BC Conservatives plan to tackle street disorder while BC NDP targets health care

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.

2:28 Decision BC healthcare promises

“Unless he has a magic wand, this is just not something that is real,” BC NDP leader David Eby said.

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“The only possible outcome of his plan is to slash health-care spending.”

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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.

“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.

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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.