Conservatives vow to strip Metro Vancouver Regional District of its responsibilities | Daily Hive

Conservatives promise to strip Metro Vancouver Regional District of its responsibilities, narrowing its work to only water supply and sewage treatment

Boardroom at the headquarters of Metro Vancouver Regional District at Metrotower III at Metropolis at Metrotown mall in Burnaby. (Turner Construction)

If elected, Lorne Doerkson’s Conservative Party of British Columbia would completely overhaul Metro Vancouver Regional District by drastically downsizing its scope, mandate, and operations.

The party announced today its platform promise of removing the regional government’s responsibilities in overseeing a cohesive regional housing, economic development, air quality and climate policy, while narrowing the regional government’s focus to the critical bulk utilities of providing safe and reliable drinking water supplies and sewage treatment services to municipal governments across the Metro Vancouver region.

Drinking water and sewage treatment services account for the majority of the regional government’s annual operating and capital budgets.

The Conservatives assert the provincial and individual municipal governments should take over the other four service areas, arguing that the regional government’s involvement duplicates work those governments already do.

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Their broader approach would have the regional government withdraw from activities already performed by another level of government — services they suggest could be jointly handled by two or three unspecified municipal governments, and work that businesses already provide or could deliver.

This announcement by the Conservatives does not provide a cost savings estimate, an implementation schedule, or details on how the provincial government and municipal government would pay for the regional government responsibilities transferred to them.

As well, the Conservatives pointed to the regional government’s growing debt and annual operating budget as reasons to reduce its responsibilities. They also accused the regional government of overspending on private consultants and contractors to the extent that such third-party labour costs now exceed the salaries and benefits of in-house staff.

“That is not a utility. That is an unaccountable bureaucratic mess with a blank cheque. We’ll take the chequebook back, focus Metro on water and sewage, and make sure taxpayers get value for every dollar,” said Carson Binda, the Conservative MLA candidate for Vancouver-Quilchena.

The party’s platform for the provincial general election on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026 — just one week after the civic election on Saturday, Oct. 17 — also calls for a smaller board of directors overseeing the direction and decisions of the regional government. Currently, the board is comprised of select mayors and city councillors of 21 municipal governments across Metro Vancouver, as well as Electoral Area A (notably entailing the University of British Columbia and the University Endowment Lands) and the Tsawwassen First Nation.

A smaller board would also align with the board’s July 2026 request for the provincial government to amend legislation to allow a 25 per cent reduction in the number of directors.

“A smaller, professional board will run this utility like the essential service it is,” said Lynne Block, the Conservative MLA candidate for North Vancouver-Seymour.

As well, the Conservative party is promising to conduct a full audit of the beleaguered project to build the new North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant in North Vancouver. When construction first began in 2017, the project had a budget of about $700 million, based on a 2020 completion. However, the project — after going through litigation, a long pause on major construction activities, and a change of contractors — is now set to reach a cost of about $3.9 billion, with a completion date of 2030. Regional households are seeing an upward pressure on their user fees to cover these cost overruns and other expensive capital projects.

This past summer, the regional district restarted its independent review process for what went wrong with the decision-making and oversight processes for this sewage treatment plant project, which is expected to culminate in a final report in early 2027.

“People here want clean water and working sewers. They don’t want a regional bureaucracy that can’t build a plant on budget and never answers for it,” said Trevor Withers, the Conservative MLA candidate for North Vancouver-Lonsdale.

Caroline Elliott, the Conservative MLA candidate for West Vancouver-Capilano, added, “North Shore families deserve accountability for the wastewater treatment debacle, but all they’ve gotten from their NDP MLAs is indifference. As Conservatives, we’ll conduct a full audit of what went so disastrously wrong under the NDP’s watch to ensure a blunder of this scale never happens again.”

It should also be noted that the regional government has already been looking inward over the past few years, implementing recommendations from a separate governance review — previously initiated by the board of directors, and conducted by consulting firm Deloitte in May 2025. The provincial government partnered in that review, which led to work on stronger internal auditing and changes to board compensation rules.

The embattled organization has also seen a recent turnover in its top leadership. Most notably and recently, in early September 2026, after weeks of media speculation, the regional government parted ways with Jerry Dobrovolny, who served as the organization’s Chief Administrative Officer and Commissioner since 2019. He had increasingly faced criticism for his leadership in providing oversight over the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant, high compensation, and allegations of overstepping his authority internally.

Prior to his time with the regional government, Dobrovolny was with the City of Vancouver for more than three decades, including four years as the Chief Engineer and General Manager of the City’s Engineering Department.

Daily Hive Urbanized has reached out to Metro Vancouver Regional District for comment on the Conservative party’s platform promise and comments.

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