Richmond—Queensborough

Richmond—Queensborough straddles the boundary between two municipalities, combining a portion of the city of Richmond with the Queensborough neighbourhood of New Westminster, both situated on Lulu Island in the Fraser River delta. The riding has a diverse electorate with significant South Asian and Chinese-Canadian communities, and its character spans established Richmond residential areas and the rapidly developing Queensborough, where condominium and townhouse projects had been transforming a once-quieter industrial-residential neighbourhood since the early 2010s. The George Massey Tunnel on Highway 99, which connects Richmond and Delta beneath the Fraser River, sat at the southern edge of the riding and remained the region's most contentious infrastructure issue.

Aman Singh had won the seat for the NDP in 2020 by a narrow margin, flipping a riding that the BC Liberals had held by just 134 votes in 2017. As a human rights lawyer and the first turban-wearing Sikh elected to the BC legislature, Singh had built a profile on civil rights and community engagement. The 2024 contest tested whether the NDP could hold this swing seat against a Conservative challenger in a riding where public safety and housing affordability were top-of-mind concerns.

Candidates

Steve Kooner (Conservative Party) — Kooner was born in Vancouver and held a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Simon Fraser University and a Juris Doctor from the University of Calgary Faculty of Law. He had practised law in British Columbia since 2006, operating his own firm, Steve Kooner Law Corporation, for more than seventeen years. He received the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2023.

Aman Singh (BC NDP) — Singh was born in Sultanpur Lodhi, Punjab, India, and grew up in Hong Kong before studying physics and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and earning his law degree from the University of Victoria. He specialized in human and civil rights law, spoke Cantonese, Hindi, and Punjabi, and had served as a governor of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He was the incumbent, first elected in 2020.

Cindy Wu (Independent) — Wu was a designer and entrepreneur who grew up in Richmond and held a bachelor's degree in fashion design from Parsons School of Design in New York and a master's in interior design from the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom. She founded an art academy in Richmond and was crowned Miss Chinese Vancouver in 2021.

Errol E. Povah also ran as an Independent with limited support.

Local Issues

The George Massey Tunnel replacement continued to dominate infrastructure politics in the riding. The NDP government had cancelled the previous BC Liberal bridge proposal in 2017 and committed to an eight-lane immersed-tube tunnel, but by 2024, the project — now estimated at roughly $4.15 billion — remained in the planning and procurement phase with no firm construction timeline. Commuters experienced daily gridlock at the aging crossing, and the years of delay since the bridge cancellation had become a potent campaign issue. The Conservatives promised to accelerate the replacement, while the NDP pointed to the progress in environmental assessment and procurement. For residents on both the Richmond and Queensborough sides of the riding, the tunnel crossing was a daily frustration that coloured perceptions of government competence.

Queensborough's rapid residential development continued to outpace community infrastructure. New condominium and townhouse projects had brought thousands of new residents to the neighbourhood, and the population was growing at more than twice the rate of the rest of New Westminster. Schools, parks, roads, and community amenities strained to keep up, and residents questioned whether provincial investment matched the pace of growth. The planned Q2Q pedestrian and cycling bridge — intended to connect Port Royal in Queensborough to New Westminster's downtown across the Fraser — remained in development, highlighting the neighbourhood's relative isolation from the services and transit connections available on the mainland side of the river.

Public safety and the cost of living were the twin pocketbook concerns across the riding. The NDP government's decriminalization pilot generated anxiety in a community where perceptions of public drug use and disorder had intensified, and the Conservative platform's promise to reverse the policy resonated with many voters. Housing affordability remained a central issue in both the Richmond and Queensborough portions of the riding, where the gap between household incomes and housing costs continued to widen. The NDP's housing measures — including the speculation and vacancy tax, the foreign buyers' surcharge, and rent controls — were debated through the lens of their impact on communities with strong transnational family and economic ties, and the riding's diverse population ensured that immigration settlement services, multilingual government access, and cultural programming remained everyday concerns.