SURREY, B.C. - For Zeeshan Wahla, the Conservative Party candidate in Surrey City Centre, the 2026 campaign is personal: in 2024, he came within 232 votes of winning the seat – and now he is back to finish the job against the same BC NDP incumbent who edged him out.
Wahla’s professional background is in engineering and planning. He is a Professional Engineer (P. Eng.) registered in four provinces, and runs his own engineering consulting firm. His party biography describes a professional commitment to honesty, integrity, and protecting public safety and the environment – the values he says guide his work.
His personal story is an immigrant one. Wahla arrived in British Columbia as an immigrant in 2007 and has proudly called Surrey home ever since. Raised in a family that valued hard work and perseverance, he pursued higher education and built a business of his own – a path his campaign says has given him firsthand understanding of the pressures facing working families, from the rising cost of living to the challenge of getting ahead.
That lived experience anchors the Conservative pitch in the riding: make life affordable again, restore safety to Surrey’s streets, and fix healthcare. The party’s Surrey slate announcement put its candidates forward as ready “to fight to make life affordable again, restore safety to Surrey’s streets, fix healthcare and give Surrey the strong leadership it deserves.”
The reason Wahla’s race matters is the same reason it is so close: the 2024 result in Surrey City Centre was Shah 6,726 votes, or 46.70 per cent, to Wahla’s 6,494, or 45.08 per cent – a 232-vote gap that set off an automatic recount and confirmed how evenly divided this downtown Surrey riding is.
This time the field is wider – CentreBC’s Raman Sharma and OneBC’s Oliver Wildfong have joined the race – and the Conservative campaign is betting that the added choices, plus two more years of cost-of-living pressure, will move the few hundred votes Wahla needs.
Wahla and his wife are raising their four daughters in Surrey, where they share their home with his mother. Providing his daughters with a good education and the opportunity for a bright future, his campaign says, is at the heart of everything he does – and he wants every family in Surrey to have that same opportunity.
Advance voting in Surrey City Centre runs October 16 to 21, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., at A.H.P. Matthew Elementary School, Creekside Elementary School, Forsyth Road Elementary School, Queen Elizabeth Secondary School, and Surrey Traditional School. General voting day is Saturday, October 24.
Photo: Conservative Party of BC (conservativebc.ca)
Sources: conservativebc.ca; Elections BC; StudioX News
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