You use them every day, so why don't you know Metro Vancouver Regional District? | Daily Hive

You use its services every day, so why don't you know Metro Vancouver Regional District?

Headquarters office of Metro Vancouver Regional District at Metrotower III. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Despite paying annual taxes and fees to the Metro Vancouver Regional District, large proportions of residents in the Metro Vancouver region do not know what the regional district — essentially, the regional government — does for them.

The continuous supply of clean drinking water, the ability to flush toilet and other used water into the sewer, and the disposal of solid waste all rely on the regional district’s bulk infrastructure and services provided to individual municipal governments.

According to a new survey by local polling firm Research Co., there appears to be a very major public awareness problem for Metro Vancouver Regional District.

Even though it is directly responsible for all five regional-level services and responsibilities asked in the survey, residents rarely identify it with anything close to a majority.

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On providing the drinking water supply — which entails the dams and reservoirs in the North Shore mountains, and water treatment facilities — only 39 per cent of respondents correctly name the regional district, while 26 per cent note the provincial government, 13 per cent note the federal government, 10 per cent note the municipal government, and 13 per cent are not sure.

The pattern is nearly identical for core utility functions that the regional district also directly runs: on operating and maintaining sewage treatment facilities, just 40 per cent identify the regional district correctly, versus 24 per cent provincial, 14 per cent municipal, nine per cent federal, and 13 per cent unsure; on solid waste/garbage/landfill facilities, only 41 per cent answer the regional district compared with 24 per cent provincial, 14 per cent municipal, eight per cent federal, and 13 per cent unsure.

The misunderstanding is even more striking on less visible but equally important regional responsibilities.

On establishing policies and plans to improve air quality, only 22 per cent of residents correctly identify the regional district. On overseeing the creation and maintenance of regional parks, the regional district is identified by only 29 per cent — even though it operates major recreational destinations like the Grouse Grind trail, Pacific Spirit Regional Park, Burnaby Lake Regional Park, and Boundary Bay Regional Park.

Map of Metro Vancouver regional parks and greenways. (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

Grouse Grind trail at Grouse Mountain. (Beth Rochester/Daily Hive | Luke Faulks/Submitted)

The regional district is actually not even the top answer on two of the five responsibilities it directly carries out. The results also show that understanding varies sharply by age and geography. Residents aged 55 and over are much more likely than younger adults to correctly identify the regional district’s role. Geographically, the confusion is especially pronounced in some suburban communities.

In other words, even on the critical services most closely associated with regional infrastructure, roughly six in 10 residents either get it wrong or do not know.

In recent years, the regional district’s challenging financial trajectory — leading to major pressures to hike taxes and fees paid by ratepayers, builders, and developers — have been the subject of much scrutiny from politicians, media, and the general public, with much of it initially fuelled by the significant cost overruns and delays related to the beleaguered North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant.

When construction began in 2018, this sewage treatment plant was originally pegged at $700 million for a completion in 2020, but it will now cost nearly $3.9 billion based on a completion in 2030 — a decade behind schedule — with litigation underway with the project’s previous contractor.

For 2026, the regional district has a $1.48-billion annual operating budget, which is currently expected to grow to $2.25 billion by 2030 from growing cost pressures, especially those related to building and operating new and expanded drinking water and sewage treatment infrastructure.

This year, households across the region will pay an average of $897 annually for these services. For years, builders and developers have been warning that the growing costs solely from the regional district’s steep new building development fees could stall housing projects, with the regional district recently moving to provide a short-term reprieve.

Map of Metro Vancouver’s existing sewage treatment facilities. (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

72% think there should be regional referendums on the regional district’s budgets

Other survey results further show just how limited public understanding of the regional district is — not only in terms of what it does, but even how it is governed.

When respondents were asked a basic structural question, how many directors sit on the regional district’s board of directors, the median answer was just 10, compared to the actual 41 directors. The board of directors are primarily comprised of the mayors and select city councillors from across the Metro Vancouver region. Currently, based on appointments, Burnaby mayor Mike Hurley is the chair of the board, while Anmore mayor John McEwen is the vice chair.

