Healthcare

For much of the riding, serious care means a trip down Highway 99, to Lions Gate, or further. When the highway closes, and it does close, that route closes with it.

Squamish General Hospital and the Whistler Health Care Centre carry an enormous load, including a visitor population that can multiply a community’s size on a winter weekend. Pemberton and the northern communities are further out again.

Recruiting and keeping physicians, nurses and allied health staff in the corridor runs straight back into housing. A clinic can post a position; it cannot post a place to live.

This riding hosts a very large number of people who do not live here. Ski injuries, mountain biking injuries, highway collisions and backcountry rescues land in local facilities and are absorbed by local capacity.

Health funding formulas built on resident population systematically understate what these facilities are asked to handle. That is a fixable accounting problem.

In February 2026 the province put the new Squamish long-term care home on hold. It was a 152-bed facility, construction had been set for 2027, and no new timeline has been offered since. Squamish was one of seven communities whose projects were paused in the same budget — together more than 1,200 beds.

The reason given was that the province wanted to incorporate lessons from projects already under way and from a review of long-term care infrastructure. Reviews are not the problem. Reviews with no end date, on a building a community has already planned around, are.

Because people had planned around it. The Sea to Sky Hospice Society expected to move into that building. Squamish’s mayor and this riding’s own MLA both criticised the decision publicly. Families here are already driving out of the corridor to visit a parent, and every month the building does not exist is another month of that drive.

I want to be straight about something, because it would be easy to overclaim. The sitting MLA did speak up about this. He was right to. But the criticism did not produce a building, and neither will mine unless it comes with a different approach to how these facilities get built. That is the part I would actually bring: the party’s proposal is modular, home-like care facilities built around shared central services, which cost less per bed than a single large institution and can be occupied in stages as each module finishes rather than sitting empty until the whole thing is done. A paused project with a high capital cost is exactly the case that model exists for.

Seniors in this corridor should be able to grow old near the people who love them. That is not a slogan; it is a building, on a site, with a date.

Restart the Squamish long-term care home with a published date, and use modular construction to open beds in stages rather than waiting on the whole facility.

Health authority staffing plans for the corridor that come with a housing plan attached, because in this riding they are the same problem.

Funding formulas for corridor facilities that account for visitor and transient load, not only resident census counts.

Practical expansion of virtual and travelling specialist care to reduce the number of full days lost to a single appointment.