Sooke road and the Malahat are two of the busiest corridors on the South Island. We need to provide encouragement and infrastructure for easy mode shifting. Even adding right turn lanes in developed areas will make a big difference. Additionally, we need to link the CVRD and CRD transit systems.

The B.C. Greens will: 

• Partner with local governments to drive development of more walkable neighbourhoods, complete communities, active transportation and healthy community design.

• Work with local governments to establish a vision for sustainable transportation in an era of expanded population growth on the South Island, including through:

  • A regional transportation strategy;

  • Establishing a regional governance body to overcome fractured decision-making and deliver integrated planning for the growing region; 

  • Investing to support expansion of public transit options to help people move around more easily; 

  • Building frequent and affordable public transportation links between cities, such as between Cowichan and the CRD.

• Prioritize investment in transit service coming out of COVID-19 to support economic recovery, improve livability of communities, and reduce GHG emissions. 

• Ensure that the projected long-term losses facing TransLink, BC Transit and BC Ferries are dealt with so that service levels are maintained, allowing ridership to quickly bounce back through the economic recovery period.

• Ensure no disruption in future expansion due to the pandemic. 

• Work with local and regional governments to redesign the transit funding model and establish an equitable, stable long-term funding model for transit. 

• Develop climate and sustainability criteria, including consideration of cumulative impacts, that will be applied to all future capital projects including transportation infrastructure investments.

Instead of investing in corporate developers who drive up prices to make a profit, The BC government needs to significantly scale up support for new non-profit and co-op housing. In addition to making more housing available, this could drive prices down across the board, because lower-priced “non-market” housing will compete with higher-priced, profit-driven “market” housing.

Affordable Rental Housing

Low vacancy rates mean landlords continue to raise rental costs, making renting more and more unaffordable.

Currently, 1 in 3 Canadian renters are worried about making next month’s rent. At the same time, rents keep going up higher. In 2021 alone, Vancouver rents increased by 14.2%.

A lack of affordable housing makes it hard to find a place to live and drives up the price of available housing. Those who can’t find a place to live, or can’t afford a home in an increasingly expensive market, end up living far away from their communities, in unsafe conditions or on the street. 

People looking for a new place to live face skyrocketing rents across the province. Vancouver is currently ranked the least affordable city of the top 30 major cities in North America. The provincial minimum wage is significantly below a “livable wage” in many regions of BC.

The imbalanced housing market is also reflected in Vancouver’s high eviction rate. With such a low vacancy rate, landlords have the ability to charge extremely high rents when they get new tenants, so there’s a strong incentive to find ways to evict those who are paying less.

The BC government has spent four years claiming to make life easier for renters, but they’ve only made a dent - things have actually gotten more difficult in that time. That’s why we need multiple policy levers to cool the rental market.

The lost hours spent in traffic are hours not spent with our families. We need good local jobs for residents as well as accessible products and services. There's no denying the vibrancy of a locally owned downtown core. With more time spent in our communities, we will have more time to connect. Buy Local or Bye Local.

We can also establish a new strategic innovation fund that can make targeted investments that align with our climate goals. We must also leverage government procurement processes to prioritize BC-based, low-carbon products and technology.

Making a deliberate choice to build on our strengths in green innovation means moving away from fossil fuels. We need to be immediately ending the subsidies that the BC NDP have offered to the fossil fuel industry, and put this funding behind new green economic sectors. BC has to make a choice—we can’t have it both ways.

Too many governments use innovation as a buzzword but don't channel the direction it takes. The BC Greens are committed to making our innovation policy in BC a bigger part of the economic strategy we use to deliberately build towards the future we want.

The BC Greens' plan for Innovation funding

1. Establish a $1 billion strategic investment fund to support business innovation that aligns with the province’s goals.

2. Support the creation of a biofuels strategy and clean hydrogen roadmap as part of the energy mix we use to replace fossil fuels in our transportation sector.

3. Integrate a GHG emissions lens into all government procurement processes.

4. Immediately reinstate the scheduled carbon tax increase and return to regular and predictable increases in the carbon tax of $10 per year.

5. Partner in innovation clusters in areas where BC has a strategic advantage, based on the proposal from the Innovation Commissioner’s report.

6. Enact Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE)-enabling legislation.

We must do more to protect agricultural land in our communities, expand the area of land under food production and establish a long-term food sustainability strategy for the province. This way we can decrease reliance on increasingly unreliable import supply chains and diversify our farming in BC so that we aren’t overly reliant on an export-import model.

Farmers are the key to this plan. We need to urgently identify and implement options to make farming a more attractive and lucrative endeavour, especially for younger farmers. In recent years, agricultural land has become tied to the escalating housing market in many parts

The BC Greens' plan for Food security

1. Create a Food Secure B.C. strategy to make B.C. agriculture more climate resilient, improve local food security and support local agricultural producers.

2. Establish a long-term food sustainability strategy for the province to decrease reliance on increasingly unreliable import supply chains and diversify farming in BC.

3. Make food production and food security part of the Agricultural Land Commission’s mandate.

4. Expand the area of land under food production and create a publicly owned agricultural land bank available to lease by new farmers.

