Vancouver-Fraserview

Vancouver-Fraserview covers southeast Vancouver from the Fraser River north through the established residential neighbourhoods of Killarney, Champlain Heights, and Victoria-Fraserview. The riding is home to large Chinese, South Asian, and Filipino communities, making it one of the most ethnically diverse constituencies in the city. Its character is defined by single-family homes on quiet streets, community centres that serve as hubs for multilingual programming, and a growing seniors population that relies on culturally specific services.

Vancouver-Fraserview had earned a reputation as one of British Columbia's most reliable bellwether ridings: since its creation in 1991, the constituency had always elected a member who sat on the government side of the Legislature. The NDP flipped the seat in 2017, and incumbent George Chow sought re-election in 2020 to keep the bellwether streak intact. With the NDP heavily favoured to form government again, the Liberals faced an uphill battle in a riding whose political character had increasingly tracked the province's broader shifts.

Candidates

George Chow (BC NDP) — Born in China, Chow emigrated from Hong Kong to Canada in 1965 at age 14, settling in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside where his father worked as a cook. He graduated from UBC with a mechanical engineering degree in 1975 and spent more than 30 years at BC Hydro in power generation. Chow served two terms on Vancouver City Council with Vision Vancouver from 2005 to 2011 and was elected MLA in 2017, subsequently serving as Minister of State for Trade.

David Grewal (BC Liberal Party) — Born and raised in Vancouver, Grewal co-founded Absolute Energy Inc. in 2003, building it into what the company described as British Columbia's largest natural gas supply management and brokerage firm. He had served as chair of his local community association and sat on a business improvement association board. In the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, he narrowly missed winning a council seat, finishing as the highest vote-getter not to be elected.

Francoise Raunet (BC Green Party) — Raunet was a district support teacher for the Vancouver School Board with over 25 years of experience in education. Fluent in French and English and conversant in Mandarin after living five years in Taiwan, she had previously run twice provincially in Vancouver-Point Grey. She advocated for increased public education funding and a stronger pandemic response plan for schools.

Local Issues

Seniors' services and community infrastructure received significant investment in the riding during the NDP's term. A new $7.5-million Killarney Seniors Centre — a 10,000-square-foot facility offering recreation programs, a hot lunch program, off-site excursions, and support services — was completed in early 2018 with funding shared equally among the federal, provincial, and municipal governments at $2.5 million each. The centre addressed a longstanding gap in services for the riding's aging population, particularly seniors in the Chinese and South Asian communities who relied on culturally specific programming. But the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020 transformed the conversation around seniors' care: outbreaks at long-term care facilities across Metro Vancouver exposed systemic problems with staffing levels, the prevalence of part-time workers moving between multiple facilities, and inadequate infection control. The province's single-site staffing order — requiring care aides to work at only one facility — was designed to limit viral transmission but exacerbated existing staffing shortages at homes serving the riding's multilingual senior population.

Transit infrastructure remained a central frustration for the riding's commuters. Many residents in Killarney and Champlain Heights relied on buses to reach employment and services, with the Canada Line providing a rapid transit connection at some distance from the riding's core neighbourhoods. The NDP government's investment in the Broadway Subway extension, while centred on the west side, was viewed as a step toward improving regional connectivity, but residents argued that southeast Vancouver had been consistently overlooked in transit planning. The NDP had also committed to a new SkyTrain station at Capstan Way on the Canada Line in Richmond, which would serve some Fraserview-area commuters, but there was no comparable commitment for improved rapid transit access within the riding itself.

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected the riding's multilingual and immigrant populations. Access to health information in Chinese, Punjabi, Tagalog, and other community languages was essential, and organizations such as S.U.C.C.E.S.S. and the Killarney Community Centre worked to bridge gaps in public health communication. Many residents in the riding worked in frontline service-sector jobs — in restaurants, grocery stores, and health care — that could not be performed remotely, placing them at higher risk of exposure. The riding's large multigenerational households, common in the South Asian and Chinese communities, increased the risk of household transmission and created anxiety among families caring for elderly relatives at home.

Housing affordability had intensified as a concern even in Fraserview, historically one of Vancouver's more middle-class areas. The NDP's speculation and vacancy tax, introduced in 2018 at 0.5 per cent and raised to 2 per cent for foreign owners and satellite families, and the elimination of MSP premiums provided some financial relief to households. But property values in the riding's established single-family neighbourhoods continued to climb, and the diverse immigrant communities that formed the riding's social fabric expressed anxiety about displacement. Young families who had grown up in Killarney or Victoria-Fraserview found themselves priced out of the neighbourhoods where their parents had settled decades earlier.