Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum’s pledge to leave Metro Vancouver governance, except for utilities, has sparked debate among local leaders and academics ahead of the region’s Nov. 27 board transition.
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Metro Vancouver is set to welcome a new board of directors on Nov. 27 following last month’s municipal elections, after a transition that reform advocates say raises questions about the region’s mandates and board structure.
The outgoing board, made up of 41 directors, has already requested it be reduced to 24 directors.
In its campaign platform, the incoming B.C. Conservative government pledged to overhaul Metro Vancouver to be “lean and accountable with a professional board,” with a focus on utility services.
Surrey Mayor Doug McCallum has vowed to pull the city from the regional government entirely except for tapping its utility services, citing concerns about how Metro Vancouver policies constrain land use in Surrey.
McCallum’s stance follows earlier disputes involving Surrey and Metro Vancouver’s urban planning approach. During his previous term from 2018 to 2022, he expressed opposition to Metro Vancouver policies limiting land use in Surrey.
In that period, Brenda Locke—who served as mayor between McCallum’s terms—said Surrey was not getting its fair share of Metro Vancouver investments and pursued initiatives to challenge land-use constraints tied to the urban containment boundary (UCB).
The UCB identifies where urban development is intended to occur to help limit sprawl and protect agricultural and environmentally important lands, and amending it generally requires a two-thirds voting threshold most of the time.
Locke also noted that areas including Campbell Heights industrial park were once greenspace and had been designated a special study area for the UCB before industrial development in 2005.
The City of Surrey has continued to submit development requests that test regional planning limits, while also pushing changes to how UCB amendments are approved.
In July 2025, Locke joined the mayors of Delta and Langley in writing to the Metro Vancouver board to ask that the UCB be expanded using a simple majority rather than a weighted two-thirds vote in more cases.
The evidence described opposition to Surrey’s proposal to expand the UCB for residential development in the city’s more rural stretches near the border, and said Metro Vancouver’s board finalized amendments in July to allow the lower voting threshold for “special study areas,” including Surrey’s proposed development in the south.
Metro Vancouver planners, in a report referenced in the text, acknowledged “the challenges of rapid growth and the desire for flexibility and local autonomy.”
Locke said in comments included in the evidence that Metro Vancouver responsibilities should be limited to “core responsibilities,” and when asked whether regional planning is a core responsibility, she said “it is to a point.”
She added that Surrey’s responsibilities as a large economic centre differ from those of smaller municipalities, saying she has “to be mindful of” the province and the country’s economic context.
Locke’s remarks included that she can’t “deal with [smaller communities] telling me that I can’t expand industrial land,” and referred to infrastructure considerations such as electrified buses.
Some governance reform supporters raised broader concerns about how far Surrey’s mayor wants to take changes. Newly elected New Westminster Mayor Daniel Fontaine helped spearhead calls for Metro Vancouver governance reforms as a city councillor, creating an “accountability charter.”
Fontaine said he has concerns about McCallum going too far, adding, “At the end of the day, I don't think we want to get away from the Metro Vancouver model,” while calling for “some significant reform.”
Fontaine said he wants a conversation with McCallum and other elected officials, and he argued that Surrey needs to remain “at the table,” describing Metro Vancouver without Surrey as “almost untenable.”
An academic referenced in the evidence cautioned against weakening Metro Vancouver’s regional planning mandate in response to what she called an unfair campaign against the region by municipalities and pressure from the province.
Meg Holden, an urban studies professor at Simon Fraser University, said Metro makes compromises and holds lines in the regional best interest, including cost-sharing and “geographic rationalization,” and she warned that without Metro there would be a “classic tragedy of the commons.”
Holden said Metro helps toward regional aspirations including reducing automobile dependence, reducing environmental pollution, improving biodiversity and supporting climate protections.
The evidence also quotes Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, who questioned how Surrey could receive Metro Vancouver’s services without participating in regional planning.
Yan said regional systems are “deeply connected to transportation and TransLink,” and the evidence says he points to how UCB rules shape infrastructure planning by directing growth to leverage existing capacity.
Yan also referenced that Metro Vancouver’s UCB-related reporting said Surrey’s submission acknowledged “the infrastructure implications of development in this area are not yet fully understood.”
He said the issue comes down to who pays for connecting services such as pipes, wires and roads, describing interdependence between jurisdictions as a “problem of not seeing codependence.”
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