recovery, and public spaces that remain genuinely public.
Once is a failure. Twice is a warning. After decades of reports, audits and repeated promises, voters are entitled to ask why the revolving door is still turning.
Funny how Eby will not offer a solution to the issues that he created. If he offers to tackle the street issues he will be roasted severely. He calls an election in which he is going to lose and cost the taxpayer 83 million. Should have just ridden this storm out and fade off into the sunset like the other leaders who ended up causing more harm than good. Trudeau and Singh come to mind.
All any candidate needs to do to win is say they oppose DRIPA as it is now and will repeal or amend it.Unelected minority groups should not have veto rights over the decisions of the elected leaders.
Six Months ago 90% of MLAs who actually “do” represent the electorate wanted DRIPA to be amended, suspended or repealed. Fact. Eby who represents all BC was the initiator of the amendments and suspension. The Public Land Use Society, PLUS, is putting out poll numbers of 66%, 75% and 86% that represent the opinion of those surveyed wanting the decision making powers “”fully”” back-with elected officials.
Angus Reid polls had 47% of British Columbians support repealing DRIPA outright.53% feel DRIPA goes too far in limiting provincial authority, a rise from 44% in August 2025. Only 30% view the act as a necessary step toward reconciliation, dropping from previous years. 26% of past BC NDP voters surprisingly support scrapping the law.
These are the numbers that represent BC.
Let’s get rid of this dumpster fire called NDP and get BC back on track!
The second those advance polls open, I am voting. BC needs a change.
BC Cons 80 seats Green 10 NDP 3
Conservatives are listening to the people of B.C unlike the “Bankroller of the Beggars” Eby and the Needles Drugs and Poverty Party
Conservatives will have to do what you have been doing for years. RUN A DEFICIT until they can figure out how to fix the mess you created, By the way.. Where the 1000 grocery benefit you promised in the last election. Horgan was the best you ever had. Your a turd Eby