LUCK: Affordability isn’t just a Vancouver problem
Published 11:50 am Saturday, June 6, 2026
In Merritt, Logan Lake, Hope and Lillooet, affordability isn’t a political soundbite. It’s the mother choosing between rent and groceries. It’s the young nurse driving two hours because she can’t find a place to live near her shift. It’s the tradesperson watching another local business close because it can’t afford to keep workers. In Fraser-Nicola, the cost-of-living crisis is lived, not debated.
Too often, the affordability conversation in British Columbia centers on Vancouver and Victoria. Interior communities are treated as an afterthought, as if high housing costs, long commutes, and stretched services only happen where the skyline is tall. But in our riding, affordability is just as urgent, even if the numbers look different. Wages haven’t kept up. Prices have. Services are thinner.
And when things go wrong, it takes longer to fix them.
Housing is the anchor of this crisis. In towns like Merritt and Hope, rents and home prices have surged while wages in health care, education, agriculture, and service jobs have stagnated. Workers essential to our communities can’t live near where they work. Families are pushed farther out. Local businesses can’t find staff. The province talks about housing targets, but too many of those targets are designed for big cities, not rural and small-town realities. Fraser-Nicola needs workforce housing, rental support, and planning that helps our towns accommodate teachers, paramedics, loggers, and miners – not just policy made for downtown condos.
Health care is part of the affordability equation, even if it doesn’t always look like it. When you can’t live near a hospital or clinic because housing is too expensive, staffing suffers.
Wait times grow. Emergency services stretch thin. Families pay in travel costs, lost wages, and stress.
A nurse who can’t afford to stay in the riding is a cost we all feel. The legislature must treat rural health care as an affordability issue, not just a service problem.
Jobs and wages matter too. Mining, forestry, agriculture, trucking, tourism, and small business are the backbone of Fraser-Nicola. Affordability depends on stable, decent-paying jobs that let families stay in their communities. Policies that ignore resource jobs or over-regulate them without providing alternatives hurt us most. We need a balanced approach: support local jobs, invest in training, and make sure the benefits of resource development stay here.
But none of this happens if the province is stuck in talks, committees, and announcements that never turn into results. British Columbia needs a Minister of Getting Stuff Done – someone whose job is not just to speak, but to deliver.
A minister responsible for cutting red tape, speeding up approvals for housing and infrastructure, and making sure projects actually break ground.
A minister who measures success by whether a school, clinic, road, or workforce housing unit is built, not by how many press releases are issued.
This minister should be accountable for rural outcomes: housing starts in Interior towns, health care staffing levels, road and bridge repairs, broadband expansion, and jobs in resource communities. They should be the person you can hold responsible when a project stalls for months or years.
Fraser-Nicola deserves affordability policies that work here, not just in Victoria and Vancouver.
We need a government that treats our riding as central to B,C’.s future, not as a footnote. And we need a minister whose only job is to make sure things actually get done for all British Columbians.