As the provincial government struggles with deep debt and a challenging economy, its 2026 budget announced scaling back on several projects, including one that would have produced 300 long-term care beds at Langley Memorial Hospital (LMH).
For now, it’s been put on the back burner as the province figures out its finances.
Langley City Mayor Nathan Pahal tells 1130 NewsRadio he’s disappointed.
“Certainly, while health care is a provincial obligation, we hear clearly from our residents about the need for enhanced health-care services, and I know long-term care was one that we’ve heard,” said Pahal.
He says his council sent a letter to the provincial government, which responded with confirmation that the project has been “re-paced.”
Pahal says he will continue to fight for it.
“I’m hopeful the provincial government will reconsider this, given we are such a fast-growing community and there is a need here. I think we know our populations everywhere are aging. We know Langley City has a higher-than-average seniors’ population, so I think the need here is more acute.”
BC Care Providers Association CEO Mary Polak echoed Pahal’s sentiments, calling it a “devastating” development.
“You have families who are picking up the slack when the supports aren’t there for their loved ones,” Polak told 1130 NewsRadio.
“Right now, there are 7,800 seniors waiting for a placement in long-term care [provincewide]. We know the average wait time has now increased to almost 300 days, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. That only counts the seniors that we know are actively pursuing a placement. There are many families who are just doing that on their own.”
She says though the project would help people, she’s pushing for seniors to be placed in homes, not hospitals.
“We want them in home environments. What we need is government stepping up to the plate. They need to build these homes for seniors much faster. It is time to prioritize having seniors at home, not at a hospital and whether that’s home with supports from home care, whether that’s assisted living, long-term care, independent living, they need to support that spectrum.”
Polak says she’s lived through caring for an elderly relative herself.
“My father is now 97. He is living in Langley Lodge, but as he was needing more and more support, unfortunately, in spite of what his doctor wanted, in spite of what his other health-care professionals wanted, the health authority wouldn’t agree to have him qualify for assisted living or long-term care until he was found wandering alone outside at night. Then, he was put into an emergency situation and had the first available bed. It shouldn’t come to that.”
Polak says for any family members, it’s draining to care for others.
“Thank God, nothing dangerous happened to him, but it could have. And my story is not unique. And at that particular time, there wasn’t the home support available for him in his independent living — because that’s where he was — to have him supervised overnight. Thankfully, I was able to afford to pay for some support while we waited for a bed, because even then, there was a six-week wait, even for emergency situations. On nights when we couldn’t get staffing, I would stay overnight in his apartment, put little bells on the doorknob so he couldn’t sneak out, but that’s what families do.”
Polak says she had the financial means to pay for the help, but stresses that most people don’t.
“What would you do? It was a struggle for me, and I was making a decent living, but overnight supervision for home care is extremely costly. At the time, I was paying somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500 a night. A lot of people can’t possibly afford that.”
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She offers some solutions.
“I think you can boil it down to this. We have to stop looking at support for seniors as something different than everyday life. This isn’t acute care. This shouldn’t be treated as acute care, hospitals, health care. This is about supporting someone in their life, and that means we can be more flexible with how we’re providing those supports. Government, in many ways, needs to get out of the way with their regulatory approach, but of course, they need to have an established plan for health human resources — one that reflects the realities for seniors’ care, not hospitals. It’s different.”
Polak says Langley’s isn’t the only project that’s been pushed to the sidelines.
“The ones we’re talking about are what we call owned and operated. They were going to be government-built, government-operated, but another piece to the system… is the facilities that are built because government puts out a ‘request for solution,’ or what they used to call ‘request for proposals’ to providers in our sector. When the agreement with the Hospital Employees’ Union (HEU) was announced, that changed the cost structure for their bids, so now we’re waiting to see if Fraser Health reinvigorates that process… right now those are all stalled too, and I think that’s another 1,200 or so beds.”
She points out that the wait list for a long-term care bed used to be roughly 2,300 just a decade ago.
—With files from Dean Recksiedler