Comox Valley Housing & 2026 Election series
A week after choosing their councils, Comox Valley voters go back to the polls on Saturday, October 24, this time to elect a provincial government. Premier David Eby called the snap election on September 22, two years ahead of the fixed election date, framing it around Donald Trump, tariffs and Canadian sovereignty. Housing has had less airtime in this campaign than it did in 2024, but every party’s platform includes housing promises, and many of the rules that govern housing in the Valley are set in Victoria.
On Sunday I wrote about what our new councils could mean for housing, and ended on a point several local candidates made themselves: a council can’t move market prices much on its own. The province wrote the Bill 44 zoning rules every council here now works under. It sets the housing targets, collects the speculation and vacancy tax and the property transfer tax, and funds most non-market housing, including the Braidwood Road project in Courtenay. Those are the levers on this ballot.
As with the municipal posts, I’m not endorsing anyone. What follows is drawn from the parties’ published platforms and their campaign announcements, organized by the decisions that reach Comox Valley owners, buyers and renters.
Who’s on your ballot
Most of the Valley votes in Courtenay-Comox, which takes in Courtenay, Comox, Merville, Black Creek and Little River. In 2024 Brennan Day won it for the Conservatives by 93 votes over the NDP’s Ronna-Rae Leonard, 13,481 to 13,388. Day is running again. His challengers are Will Cole-Hamilton for the NDP, a Courtenay city councillor who gave up a re-election bid to run provincially; Jay Van Oostdam for the BC Greens, who works in public health; and Jason Cook for CentreBC, who works in finance.
Cumberland sits outside that riding, with its northern municipal boundary as the riding line. The village votes in Mid Island-Pacific Rim, along with Royston, Union Bay, Fanny Bay and Denman and Hornby islands. There, NDP incumbent Josie Osborne faces Conservative Joshua Dahling and Green Gracie MacDonald. If you live near a boundary and aren’t sure, you can look up your address at wheretovote.elections.bc.ca.
Advance voting runs through Wednesday, October 21, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and you can vote at any advance location in the province. On Saturday the polls are open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. You have an assigned voting place, although Elections BC says you can vote at another voting place if that’s more convenient. A B.C. driver’s licence or B.C. Services Card with photo covers both identity and address.
I couldn’t find riding-specific housing platforms from any of the local candidates, so the positions below are the parties’.
Empty homes and the speculation tax
Courtenay, Comox and Cumberland have been inside the speculation and vacancy tax (SVT) zone since the province added them in 2024. The Comox Valley Regional District’s rural electoral areas are not on the province’s list of taxable areas. Most owners never pay it, because a principal residence, or a property rented out for at least six months of the year, is exempt; the tax lands on homes that sit empty or are used only occasionally. For the 2026 tax year the rate is 1 per cent of assessed value for Canadian citizens and permanent residents and 3 per cent for foreign owners. The foreign rate is already legislated to rise to 4 per cent in 2027.
The NDP is proposing to go further, raising the rates to 2 per cent for domestic owners and 5 per cent for foreign owners. On a Comox condo assessed at $600,000 and left empty for the year, a Canadian owner’s bill would go from $6,000 to $12,000. The NDP would also bring in an Unsold Condo Tax on large, developer-owned finished condos that sit vacant and unsold, starting at 2 per cent in the second year and rising a point each year after. The platform doesn’t define “large developer,” so it’s unclear how many Comox Valley projects, if any, would fall under the tax.
The Conservative position has changed since the last election. In 2024, under John Rustad, the party campaigned on scrapping the SVT. This time interim leader Lorne Doerkson has said a Conservative government would keep the SVT, and on September 27 he pledged not to raise or introduce any new taxes. The Greens and CentreBC haven’t proposed SVT changes that I could find. The Greens have proposed a wealth tax on households with a net worth above $50 million, counting all assets minus debts. It would start with a one-time levy of 5 to 20 per cent on wealth above that line, then an annual 2 to 5 per cent, with affordable housing one of several uses for the revenue alongside childcare, transit and debt reduction.
How fast a permit comes back
The NDP, the Conservatives and CentreBC all promise faster approvals, and they differ in how specific they get. The Greens’ platform doesn’t set permit timelines; their approval proposals deal with how housing targets are set, which I cover in the next section.
The NDP’s Small Builder Permit Guarantee would require a decision within 30 days on complete applications for projects of up to six units that fit the official community plan, in large municipalities, with $5 million a year to help cities meet the deadline. It would also standardize technical code and permit requirements for small builds across the province. The platform doesn’t say how large a municipality has to be, so whether Courtenay or Comox would fall under the guarantee is an open question.
