Surrey-Guildford chooses between two Garrys. Garry Begg, the incumbent, or Garry Thind, the school trustee, on crowded classrooms and safer streets.

Three hundred and fifty-three. In September 2025 that was how many portable classrooms the Surrey School District still had, by the count of its own board chair; 45 of them stood empty because moving one costs more than $100,000.¹ Garry Thind has sat at that board table since 2014. Now he is the Conservative Party of BC candidate in Surrey-Guildford, and he says the board has taken him as far as it can.

The portables were supposed to be gone by now. On 19 April 2017, John Horgan, then the leader of the BC NDP, stood in a Surrey schoolyard with a row of portable classrooms behind him. More than ten per cent of Surrey students, he said, about 7,000 children, were learning in portables, and an NDP government would “get Surrey students into real classrooms.” At the microphone beside him stood the party’s candidate in the new riding of Surrey-Guildford, a retired RCMP inspector named Garry Begg.²

Begg won that May, and he has held the seat ever since. The Province’s own biography of him says he went into politics with four goals: “tackling crime, improving hospital care, getting students out of portables and into real classrooms, and addressing the transportation needs of Surrey.”³ Nine years later he is asking Surrey-Guildford for a fourth term, against the trustee who has watched the portables from the board table.

Garry Thind

Conservative Party of BC candidate, Surrey-Guildford

Surrey

Has lived and worked in the city for more than 27 years

Schools

Surrey school trustee since 2014; vice-chair of the board; has chaired its Budget Committee

Community

Past president, Rotary Club of Surrey; leads the BC region of the Pingalwara Society, a disability charity

Raised

More than $5.4 million for charitable causes since 2002

Work

Full-time Realtor, Century 21 Coastal Realty in Surrey

Portrait: Conservative Party of BC⁴

Both men have a record in Surrey, and both have said in their own words what they would do with the seat. Here is where they stand, side by side.

Garry ThindConservative candidate

Garry BeggBC NDP, incumbent

Record

Surrey school trustee since 2014 and the board’s vice-chair; past president of the Rotary Club of Surrey; has helped raise more than $5.4 million for charity since 2002.⁴

MLA since 2017; Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General, 2024–25; Parliamentary Secretary for Surrey Infrastructure; 38 years in the RCMP, the last eight in Surrey.³

Health care

“Healthcare: family doctors for every British Columbian.” His first 100 days: “finding family and emergency room doctors, stopping closures.”⁵

“Expand access to doctors and timely local care.” He backs 20 team-based primary-care clinics, three more of them in Surrey, and “timely diagnosis and emergency care at Surrey Memorial.”⁵

Cost of living

“A Real Path to Home Ownership.” On taxes: “Just applying new taxes won’t solve any problem.”⁵⁶

“Lower grocery bills and fuel costs for local families.” He backs suspending 10 cents a litre of fuel tax and keeping ICBC rates frozen through 2030.⁵

Safety

“Safer streets: protecting our neighbours, ending catch and release.”⁵

“I know this growing community needs lower costs, timely health care and safe neighbourhoods.”⁵

Schools

Twelve years on the board; says “There are certain things that I cannot do at the school board level.”⁶

The Province says it has spent $1 billion on new schools and additions in Surrey since 2017, for more than 16,000 new seats.¹

01 Garry Begg promised to get Surrey students out of portables. Eight years later the district still had 353 of them.

In August 2017, three months after Begg was first elected, the Surrey School District said it expected to go “from about 275 portables to 325 thereabouts” that fall, to hold students until new schools were built.⁷ In September 2025 the chair of the Surrey Board of Education, Gary Tymoschuk, said the district “still has 353 portables.” Forty-five of them were sitting empty at schools that no longer needed them, because moving one costs more than $100,000 out of the classroom budget.¹

The Province says it has spent $1 billion on new schools and additions in Surrey since 2017, for more than 16,000 new seats.¹ That money was needed, and some of it built real classrooms. But Begg did not run on a dollar figure. He ran on getting students out of portables, and in our view a promise is measured at the door of the classroom.

Thind has watched that from the board table, and he says it is why he is running.

02 Garry Begg was the minister responsible for public safety when Surrey’s extortion wave began.

Begg’s first goal was tackling crime, and for eight months he held the job that answers for it. From November 2024 until July 2025 he was British Columbia’s Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General.³ Surrey Police Service dates the city’s spike in extortion threats and the shootings that go with them to June 2025, inside his time in that office.⁸

On 26 June 2025 he stood up to answer for it. He announced $100,000 for a 60-day Crime Stoppers campaign and told business owners to report their threats. “It’s important that we realize that there is fear in the community at large,” he said. Surrey Police counted 12 extortion files in the city that year to that point.⁹ Three weeks later, on 17 July, Premier David Eby moved him out of the portfolio and gave it to Nina Krieger, the MLA for Victoria-Swan Lake.¹⁰

The numbers that followed belong to the city Begg represents. Surrey Police counted 9 extortions in all of 2024. In 2025 it counted 133, with 49 shootings tied to them. This year, to 12 October, it has counted 147 reported extortions, 21 shootings and 3 arsons, against 80 victims, 41 of them targeted more than once.⁸ In February the Province named Begg, as a former minister, to a community advisory group on the crisis.¹¹

In our view, a family business in Surrey that has had shots fired at its door does not need its MLA on an advisory panel. It needs a government that treats the people shooting at it as the emergency. Thind lists “extortion threats” among the issues he says the NDP “have completely neglected,”⁶ and his platform puts it in five words.

03 Garry Begg is the Parliamentary Secretary for Surrey Infrastructure, and Surrey’s second hospital is three years late and more than a billion dollars over.

