Vaughn Palmer: ‘News to me,’ says BC premier about school spending freeze

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VICTORIA — With 10 days to go in the 2020 provincial election campaign, the two NDP candidates in Mission promised that if the New Democrats were elected, the community’s aging senior secondary school would be replaced with a brand new $87-million facility.

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“A John Horgan government will put the needs of Mission students, their families, and our community first,” declared Pam Alexis, running for the NDP in Abbotsford-Mission.

“We need a new school that provides a quality learning environment and helps deliver the best education possible for our students.”

Joining Alexis on the grounds of the school itself and reminding voters of the bad old alternative was her NDP colleague, Bob D’Eith, the candidate in Maple Ridge-Mission.

“Year after year, the old BC Liberal government neglected the health and usability of BC schools,” said D’Eith. “It was short-term thinking about a long-term need.”

Both Alexis and D’Eith were elected.

Both repeated their commitment to the new school in a joint address to the local chamber of commerce in May 2021.

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But that wasn’t enough to ensure that replacement of the overcrowded Mission Secondary would go ahead, the Mission City Record reported this week.

“The ministry of education has removed the $87-million election promise from its list of approved capital projects,” according to Monday’s story by reporter Patrick Penner.

The $87 million is in 2020 dollars. The estimated cost of this year is $114 million. By next year, the district estimates the price tag will climb to $125 million.

The central core of the existing Mission Secondary was constructed in 1954.

There have been many additions since. The district superintendent says the patched-together structure reminds him of Frankenstein’s monster.

The school is at 109 per cent of student capacity this year.

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The district says the deferral probably means a replacement building won’t be open for six years.

All of which suggests that the project has failed prey to the “short-term thinking about a long-term need” that D’Eith attributed to the Liberals.

When he and Alexis were contacted for a reaction this week, they promised to “advocate strongly for this project, and (we) will do everything we can to help it along.”

Everything, that is, short of demanding that their own government make it a priority to replace a 68-year-old at-risk secondary school over the 54-year-old provincial museum in Victoria.

Mission is not the only school district being turned down on its capital plan these days.

Vancouver has expressed its disappointment in writing to Education Minister Jennifer Whiteside over the ministry’s decision to indefinitely defer seismic upgrades for one elementary and two secondary schools.

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One of the latter, David Thompson Secondary, is 60 years old.

In her letter to the minister, school board chair Janet Fraser noted that in the southeast region of the school district, “there are over 4,000 students attending seismically unsafe schools.”

Most of those children live in ridings represented in the provincial legislature by NDP MLAs.

Also on the deferral list in Vancouver is a proposed new elementary school at the Olympic Village.

It was promised in the last election by New Democrats George Heyman (Vancouver-Fairview) and Brenda Bailey (Vancouver-False Creek).

A third district on the ministry’s hit list is Sooke.

It reports being turned down for three new elementary schools in fast-growing Langford and Colwood, plus a seismic upgrade at the school in Port Renfrew.

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Sooke, like Mission, is having to revert to a backup plan, meaning portable classrooms, the kind of thing the New Democrats deplored when the Liberals were in government.

Sooke is represented in the legislature by Premier John Horgan.

But when the premier was asked about the government decisions to put off school capital projects, he appeared not to have a firm grasp on what was happening.

“That’s news to me,” he said when asked Monday morning about the news out of Mission.

“We have no freeze in place,” Horgan insisted. “We have the largest capital budget in BC history.”

What about Sooke school district saying it has received zero dollars in new capital funding for the 2022-23 school year?

“I’m surprised that people are saying there’s not enough investments in the Sooke school district,” Horgan replied. “There may not be new dollars in this capital budget, but there are projects that are in planning, projects that are in construction, land acquisition. … There is no constraint on our capital budget at this time.”

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He repeated for emphasis: “There are no directives from government that would constrain building the schools that are in Sooke or Mission or anywhere else.”

Yet clearly there are directives coming from inside of his own government, capping the capital plan and thereby precluding some projects and deferring others.

Later Monday, the ministry of education admitted that “the financial impact of the pandemic and recent flooding events has resulted in the deferral of seven school capital projects.”

On Tuesday, the ministry identified the seven schools as the one in Mission, the three in Vancouver, and others in Fernie, Pitt Meadows, and Victoria.

All will be included in district capital plans “for prioritization” in unspecified “future budget years.”

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With the premier in denial about what is going on with school projects, it falls to individual NDP MLAs to lobby for their government to review their priorities.

I doubt it will include them saying publicly that the $1 billion in the capital plan for a new museum would pay for a lot of schools.

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