The Conservatives promise to approve homes in “months rather than years.” Their platform doesn’t put a number of days or weeks on that. Its approval measures are an overhaul of the Step Code (the province’s energy-efficiency standards for new buildings) and a simpler, harmonized building code, so builders face one set of technical rules wherever they work.
CentreBC would set province-wide limits by January 1, 2028: eight weeks for a building permit and six months for a rezoning, with fees refunded to the builder if a city misses the deadline and a $125-million annual fund for cities that hit their targets.
Courtenay’s incoming mayor, Manno Theos, campaigned on a 90-day development permit process, and four of the six councillors elected with him are on record wanting faster approvals. A provincial deadline would set the floor for that work rather than leave it to each council.
Who decides how dense
This is the clearest split between the two largest parties, and it lands directly on Comox.
The NDP’s Bill 44, passed in 2023, moved much of the density decision to Victoria. It requires small-scale multi-unit zoning on most residential lots, requires community plans and zoning to make room for 20 years of projected housing need, and limits public hearings for rezonings that are consistent with an OCP. The NDP platform keeps that framework and adds the permit guarantee on top.
The Conservative plan says density decisions should rest with local governments and residents, with municipalities held to their own community plans and density targets, zoning brought into line with those plans, and new growth matched by roads, transit, schools, health care and utilities. The Greens would also revise how housing targets are set, factoring in water, watershed, climate and health care capacity, and would share property transfer tax revenue with the communities that build.
Comox’s new council was elected largely on how the town’s OCP and its six-storey downtown heights were handled. Under the current rules, any council that significantly lowers planned density would still have to ensure the OCP and zoning provide enough capacity to accommodate the roughly 3,358 homes identified as needed by 2041. A provincial government that hands more of those decisions back to municipalities would give that council more room to revisit the plan. One that keeps Bill 44 as written would not.
Renters
The Greens have the most extensive rental platform. They would restart the Community Housing Fund and Indigenous Housing Fund with a goal of 26,000 homes built or protected a year, which CTV News reported as a $1.5-billion commitment. They would introduce vacancy control, which ties the allowable rent increase to the unit rather than the tenant, so a landlord couldn’t reset the rent to market between tenancies. They also propose a rent review when local market rents fall, and dedicated workforce-housing funding for tourism communities.
CentreBC would raise the renter’s tax credit from $400 to $600 a year, extend the full credit to households earning up to $80,000 and index it to inflation. It would also double BC Builds to 20,000 below-market homes by 2031. BC Builds is the province’s rental program for middle-income households, launched in 2024, which pairs low-cost government financing with public, non-profit and community land so rents can sit below market.
The NDP would double the number of homes protected through the BC Rental Protection Fund, which helps non-profits buy existing rental buildings so their rents stay affordable, and invest $390 million in non-market projects that are ready to build. The NDP says starting rents are down more than 10 per cent and have fallen 27 months in a row, a provincial figure that I haven’t been able to check against Comox Valley rents.
The Conservative platform I read has no renter-specific measures.
Who pays for growth
Development cost charges (DCCs) are the fees builders pay toward the pipes, roads and parks new homes need, and the new Courtenay council is already split over them. Councillor Wendy Morin wants to keep growth paying its way through DCCs, while Councillor Evan Jolicoeur has raised concerns about what they add to the price of a new home.
Three provincial parties propose cutting them. The NDP would lower DCCs on multi-unit housing by up to 50 per cent, which it puts at as much as $40,000 a home, contingent on a final agreement with Ottawa. CentreBC would halve DCCs on new rental and below-market homes, add a $240-million annual growth fund cities can apply to, and rebate the PST on building materials for purpose-built rentals of four or more homes started between 2027 and 2032. The Conservatives promise to cut construction taxes and charges without, in the platform I read, putting a figure on it.
For a council like Courtenay’s, the detail to look for is who replaces the revenue. DCCs help pay for the water mains, sewer lines, roads and other infrastructure that growth requires. If senior government reduces what a builder pays, either it replaces that revenue, the municipality finds another source, or some of the planned infrastructure has to change. The NDP’s cut depends on a deal with Ottawa, and CentreBC pairs its cut with a growth fund cities can apply to. The Conservative platform doesn’t say how its cut would be covered.
One more item for older homeowners, who are a large share of the Valley. B.C.’s Property Tax Deferment Program lets homeowners 55 and older put off paying their annual property taxes. The province pays the bill as a loan against the home, and the homeowner repays it, with interest, when the home is sold or passes to the estate. Until this year, new loans under the regular program carried simple interest at 2 per cent below prime. For taxes deferred in 2026 and later, the province raised the rate to 2 per cent above prime and made the interest compound monthly.
