Surrey City Centre

Surrey City Centre is a new riding created through the 2024 redistribution, carved from the former Surrey-Whalley constituency and the urbanizing core around King George SkyTrain Station. The riding encompasses the rapidly densifying blocks of condominium towers along King George Boulevard, the civic precinct around Surrey City Hall and the new Surrey Provincial Court, and portions of the Whalley neighbourhood where the city's growing downtown ambitions coexist with longstanding challenges around homelessness and the toxic drug supply. The SkyTrain extension from King George Station to Langley, which broke ground during the 2020–2024 term, promised to reshape the riding's transit landscape.

As a new riding, Surrey City Centre had no incumbent. The NDP's Amna Shah and the Conservatives' Zeeshan Wahla, both first-time candidates, competed in one of the tightest races in the province.

Candidates

Amna Shah (BC NDP) — Shah had called Surrey home for nearly twenty years. She served on the board of the Surrey Food Bank and previously worked as Director of Outreach and Stakeholder Relations for the BC NDP caucus. She also worked with BC's Ministry of Housing, where she helped advance affordable housing policies and projects.

Zeeshan Wahla (Conservative Party) — Wahla was a professional engineer registered in four provinces who ran an engineering consulting business. He arrived in British Columbia as an immigrant in 2007 and had been actively involved in the Surrey community for more than a decade.

Colin Boyd (BC Green Party) also contested the riding. Saeed Naguib (Independent) and Ryan Abbott (Communist Party of BC) received minor shares of the vote.

Local Issues

The policing transition from the RCMP to the new Surrey Police Service was the most prominent public safety issue across all of Surrey's ridings, and Surrey City Centre sat at the epicentre of the changeover. Newton and Whalley — the districts with the highest concentrations of street-level crime and social disorder — were designated as the first deployment areas for the Surrey Police Service. By the time of the October 2024 election, the transition was still underway, with SPS officers integrated into the Surrey RCMP under RCMP operational command. Residents and business owners along King George Boulevard debated whether the new municipal force would deliver more responsive community policing or simply impose higher costs during a drawn-out transition period.

The opioid crisis continued to exact a devastating toll in the riding. The SafePoint supervised consumption site on 135A Street, which had operated since 2017, reversed hundreds of overdoses annually, but fatal overdose counts across Surrey remained among the highest in British Columbia. The NDP government's approach — centred on harm reduction, supervised consumption, and safe supply programs — drew sharp criticism from the Conservatives, who argued for a greater emphasis on involuntary treatment and recovery-oriented care. The crisis intersected with visible homelessness along the 135A Street corridor, where encampments and street-level disorder were persistent concerns for neighbouring businesses and residents.

The Surrey–Langley SkyTrain extension, a sixteen-kilometre expansion of the Expo Line from King George Station to Langley along Fraser Highway, was under construction during the campaign. The project, budgeted at roughly six billion dollars, promised to bring rapid transit to communities east of the riding, but the construction itself brought lane closures, traffic disruption, and noise to residents of Surrey City Centre living near the King George hub. Candidates debated whether the massive transit investment would catalyze the economic revitalization of the city centre or whether the benefits would primarily flow to communities farther along the line.