Ask Your Candidates Action Toolkit

Building power for public health care

We know that improving our public health care system is one of the most important issues that people in British Columbia care about. But beyond the political slogans, we need to find candidates who are willing to commit to real solutions and ensure they continue to listen to us after they are elected.

Candidates in all political parties and every electoral riding need to see that British Columbians are taking a stand for public health care, including asking candidates to explain where they and their party stand on six practical solutions that would not only heal the underlying strains in our current health system, but will expand vital services to support our growing seniors’ population and the many people who need improved access to primary care and mental health support.

If we identify and support candidates who will champion real solutions that will heal and strengthen our public healthcare system, we can build the power to hold our next government accountable when for-profit healthcare lobbies try to push privatization, cuts, and poison pills after the election.

We’re calling on supporters of public health care across the province to put their candidates to the test and help identify health care champions committed to the fight for the health care system we all rely on.

Click here to access the full toolkit in one downloadable document.

Join the action

When candidates receive questions from voters in their riding, their campaign team is likely to pass them on to the party and feed back a formal position. The more a campaign gets asked a question, the more likely it will be that a candidate will take notice that this is a priority issue in their riding.

If enough local campaigns get asked to make the same commitments from BC Health Coalition members, this can push a party to make a campaign commitment. It can also establish our movement as a powerful, organized network and send a clear message that the next government will have to work with us after the election.

The questions in this guide can be used to approach the candidates in your riding. Whichever strategy you use to ask your candidates these questions, it’s important that you do your best to capture your candidates’ response (videos are great!) and share what you learned with your local BC Health Coalition campaign team.

Sounds exciting, right? Here are three easy steps to approach your candidates.

This election, we’re organizing local campaign teams who will work together to track and report the developments of their local campaigns, including commitments made on health care.

Local campaign teams are organized around clusters of battleground ridings, so they may be tracking more than one race. This is a nice way for you to meet people in your area beyond your riding and find out where you can take action close to home and have the greatest impact.

The best way to connect with your local campaign team is to join your area’s WhatsApp group in the BC Health Coalition WhatsApp community. WhatsApp is a phone or desktop app that allows you to join a community and its discussion groups using your phone number. It’s a powerful organizing tool that’s been used effectively to empower volunteers on many campaigns.

Connecting with our WhatsApp Community

UPDATE: For group security reasons, we've removed the invitation links from this page. Please send an email to [email protected] to request an invitation to join a WhatsApp group.

If you’re not already familiar with WhatsApp, you can learn more about the app and download it here. Learn about WhatsApp communities here.

Once you’ve downloaded WhatsApp or if you already use Whatsapp, you will be able to join groups within the community. Joining any of the groups below will add you to the community as a whole. Choose the group that is closest to your home to join a local campaign team, and any other group in the community that’s of interest to you. If you’re not seeing a local group for your area, we recommend joining the provincial election discussion group and BCHC Boost.

Take a look at the groups we have and what they’ll be covering.

Abbotsford & Langley

Abbotsford South
Abbotsford-Mission
Langley-Willowbrook
Langley-Walnut Grove

Coquitlam

Coquitlam-Burke Mountain
Coquitlam-Maillardville

Surrey

Surrey-Cloverdale
Surrey-Panorama
Surrey-White Rock

Mid-Island

Cowichan Valley
Nanaimo-Lantzville
Courtenay-Comox

Kootenays

Vernon-Lumby
Boundary-Similkameen
Kootenay-Monashee
Kootenay Central

Kamloops

Kamloops Centre

Province Wide

Group with province wide campaign updates, discussion and volunteer updates

BCHC Boost

Group where we will link posts and articles we need you folks to share within your networks

Other ways to connect

We know that not everyone will be comfortable using WhatsApp. If that’s you, here are some other ways you can get connected.

Through your local area campaign captain. We’ll be recruiting volunteers to act as riding or local area liaisons. If you’d like to know if there’s a local captain in your area, reach out to the BC Health Coalition staff by email at [email protected]. If you’re interested in being a local captain, let us know!
On social media. You can send the BC Health Coalition your updates by direct message on Facebook, Instagram, X. Or you can post on your profiles and tag the BC Health Coalition.
Sign up for another volunteer role. Take a look at some other volunteering options on our sign up page!

Approaching the candidates is the main (and most fun!) part of the toolkit. Remember that our goal is to push all parties to raise their health care commitments, so do your best to approach all the candidates in your riding.

Feel free to provide the candidates with a link or printout of the Six Solutions handout. Following this section, you will find the questions for candidates alongside some helpful framing information.