Since July 2025 Begg’s title has been Parliamentary Secretary for Surrey Infrastructure.³ The largest piece of Surrey infrastructure on the books is the new hospital and cancer centre in Cloverdale, announced in 2019. The Province once promised it would open to patients by 2027 at a cost of about $1.7 billion. It is now scheduled to open in 2030, at $2.88 billion.¹² The Premier says it is now “on time and on budget,” which is true of the new schedule and the new budget.¹³ The Surrey-Langley SkyTrain line went the same way: from 2028 to late 2029, and from about $4 billion to almost $6 billion.¹⁴

Begg’s own pitch this fall is about care: he promises to support “timely diagnosis and emergency care at Surrey Memorial.”⁵ In our view, an MLA who has held the seat since 2017 is promising to fix what his own government was supposed to have fixed. Thind’s first hundred days start in the same place, with doctors.

His party has promised to finish the Cloverdale hospital on time and on budget, and to build a new Women and Children’s Hospital in Surrey so families no longer have to drive into Vancouver for that care.¹⁵

04 Garry Begg says he is listening to his neighbours. Online, he answered none of them.

On 4 October, Begg told voters on X what his campaign was doing. One hundred and sixteen people replied.¹⁶

Garry Begg@GarryBeggBC · X · 4 Oct 2026, 5:25 p.m.

We’re knocking on doors, listening to our neighbours and working hard to earn your support once again.

116 replies · answered by Begg: 0

The post as published, re-set. The highlight is ours.¹⁶

We read every campaign post Begg put up between 22 September and 17 October, 69 in all on X, Facebook and Instagram. His 19 posts on X drew 2,956 replies, and he posted no reply of his own. On Facebook and Instagram we read 297 comments under 40 of his posts and found no reply from him there either. Those two platforms hide many replies behind a tap, and 20 of the 38 hidden reply threads under his posts would not open for us, so that zero rests on the comments we could read. To his credit, he left the reply box open on every post. In our grading of all 41 NDP incumbents on whether they answer the people who write to them, he gets an F.¹⁷

In our view, an MLA who tells his neighbours he is listening, and then answers none of the hundreds who write back, is not listening. In the Surrey Now-Leader’s candidate guide, Thind gave voters a phone number and an email address to reach him.⁵ He described his habit this way:

05 Garry Thind has spent twelve years on the Surrey school board and wants to take Surrey’s fight to Victoria.

Thind has lived and worked in Surrey for more than 27 years. He was first elected a trustee in 2014 and is the board’s vice-chair, and he has chaired its budget committee. He is a past president of the Rotary Club of Surrey and leads the BC region of the Pingalwara Society, a charity for people with physical and mental disabilities. He says it has raised $5.4 million since 2002 and runs with “zero administration cost.”⁴⁶

His three priorities are home ownership, doctors and safe streets.⁵ On the economy he is blunt:

One more thing a voter should know. When the Premier called the election on 22 September, the deadline to withdraw from Surrey’s 17 October school board vote had already passed, so Thind’s name stayed on that ballot. He told civic voters plainly that he was not seeking re-election as a trustee. They re-elected him anyway; the latest count had him second.¹⁸⁶ If he wins on 24 October, the provincial seat takes precedence and the board will need a by-election. In our view, the people who know his school board work best just voted for him when he asked them not to. That is a reference most candidates would envy.

06 Surrey-Guildford was decided by 22 votes, and 338Canada now projects Garry Thind ahead.

In 2024 this riding decided who governs British Columbia. After a judicial recount, Justice Kevin Loo of the B.C. Supreme Court declared Begg elected with 8,947 votes to 8,925 for the Conservative, Honveer Singh Randhawa. Those 22 votes gave David Eby’s New Democrats the 47 seats they needed for a majority.¹⁹²⁰

Garry Begg, BC NDPDeclared elected after the judicial recount

8,947

Honveer Singh Randhawa, ConservativeSecond, 22 votes behind

8,925

Elections BC, 2024 Provincial General Election, after the judicial recount of 8 November 2024. If 12 of Begg’s voters had chosen the Conservative instead, the seat would have changed hands.²⁰

338Canada, which turns the published polls into a projection for every riding, rates Surrey-Guildford “CPBC leaning.” Its update of 16 October puts the Conservatives at 48% and the BC NDP at 43%, each with a margin of eight points either way.²¹

Surrey-Guildford, projected vote

338Canada, update of 16 October 2026. Bars show the projection; the thin lines show its margin either way.²¹

Garry ThindConservative

48%

Garry BeggBC NDP

43%

Jodi MurphyBC Green

6%

James YaroshukUnaffiliated

3%

0%30%60%

A projection is a forecast, not a result, and the margins overlap. Thind is ahead of the incumbent, and nobody else on the ballot is within reach of either of them. Jodi Murphy, the BC Green candidate, is projected at 6%, and James Yaroshuk, who is running unaffiliated, at 3%.²¹

In our view, Garry Thind is the better choice for Surrey-Guildford.

07 Garry Begg stood in front of the portables in 2017. Garry Thind has been inside the schools ever since.

Nine years ago Garry Begg stood beside John Horgan in a Surrey schoolyard and promised that the portables behind them would give way to real classrooms. Since then he has been a backbencher, a minister and a parliamentary secretary. In those years the district’s portable count went up, not down, the new hospital slipped three years, and Surrey’s extortion wave began in his time as minister.⁷¹¹²⁸

Garry Thind spent those same years at the Surrey school board table, where the cost of those portables comes out of the classroom budget. Advance voting runs until 21 October, and Final Voting Day is 24 October.²² Last time this seat was settled by 22 votes.

The portables are still there. Garry Thind has spent twelve years at the table that pays for them. In our view, he has earned the chance to fix it from Victoria.