Metro Vancouver rejects call to cancel Friday budget vote: outgoing board to decide 2027 budget

Metro Vancouver has rejected a call to cancel its Friday budget vote. The Vancouver Sun reported that Surrey mayor-elect Doug McCallum on Monday urged the regional district to cancel the board meeting scheduled for October 30 and leave its agenda to the board voters have just chosen — but the district will meet and vote as planned.

McCallum's case: 13 mayors already replaced

McCallum noted that in the October 17 B.C. municipal elections, voters in 13 of the region's 21 municipalities chose a new mayor, including Vancouver, Surrey, Richmond, Coquitlam, Delta and both Langleys. Those municipalities are home to more than 2.1 million people, about four in every five residents of the region, and they hold 114 of the 145 votes on the Metro Vancouver Board; Surrey alone holds 29. In his words: “Thirteen days after voters replaced 13 mayors, the old Board plans to sit down and pass next year's budget. That is not how you treat voters.”

What Friday's vote decides

On Friday, October 30, the outgoing board is scheduled to consider agenda packages running to 1,190 pages across Metro Vancouver's four boards, and to approve the 2027 Budget and Five-Year Financial Plan — the document that sets what every household in the region pays for regional water, sewer, garbage and parks, already nearly $900 a year for the average home, according to McCallum. He also pointed out that the law gives the board until March 31 to adopt its financial plan, and that the next regular meeting is November 27, by which time every new council will be sworn in and will have named its directors.

What happens next

With the cancellation call rejected, Friday's vote goes ahead as scheduled, while the newly elected mayors and councils start being sworn in next week. The dispute is about more than a meeting date: it is whether an outgoing board should lock in a budget affecting every household's bills on the eve of a turnover, or leave the decision to the board voters have just elected.