Doerkson pins growth hopes on getting forestry 'back to business' and LNG opportunity

Interim British Columbia Conservative leader Lorne Doerkson is partly pinning his hopes on the province's beleaguered forestry sector to carry his election platform's forecast of 3.2 per cent economic growth.

Doerkson says the sector is now in peril but has been a "ginormous contributor" to the province's economy in the past, and the infrastructure is in place to "absolutely get back to business."

The Conservatives' growth projections exceed both the NDP's projections for the province and the Bank of Canada's national forecasts.

They say in their platform for Saturday's election that GDP growth by 2029-2030 will yield $2.6 billion in new revenue that will help bring down the deficit that has reached record levels under the government of NDP Leader David Eby.

Doerkson says in a brief interview that the gas industry is also a growth opportunity that he says "hasn't been capitalized on by the NDP."

The New Democrats have accused Doerkson of using unrealistic growth projections in its costed platform that says the deficit will be brought down from a forecast $14 billion to $10.8 billion by 2030.

But Doerkson says the LNG sector represents "a bigger opportunity in British Columbia than we've had in a decade."

"This is a business that speaks in trillions of dollars when you talk to them. What we need to run our province is billions of dollars. There is a massive opportunity in the north to help us," he said on Thursday after a campaign event in Surrey, where he announced what he called the "Surrey success plan" for B.C.'s second-largest city. 

Both Doerkson and Eby have been concentrating on vote-rich Surrey in the final week of the campaign.

Doerkson is scheduled to hold a rally in the city that has 10 ridings later Thursday, while Eby was in Surrey on Wednesday and held a rally near City Hall that drew hundreds of supporters. 

The NDP leader, campaigning in Vancouver on Thursday, called Surrey "a vitally important city in the province."

"They're the fastest-growing city, they're the most diverse, they're youngest, and for a bunch of reasons they deserve that additional level of attention, even independent of the election," he said.

"This is a community that's been neglected for a long time by previous governments and we're catching up."

Six days of advance voting wrapped up on Wednesday, with numbers down more than 11 per cent compared to 2024.

That bucks what Elections BC has called a two-decade upwards trend.

There were 891,348 advance votes cast, representing about 24 per cent of all registered voters.

There were 1,002,004 advance votes cast in 2024, when numbers spiked 49 per cent compared to the previous vote.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 22, 2026.

— With files by Wolfgang Depner in Vancouver

By Nono Shen | Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.