Four ideas for how to engage your candidates

Meet with the candidates. Contact candidate campaigns and request an in-person or virtual meeting with the candidate. At the meeting, let the candidate know you are part of the BC Health Coalition’s campaign to secure health care commitments from all parties and you’ll be reporting back on their answers. Some candidates may be pressed for time, so do your best to move quickly through the questions. It’s a good idea to ask them for their staff to get back to you with written responses to all the questions. You can do this by yourself or organize a small group from your local campaign team to attend the meeting together.
Contact local campaigns and request written responses. If a meeting is not possible, provide candidate campaigns with the questions in writing and ask them to provide written responses. This is a great action you can take by yourself from the comfort of your home. The more people send in the same questions, the better!
Attend a local all candidates meeting or debate. Connect with your local campaign team to organize a group to attend together, and either stuff the question box or split up the questions to ensure more of the questions get put to the candidates.
Find out if your local candidates will be attending any local events or making campaign announcements. Attend the events with your local campaign team and look for opportunities to ask them questions in public. Try to capture their responses on camera and share the videos with your local campaign team.

You can find out who the candidates are in your riding by referring to the Elections BC candidates list.

Reporting back on what you learned is an important part of our campaign. We’ll use what you learned to create a report card that compares where each party stands on priority health care issues. We’ll release this resource publicly and use it as a tool to equip volunteers working to get out the vote on public health care.

We will also be using the information you share to help Identify candidates that have a demonstrated willingness to commit to healing health care solutions. We will mobilize volunteer support for these candidates in battleground ridings and build strong relationships we can build on if they get elected.

How to report back

To your local WhatsApp group (see Step 1). Use this group to share what you’re up to and what you’re learning with other volunteers in your campaign team. You can also use the groups to organize attending events together.
Share on social media (see Step 1). Post pictures of your team attending events, summaries of candidates replies, or videos of their responses on your social media accounts and tag the BC Health Coalition. [insert our handles]
Send us an email. Email with the candidate’s responses can be sent to [email protected]. We’ll pass it on to the local WhatsApp group.

Questions for candidates

These questions are based on the BC Health Coalition’s Six Solutions to heal the health care system. Click here to download a printable version of these questions.

Our access to primary care is dependent on family physicians being able to run small businesses while simultaneously providing services. Over the past 20 years, bandaid solutions like one-time injections of money and increasing investments in walk-in clinics style care have fractured our overall care.

Will you fund community health centers like we do schools and hospitals and provide salary options for doctors so they can focus on primary care?
What do you and your party propose to do to prevent the growth of corporate virtual care and investor-owned private clinics and to invest in the public provision of team based primary care?

About 8.4 million working people in Canada do not have employer-based health benefits, leading 1 in 4 households to have to choose between buying groceries and life saving medications. Lack of access to essential medications leads to overcrowded emergency rooms and adds huge costs to our provincial health care budget.

How will you expand the publicly funded, universal, single-payer pharmacare program in British Columbia?

Despite BC’s surgical capacity having increased to pre-pandemic levels, patients are still waiting longer for most surgeries than they did in 2019. That’s because hundreds of surgeons and other specialists operate their own private businesses and manage their own wait lists.

Will you commit to rapidly reducing surgical wait-times by implementing a “first available surgeon” model?
Despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary, some candidates have suggested that adding more private surgical clinics into our system will speed up wait times. If your party forms a government, what other methods will you use to alleviate strain on the system?

Without access to home support services and adequate respite for caregivers, many seniors experience health decline more rapidly and family caregivers become over-extended. People end up relying on more costly hospital visits or long-term residential care.

While the majority of provinces do not charge for home support services, BC charges the highest co-pays. A senior with an annual income of $29,000 must pay $9,000 a year for one-hour daily visit of home support. This means it is often more financially feasible for a senior to move into publicly-funded long-term care, even though residential care costs the public up to four times the cost of at-home care. If elected, how will you and your party eliminate the financial barrier of the current regulated daily rate co-payments that clients must currently pay to access home support services?

For-profit long-term care homes have been found to pay care aides up to 25% less than not-for-profit long-term care homes. This is despite contracted not-for-profit and for-profit long term care homes receiving the same public funding to pay staff based on the industry standard outlined in the public sector master collective agreement. Because many for-profit facilities are not a part of the public sector collective agreement, they’re able to cut wages and reduce ratios.

How will you and your party hold for-profit long term care homes accountable and raise the standard of care? Will you require all facilities that receive public money to be part of a public sector master collective agreement?

We know that high quality health care depends on high quality working conditions in over 70 health care professions. While a lot of attention gets placed on incentives for doctors, the highest paid professionals, the lowest paid workers in the system are left with low wages and job precarity.

How will you and your party address recruitment and retention issues, especially for home support workers, care aides, allied health workers, and nurses, and how will this provide fair, equitable compensation, meaningful work with reduced work loads, and increased stability and job satisfaction?

For-profit providers are costing the province millions of dollars a year. BC is being penalized every year for failing to fully enforce the Medicare Protection Act, which protects patients from being billed for services that should be free. Private for-profit providers have illegally billed BC residents over $100 million since 2016, and the federal government claws back every dollar that is reported. This results in millions of dollars of federal funds being held back that could have gone to improved services.

What do you and your party propose to do to fully enforce the Medicare Protection Act, including sections that protect patients against illegal extra billing in diagnostic and imaging services?
How will you phase out public contracts to for-profit and corporate providers that are draining public funding away from public health services?