SURREY, B.C. – More Surrey voters put an X beside Harry Bains’ name than beside any other council candidate on October 17. It bought him a very lonely seat.
Bains, running with Surrey Connect, won 31,362 votes in the municipal election, the highest total of any councillor in the city, ahead of Safe Surrey Coalition’s Doug Elford at 30,833. But every other name at the top of the count belonged to Doug McCallum’s party. Safe Surrey took seven of the eight council seats, and with McCallum’s win in the mayor’s race, his bloc controls eight of the nine votes at the council table. Bains is the only councillor elected outside it.
It is a complete reversal of 2022, when Surrey Connect held the council majority and Safe Surrey was reduced to two seats. This time Surrey Connect, the party of defeated mayor Brenda Locke, was cut to one seat, and Surrey First, which ran city hall from 2008 to 2018, was shut out entirely. The final seat was decided by 232 votes, with Safe Surrey’s Cheney Cloke edging Surrey First incumbent Mike Bose, 26,324 to 26,092.
Bains is not new to being outnumbered, or to Surrey politics. He served five terms as the BC NDP MLA for Surrey-Newton from 2005 to 2024, including seven years as British Columbia’s Minister of Labour from 2017 to 2024, and before that spent more than 15 years as an elected officer of Steelworkers-IWA Canada Local 2171. Few people arriving at Surrey city hall have spent more time in rooms where their side did not hold the votes.
His path to the lone seat had its own twist. During the campaign, Bains publicly endorsed Mike Starchuk of Imagine Surrey for mayor over his own party’s candidate, incumbent Brenda Locke, saying he had known Starchuk for over 20 years and found him “genuinely committed to improving workers’ health and safety.” Starchuk finished third in the mayor’s race with 17,282 votes. Bains now sits on a council led by the man his endorsed candidate lost to.
What one vote can do on a nine-member council is limited, and Bains will not be able to block Safe Surrey’s agenda on his own. What he can do is ask questions on the record, force debates into the open, and carry the concerns of the voters who backed the losing side, which in the mayor’s race was a majority of the city: McCallum won with 42,741 votes, 31.94 per cent of ballots cast, in a turnout of 37.35 per cent.
The results remain unofficial until the City of Surrey declares them, which it must do by 4 p.m. on October 21. The new council’s term will show whether the city’s top-polling councillor becomes its most effective critic, or simply its most outvoted one.
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