What do making schools safe against earthquakes and building more daycares in Burnaby have in common?
Both have been the subject of big election promises that have yet to bear fruit.
More than five years ago, a month before the provincial election, then-Premier Christy Clark announced $584 million in funding for seismic upgrades for 45 schools, including Burnaby North Secondary.
The 60-year-old school was listed for upgrades in 2014/15 in a press release that quoted Clark saying, “Absolutely nothing is more important than keeping our kids safe.”
Five years later, actual dollars for the project have yet to materialize.
It turns out the 2013 promise was an empty one, according to the education ministry.
“The majority of these projects, including Burnaby North, did not have business cases under development or proper funding approvals in place when they were announced,” reads a statement from the ministry to the NOW.
The district didn’t actually get permission to develop a detailed business case for the project until March 2017.
That plan, calling for a $79-million replacement of the school was submitted to the ministry before the summer break, according to the school district.
“We are very near to being able to make the announcement,” school board chair Gary Wong said about Burnaby North.
Wong was at a “celebration” for a $6.7 million seismic upgrade already in progress at Armstrong Elementary last week.
The chair said the difference between the Burnaby board of education and the former BC Liberal government is that the school board is “reluctant” to make announcements until plans are finalized.
Asked whether he thinks the current BC NDP government will handle such announcements differently, he said, “I would hope so.”
“Different governments run things differently,” Burnaby-Lougheed MLA and minister of state for childcare Katrina Chen told the NOW. “I don’t think it’s right to do an announcement before things are there, in place, funding is there.”
Chen and Wong, however, were themselves involved in a big announcement made just before the 2014 municipal election that has failed to bear fruit.
At the height of the campaign, Burnaby’s city council and school board – comprised entirely of Burnaby Citizens Association members running as candidates – announced an ambitious plan to triple childcare spaces in the city starting in 2015. The school district was to supply the land and the city was to pay for the placement of modular buildings for the daycares.
Wong and Chen were both part of that announcement – Wong as a trustee and Chen as a parks and rec commissioner.
Four years later, not a single one of those daycares has broken ground.
Wong said he had trusted the city’s information on the project and that the city had run into problems, like a widespread shortage of portables for the plan.
“We weren’t the ones to manage that project,” he said.
Chen, meanwhile, said the board did its best to make the plan happen “as soon as possible.”
“That announcement was made with good intentions; we really need to address child care … It did take way longer than we ever expected,” she said.