5. Recognize income and regional disparities in food insecurity across BC and work to enhance access to high quality, healthy food for low-income British Columbians.

6. Develop systems to address food insecurity for First Nations that honour Indigenous knowledge and values.

7. Incentivize agro-ecological farming practices.

8. Support small-scale farms to adopt new technologies to reduce carbon emissions.

9. Identify options to make farming a more attractive and sustainable endeavour.

10. Provide $10 million per year to fund research and establish regional agricultural bureaus to provide expertise and support to local farmers to apply innovations on-farm and adapt to a changing climate.

11. Restrict and regulate foreign ownership of ALR land.

With the current primary care system (or “fee-for-service model”) in BC, family practices are operated as small businesses. As our population ages and the pandemic continues, doctors are struggling to keep up with a heavy caseload while also managing their small businesses. This situation is leading to large-scale burnout, the closure of family practices, and an exodus of doctors from the system. 

It’s also turning prospective doctors away from family practice, because their skills can be better utilized in specialized medical fields or in private healthcare clinics where the business is managed for them. 

All the while, more and more British Columbians go without access to a family doctor and their healthcare suffers. 

BC Greens are calling for an overhaul of the primary care system to: 

1. Modernize the outdated fee-for-service payment model to ensure better care for British Columbians;
   

2. Expand alternative payment models to better reflect the demand for in-person, longitudinal, and team-based care.

This overhaul would reward physicians for providing quality health care and allow them to continue running their own practices. 

Additionally, the BC Greens are proposing a 12-month pilot project authorizing psychologists to become eligible health care providers through a government-funded billing system (such as MSP or a comparable Psychological Services Plan) for consultation and psychotherapy. This program would allow them to work alongside primary care physicians and other medical specialists.

Mental health is health. It should be prioritized, just like physical health, in our public healthcare system.

Rapid changes in the economy mean that many of the jobs our children will have don’t even exist today, and they will be using technology that has not yet been invented to solve the incredible challenges facing us.

We need to redesign our education system to prepare our children for this future and instill in them a commitment to lifelong learning. For our children to be able to prosper in the world that is taking shape before them, adaptability, perseverance, problem solving and creativity are some of the most important skills they will learn.

Sixteen years of austerity under the BC Liberals has left classroom sizes too large, teacher salaries struggling to compete nationally and school districts struggling to find the funding needed to ensure a quality education for all students.

While the BC NDP have taken some action around the edges, they have done very little transformative work where it really matters. This won’t be something we can change overnight, but it is essential that the work starts now.

COVID-19 has complicated these already-existing challenges, adding new stressors to our education system. While some resources and supports have been put in place, not enough has been done to address the fears and challenges in our education system.

Parents shouldn’t have to choose between their child's safety and the quality of their child's education.

Teachers shouldn't have to worry about their personal safety, and districts shouldn’t be facing uncertainty about whether they have the funding needed to ensure a high-quality education for all students.

With a focus on ensuring public schools have the funding needed to address the challenges of this current school year, the BC Greens education plan brings the age of scarcity in education to an end.

Education quality, safety and flexibility

To ensure a quality education, a safe school environment and flexibility for parents and students, the BC Greens will:

1. Support the mental health of our students with $24 million in new funding to enhance the number of counsellors in our schools, starting with the current school year.

2. Develop and implement a province-wide plan to address racism that exists in schools, and commit to additional, ongoing funding to deepen the work of reconciliation and Indigenous education across K-12.

Public Early Childhood Education (ECE)

To help support the integration of ECE into our public school system, the BC Greens will:

1. Provide $300 million in new funding to begin phasing in up to 25 hours of free early childhood education programs per week for 3 and 4 year olds, rising to $550 million as capacity expands.

2. Provide $100 million in new funding to create a new capital program in the Ministry of Education to fund renovation and additions to existing schools to support ECE spaces.

School nutrition program

To help address affordability, to ensure that no child attends school hungry and to better integrate nutrition into our curriculum, the BC Greens will:

1. Create a new $25 million fund for school districts to develop a food program for their schools in their district.

Improve per-student funding

We will work with education partners on a long term plan for how BC can improve its per student funding. We will:

1. Address the continued disparities in wages, class size and composition between districts.

2. Improve access to speech-language pathologists and school psychologists, and develop new resources for students with special needs.

3. Develop a new funding formula that supports a 21st century education system.

Support post-secondary students

1. Double the funding of the B.C. Access Grant to help support post-secondary part-time students, and those enrolled in multi-year programs.

The decisions we make today shape the future.

In 2023, we saw a disturbing shift back to climate change denial, or climate action delay, from the other political parties in BC. The BC Greens remain consistent in our position: urgent actionon climate change is necessary, and policies must be rooted in science and evidence. 

More than ever, we need climate action that focuses on the well-being of people, communities, and nature, and recognizes that good climate policy is also good economic policy.

We must continue to hold the provincial government accountable to its climate commitments, and not allow climate denial schemes in BC politics to undo decades of hard work. If we work together, we can protect the future of British Columbia, and create a province where we can all thrive.

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