B.C. election campaigns promise support for doctors, seniors

British Columbia NDP Leader David Eby is making election campaign pledges of a new training program for international medical graduates and discounted tuition or loan forgiveness for health-care workers willing to move to rural communities.

Eby spent Friday in Surrey, at a campaign stop at the site for a new medical school, while B.C. Conservative interim leader Lorne Doerkson was in Coquitlam laying out his promises for seniors, which include giving those waiting for long-term care beds “portable public funding” so they can pick where they want to be, including in non-government facilities.

Eby said if the New Democrats are elected on Oct. 24, the new medical school at Simon Fraser University will offer a first-of-its-kind “bridging to practice” training for qualified foreign graduates already living in the province but who are unable to practice family medicine because of a lack of residency spots.

“(It is) for international medical graduates and people with international medical experience, so they can get the practical training they need to get off the sidelines, whatever they’re doing right now, and get into our hospitals and into our communities delivering the care that people need,” Eby said.

Other promises laid out in the NDP health platform include discounted tuition, loan forgiveness, and moving expenses for workers heading to underserved rural areas.

“Recruiting new physicians to move to rural communities helps them deepen roots there and commit for the long-term to serve rural communities — an urgent issue that we know needs more attention,” Eby said.

Many emergency rooms in B.C., most of them rural, have experienced years of temporary closures caused by a lack of staff. The Conservatives say emergency rooms closed 2,400 times in two years.

Doctors of B.C., which represents about 20,000 physicians and medical students in the province, called on party leaders in the campaign to address specialist wait-lists and shortages, to ensure more access to family doctors, to improve access to emergency care and to strengthen rural health care.

In the lead-up to calling the election last month, Eby’s government celebrated what it said was one million people being connected to primary care in B.C. since 2018, but about a million more B.C. residents are still without a family doctor.

The Conservatives have argued that the NDP’s proposal to increase taxes on the highest income brackets starting at about $190,000 would drive doctors away.

Eby said Friday that an NDP government would also provide incentives for doctors to offer same-day appointments, evening and weekend care, and would add 1,000 training seats for nurses, nurse practitioners, allied health workers and care aides.

He said the NDP would also build 20 additional primary care clinics in the province.

In his pitch to seniors on Friday, Doerkson said there are 7,200 people in British Columbia waiting for long-term care beds and that the NDP “piled so many unnecessary rules on home care design that the proposed beds reached a cost of $1.8 million each.”

The government cancelled contracts earlier this year for five health-related projects, including the Beedie Long-term Care Centre in Delta, as well as long-term care projects in Abbotsford, Chilliwack and Kelowna.

At the time, the government said the contracts were being deferred or rescheduled, noting that estimated budgets were coming in well over projections.

Doerkson said Friday that Conservatives will build long-term care beds and review the design rules, but said seniors in need can’t be asked to wait for that construction.

“So, for those people, we will be making long-term care funding portable. That means the public money follows the senior and not the other way around,” he said.

“If you’re eligible for publicly funded care, you and your family will choose your provider. Any qualified provider, public or non-government that meets strict standards for safety and quality, and we’ll hold them to those standards.”

The Conservative platform also includes promises to expand the HandyDart service for those who can’t take standard transit, and reverse NDP changes to the property-tax deferment program as a way of allowing more seniors to remain in their communities.

The Conservatives say they would also implement the B.C. Seniors Advocate’s recommendation to expand access to home care with “more consumer-directed, publicly funded choices for quality accredited homecare.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 9, 2026.

Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press