Conservative Leader John Rustad speaks as people cheer and hold up signs during a campaign rally in Surrey B.C., on Oct. 17.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
B.C.’s second-fastest growing city got a lot of what it wanted from the province’s New Democratic Party government in the past seven years.
After the NDP pushed the BC Liberals from office, eking out a win in 2017 in part by taking six of nine ridings in Surrey, it cancelled a toll on the new bridge linking the city to the rest of the Lower Mainland.
The then-new government dragged its feet on allowing Uber into the province, ensuring that the area was among the last in North America to get the car-share service, a nod to the taxi industry heavily centred in Surrey’s South Asian community.
And the NDP agreed to pay for the very expensive central-Surrey-to-Langley SkyTrain line. It poured money into school construction for the burgeoning population, and it got started on a new hospital.
But it wasn’t enough.
Last week in the provincial election, Surrey residents elected B.C. Conservatives in seven of now 10 city ridings. The results in one riding, Surrey City Centre, are so close that a count this weekend of absentee ballots could flip the seat from NDP to Conservative. Provincially, the NDP emerged from the vote with only one more seat in the legislature than the Conservatives: 46 to 45.
“People felt frustrated. They couldn’t see or tell the changes the government was bringing in. We did a hospital, SkyTrain, we have built or expanded 36 schools but people still felt the changes were not enough,” said long-time NDP MLA Harry Bains, who did not run in this election.
He blamed federal immigration policy, which brought thousands to the city and made it impossible for his party to keep up, no matter how much it did.
“Every change we tried to bring in got overwhelmed by the overwhelming immigration,” said Mr. Bains, 72, who had represented Surrey-Newton.
The city, once considered simply a suburb to Vancouver, has transformed into a booming municipality but with growing pains. Its voters in this election rejected the left-leaning politics of B.C.’s other major cities – Vancouver, Burnaby, Victoria – and instead aimed their frustrations at the NDP government.
Some of the B.C. Conservative messaging around social issues also appears to have resonated with a socially conservative electorate.
Surrey’s population grew to about 610,000 in 2023 from around 548,000 in 2017 and is projected to reach 645,000 by 2026. It has been a favoured destination for thousands of new immigrants and all kinds of other new arrivals because of its relatively cheap housing. According to the city’s website, the population is 33 per cent Caucasian, many of them clustered in Cloverdale or South Surrey, 38 per cent South Asian, nine per cent Chinese, seven per cent Filipino, and 13 per cent “other.”
The NDP lost a member of cabinet, Education Minister Rachna Singh, and two other seats where previously popular incumbents were running.
That’s in stark contrast to the seven ridings that went orange in 2020 and six in 2017, when John Horgan led the party. David Eby became Premier in 2022 after Mr. Horgan stepped down.
Significantly, it was voters from the large non-white communities in Surrey that produced some of the biggest swings, according to extensive polling done by Mainstreet Research.
Mainstreet CEO Quito Maggi said that while the non-white vote is why Richmond, with a population that is 54 per cent Chinese, went so definitively to the Conservatives, the picture was more nuanced in the multiculturalism of Surrey.
“There is still a solid core that are still hardcore NDP – older, unionized labour,” he said.
Strategists and politicians with both the NDP and the B.C. Conservatives say the major issue was the government’s failure to keep up with the city’s explosive growth. Voters got tired of waiting after seven years of NDP government that they thought would bring them more schools, transit, hospital space and traffic solutions.
The NDP’s housing policies promising much more density, were aimed at appealing to younger voters frustrated over their inability to buy, but that didn’t play as well in Surrey.
The city already builds more housing than almost anywhere else in the region, at some of the lowest prices, but that lands people in neighbourhoods still short of public amenities.
“The level at which Surrey has been delay, delay, delay has been pretty shocking,” said Azim Jiwani, the chief of staff to Conservative Leader John Rustad and one of the top strategists for the party’s Surrey election tactics.
“People felt like they were being ignored.”
The crime and public-disorder issues also didn’t help the NDP, especially with the years-long fight over switching from the RCMP to a municipal force, a change forced by the province that left some voters concerned that it had an impact on front-line policing.
Mr. Jiwani said the Conservative proposal for a women and children’s hospital resonated in Surrey, which doesn’t have enough hospital space for the 6,000 women a year who give birth south of the Fraser – a region with almost half of the births in B.C.
(The NDP’s Adrian Dix countered that the NDP was already building a major expansion to Surrey Memorial Hospital that would include a new maternity unit and pediatric services.)
In addition, there was anger among some groups over the province’s education policy on sexual orientation and gender inclusivity, usually referred to as SOGI 123, something barely mentioned in campaigns past.
The policy, brought in eight years ago under the then-BC Liberal government, was attacked repeatedly by the Conservatives in radio ads on Punjabi-language radio stations and it showed up as an issue for campaigners on both sides.
The policy is not curriculum but additional guidance for teachers on how to handle discussions about sexuality and sexual orientation with an aim to making students of all types feel included. But Mr. Jiwani said it enraged parents from some cultural backgrounds who didn’t like what they saw as the availability of sexually explicit materials in the school.
Mr. Jiwani said he heard that a lot from the Muslim community in south Surrey, largely educated professionals who hold to traditional values.
“One woman said her daughter came home talking about boys having sex. In our culture [Mr. Jiwani is Muslim], talking to young kids about sex is super-super taboo.”
Amrit Birring, a community activist who has been organizing anti-SOGI protests for more than a year, said he believes a third of the votes that swung to the Conservatives were because of his group’s campaign against SOGI.
However, Mr. Maggi said he believed it was only a secondary factor after the growth issues.
The NDP’s Mr. Bains acknowledged that the party hadn’t done enough to “deal with that issue effectively,” though he also blamed the Conservatives for spreading misinformation.
Mr. Jiwani said the sudden rise in antipathy to the program was not a result of Conservative fear-mongering.
“We tapped into something that was already there.”