This massive gap highlights that most residents have little sense of the scale or composition of the regional government that oversees billions of dollars in infrastructure and services.

At the same time, people have pretty strong opinions about how the regional district should be run, even if they do not fully understand how it works today. For example, 70 per cent of respondents think it is a good idea to stop paying extra stipends to the mayors and city councillors who sit on the various regional boards, while only 16 per cent disagree.

There is also very strong support for more oversight: 76 per cent support a full public inquiry into the North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant, and 72 per cent think residents should vote directly in a regional referendum on the regional district’s operating and capital budgets.

Currently, key decisions made by the regional district’s board of directors are made by allocating weight votes to each director, based on the municipal jurisdiction’s population. Each director is provided with one vote for every 20,000 people in their municipality, electoral area, or First Nation, up to a total of five votes.

Furthermore, the number of directors — typically one mayor, plus potentially additional directors represented by appointed city councillors — on the board depends on the population of that jurisdiction.

For these combined weighted factors based on population, the City of Vancouver has the most voting power with 34 votes in total (six directors with five votes each, plus one with four votes), followed by the City of Surrey with 30 votes in total (six directors, each with five votes). This is followed by 13 votes for the City of Burnaby’s three directors, 11 votes for the City of Richmond’s three directors, and eight votes for the City of Coquitlam’s two directors. Other jurisdictions are smaller, typically one to five votes each.

In recent decades, the Vancouver’s proportion of the weighted votes has fallen in size, as a direct result of faster population growth in the suburban jurisdictions, especially in Surrey.

Boardroom at Metro Vancouver Regional District’s headquarters office. (Metro Vancouver Regional District)

67% think separate elections are needed to select the regional district’s politicians

Many survey respondents are also critical of how things work now, with 66 per cent believing the regional district is run by mayors and city councillors who are mainly concerned with the interests of their own individual municipal governments, not the collective good of the region as a whole.

There is also broad support for making the system more direct and transparent, with 67 per cent thinking separate direct elections for the regional district’s board of directors — instead of the appointed makeup of mayors and city councillors serving additional roles on the regional level — would make decision-making simpler, and 71 per cent believe it would be more accountable and effective. Similar numbers support specific changes, like electing board members directly (65 per cent) or creating a smaller, elected regional council (67 per cent).

Even though many respondents cannot identify the regional district as the service provider, they are not overwhelmingly in favour of privatizing its services, with a slight majority — within a range of 53 per cent to 56 per cent of the respondents — supporting spinning off services to the private sector.

“Metro Vancouver” is both the name of the region as a geographical location — encompassing 21 municipalities and a total land area of nearly 2,900 sq. km., named after the region’s namesake economic powerhouse city of Vancouver — and the regional government. Similar regional districts across British Columbia operate under the provincial government’s Local Government Act.

Regional districts in B.C. are designed to deliver services like bulk water supply, sewage treatment, and solid waste disposal more efficiently than individual municipal governments could on their own. By pooling resources across the region, they take advantage of economies of scale — spreading the high costs of infrastructure like treatment plants, reservoirs, and landfills over a larger population.

In other areas of Canada, larger municipalities in terms of both population and geographical area — far bigger than Vancouver and Surrey — are directly responsible for some of these bulk services, such as the cities of Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Ottawa. They are also responsible for their own public transit generally contained within their own municipal borders, as opposed to a regional public transit authority like TransLink, which is governed in a similar regional manner under the Mayors’ Council. By contrast, Metro Vancouver’s geographical area is comparatively very small compared to Canada’s other major metropolitan areas.

The regional district owns the Metrotower III office tower at Metropolis at Metrotown mall for the use of its headquarters office.

The survey did not gauge public sentiment on the regional district’s role as a land-use regulator — its responsibility for creating regional growth strategies (most recently Metro 2050) — or its expanding functions in building, owning, and operating affordable housing and economic development, including its investment attraction agency, called Invest Vancouver.

During the current term, Surrey’s municipal politicians, in particular, have been butting heads with the regional district over the imposed regional land-use restrictions and the existence of Invest Vancouver.

This statistically representative survey was conducted from April 5 to 7, 2026, and had 1,203 adult respondents. It has a margin of error of 2.8 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

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