In the lead-up to British Columbia’s 2026 provincial election, the BC NDP, BC Conservatives, BC Green Party, and CentreBC outlined different approaches to health care and health equity. Common themes include improving access to care, addressing health-workforce shortages, reducing wait times, and supporting seniors. The parties differ in their approaches to mental-health services, substance-use treatment, public health-care delivery, and the social determinants of health, including housing, childcare, food security, and income affordability. Their environmental commitments also vary, with implications for climate resilience and other environmental factors that influence health.
Read where each party stands on chronic disease prevention and primary care, mental health, substance use, social determinants of health, environment, equity and community health, housing, childcare, food affordability, and transportation access so we can have an informed vote this weekend.
BC NDP
- Prevention and primary care: Expand and strengthen the public health-care system; add more doctors, nurses, specialists and health-care capacity; add 8 MRI machines and 10 CT scanners; reduce surgical and diagnostic wait times; expand primary-care access and team-based care; provide free shingles vaccination for adults aged 50 and older and immunocompromised adults.
- Mental health: Continue investments in mental-health services.
- Substance use: Continue investments in harm reduction.
- Social determinants of health: Add 500 home-care workers and remove home-care user fees; support approximately 5,600 more seniors to remain at home; advance seven long-term-care projects.
- Environment: Investments in climate resilience, renewable energy, heat-pump and EV-charging incentives, emissions reduction, forest and land conservation, watershed protection, and marine conservation to support environmental sustainability and community health.
- Equity and community health: Strengthen protections against user fees for medically necessary care and queue-jumping by people who can pay; bring 5,000 care-home workers back into the public health employer system; phase out reliance on private agency nurses in hospitals over three years.
- Housing: Invest $390 million in shovel-ready affordable housing projects; double the number of homes protected through the BC Rental Protection Fund; reduce development charges for multi-unit housing by up to 50%; introduce 30-day permit deadlines for eligible small residential builds.
- Childcare: Create 7,200 additional before- and after-school childcare spaces on school grounds and invest $250 million in expanding affordable childcare.
- Food affordability: Cap retail markups on essential groceries, introduce clearer unit pricing, and strengthen competition in grocery supply.
- Transportation access: Provide free transit passes for low-income seniors and expand bus rapid transit in Surrey.
BC Conservatives
- Prevention and primary care: Recruit and retain more doctors and nurses; train more doctors in B.C. and speed up foreign credential recognition, propose 11 Urgent and Primary Care Centre locations, propose a $50 million emergency health-care fund; launch an expert commission within the first 100 days to identify ways to reduce wait times.
- Mental health: Strengthen psychiatric treatment services.
- Substance use: Expand residential addiction treatment; support mandatory treatment in some circumstances; oppose the NDP’s current safe-supply approach.
- Social determinants of health: Maintain universal, publicly funded health care.
- Environment: Strengthen wildfire prevention while supporting resource management and protection of rare ecosystems.
- Equity and community health: Focus on keeping emergency rooms and maternity wards open; improve health-care access through workforce recruitment, training, and credential recognition.
- Housing and affordability: Propose a $1,000 annual provincial income-tax cut for most working British Columbians, with the party estimating an average $2,000 annual saving for couples, increase housing supply and speeding up construction as priorities in its housing platform
- Food security: Expand school meal programs to help ensure children have access to food during the school day.
- Child and youth wellbeing: Introduce a $500 children’s activity credit to help families pay for activities, alongside more places for children to play.
BC Green Party
- Prevention and primary care: Expand publicly delivered, community-based health care; establish an integrated Community Health Centre in every provincial riding; introduce a single-entry referral model for surgeries, alongside team-based non-surgical and pre-surgical care.
- Mental health: Expand publicly funded mental-health care and cover mental-health care through the public system.
- Substance use: Support harm reduction and voluntary addiction treatment.
- Social determinants of health: Develop a reproductive-health plan that increases transparency about fertility-clinic live-birth success rates and add-on services.
- Environment: Stopping new fossil fuel development, investing in renewable energy and home retrofits, strengthening climate accountability, protecting old-growth forests, promoting sustainable forestry, and improving resilience to wildfires and extreme weather
- Equity and community health: Support safe nurse-to-patient staffing ratios; increase funding for nurses in the public system; reduce reliance on private agency nurses; keep health-care funding focused on public services.
- Housing: Build and protect 26,000 permanently affordable, non-market homes annually and introduce vacancy control to limit rent increases when tenants move out.
- Childcare: Restart the $10-a-day childcare commitment and work toward universal childcare coverage.
- Income and poverty: Raise social and disability assistance rates above the poverty line, index them to inflation. Increase minimum wages toward a living wage.
- Food affordability: Improving food security and affordability by expanding local food production, investing in public food distribution and community food hubs, keeping a basket of essential groceries at Green Grocers 30% below market prices, providing universal school meals, and supporting farmers and Indigenous food sovereignty.
- Transportation: Make public transit free and improve its frequency and reliability
CentreBC
- Prevention and primary care: A family doctor/NP team for everyone who wants one by 2031, 600 additional NPs, five new MRIs, 20,000 extra scans annually for two years, 15,000 additional surgeries annually by 2030-31, faster credential recognition, 100 new residency spots (60 in family medicine), and a public health dashboard with regional wait-time targets.
- Mental health: Establish 12 round-the-clock adult crisis centres by 2030, expand forensic psychiatric capacity, and improve access to counselling.
- Substance use: Expand access to care through adult crisis centres and mental-health services.
- Social determinants of health: Provide a $400 monthly benefit to eligible family caregivers, increase home-support hours, and add 1,000 long-term-care beds by March 2031.
- Housing: Double BC Builds to 20,000 below-market homes by 2031 and increase the annual renter tax credit from $400 to $600 for households earning up to $80,000.
- Childcare: Create 20,000 new $10-a-day childcare spaces by 2030.
- Income and poverty: Increase the renter tax credit for eligible households to help with affordability.
- Food affordability: Expand school food programs from approximately 20% to 40% of students by 2030.
Let’s get out there and vote!