By the Ministry of Finance’s own estimate, a homeowner who defers a $3,800 tax bill every year for 10 years would owe just over $17,000 in interest under the new terms, compared with just over $5,000 under the old ones. CTV News reports that the Conservatives would bring the rate back to prime minus 2 per cent. I couldn’t find a proposal from the NDP, Greens or CentreBC to change it.
What the local market is saying
The NDP’s campaign points to provincial asking rents, which have now fallen for more than two years in a row. The Conservatives point to low housing starts and falling sales. Both describe the province as a whole, and the Comox Valley doesn’t match either one neatly. Our benchmark single-family price was $848,900 in September, up 1 per cent from a year earlier. Sales were down 37 per cent from last September, and the Valley had about five and a half months of inventory, the high end of a balanced market.
When the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board released those numbers, its chief executive, Jason Yochim, named the “two elections going on in the province right now” as one reason buyers were holding back. By Sunday morning both elections will be decided.
Where the parties stand, side by side
| NDP | Conservative | Green | CentreBC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speculation and vacancy tax | Raise to 2% domestic, 5% foreign; new Unsold Condo Tax | Keep current SVT; no new taxes | No change proposed; wealth tax on households with net worth over $50M | No change proposed |
| Permit timelines | 30-day decisions for builds up to six units in large municipalities | Approvals in “months rather than years” | Not a focus | 8-week building permits, 6-month rezonings by 2028; fee refunds if missed |
| Density decisions | Keep Bill 44 framework | Return density decisions to local governments | Tie targets to water, climate and health care capacity | Standard approval rules across municipalities |
| Renters | Double Rental Protection Fund homes; $390M for shovel-ready non-market projects | No specific measures in platform | Vacancy control; build/protect 26,000 homes annually through restarted housing funds | Renter’s credit to $600; double BC Builds to 20,000 homes |
| Development cost charges | Cut up to 50% on multi-unit, with Ottawa | Cut construction taxes and charges | Share property transfer tax with building communities | Halve on rental and below-market homes; PST rebate on rental materials |
What it could mean if you own, buy or rent here
This section is my interpretation. A platform is written for the campaign, and what actually becomes law depends on the budget the new government tables and the bills it can get through the legislature.
If you own a second property in Courtenay, Comox or Cumberland that sits empty for much of the year, the SVT rate is the most direct line from this ballot to your finances. If you’re a homeowner thinking about adding a suite or a garden home, or a small builder, watch the permit promises: a provincial deadline would do more for your timeline than any single council can. If you own rental property, the Green proposal for vacancy control would change how you price a unit between tenants. If you rent, the parties’ offers range from a larger tax credit to new rules on rent increases. If you’re deferring property taxes as a senior, the deferment rate differs depending on who forms government.
Whoever wins on Saturday will write the rules the councils we elected last week have to work within.
Advance voting is open through Wednesday, October 21. Find your voting place at wheretovote.elections.bc.ca.
Note: I use AI to help structure and speed up drafting these posts, then edit them substantially against the sources listed below.
Sources
- Daily Hive, B.C. will vote twice this October as premier David Eby triggers snap election, September 22, 2026
- Global News, B.C. Premier David Eby calls snap election, September 22, 2026
- Comox Valley Record, Provincial Election to be held Oct. 24, October 20, 2026
- My Comox Valley Now, Courtenay-Comox provincial election candidates finalized, October 5, 2026
- Sitka Media, Riding Snapshot: Courtenay-Comox, October 14, 2026
- BC Ballot, Courtenay-Comox riding page and Compare the party platforms, checked October 18, 2026
- Wikipedia, Courtenay-Comox (2024 results) and Brennan Day
- Elections BC, Ways to vote and Voter ID
- Daily Hive, How to vote in the 2026 provincial election
- BC NDP, BC Strong plan
- Conservative Party of B.C., Lorne Doerkson’s Plan for a Stronger BC
- BC Green Party, Believe in Better platform
- CentreBC, 2026 Platform
- My Cariboo Now, B.C. election: A look at the main party promises as advance voting begins, October 16, 2026
- CTV News, B.C. Election 2026 platform tracker and B.C. Conservative leader pledges not to raise or introduce new taxes, September 27, 2026
- Daily Hive, B.C. Greens propose wealth tax, October 7, 2026
- Traders Union, British Columbia rent declines extend to 26 months as asking prices fall in September
- Yahoo News Canada, B.C. Election 2026: 12 hot topics and where each party stands
- Government of B.C., Speculation and vacancy tax: taxable areas and tax rates
- Government of B.C., Interest and fees for property tax deferment
- Office of the Seniors Advocate, news release on property tax deferment changes, May 2026
- Vancouver Island Real Estate Board, September 2026 statistics, released October 1, 2026 (see my October Market Snapshot)
- After the Vote: What Comox Valley’s New Councils Could Mean for Housing, October 2026