Jaime Stein | Ep. 1: Time to Step Up | 2026 BC Election Interview
https://youtu.be/8mhtCv4ueIQ
(Transcript from the episode's English subtitles — the interview is in English; speakers not labelled. Host: Sarah Yu.)

[0:00] Highlights
The biggest concern I hear from people on the doors is folks either born and raised in Canada or immigrated to Canada for a better life. They followed the rules, they worked hard, they paid their taxes, and now they're retiring and they don't have a family doctor. That's not fair. That's not my Canada.

[0:23] Meet Jaime Stein
Hi, Jaime. Hey, Sarah, good to see you. Can you introduce yourself? Yeah, my name is Jaime Stein. I'm the Conservative candidate for Vancouver-Langara. Why are you running in Vancouver-Langara? Thank you. So for me, I've seen a lot of people talk, but not a lot of people act. And I said, you know what, it's time for me to jump in the ring. And it's time to bring my experience to serve my community in Vancouver-Langara and also the people of British Columbia. So I've done a lot of work with combating hate, combating antisemitism, and I feel that we're at a point now where we need people to step up and help create a better society, and One of the things I hear when I talk to people at the doors is how hard it is right now to live here in Vancouver and in British Columbia. It's gotten really expensive after nine years of the NDP government, and people are having trouble making ends meet, and I want to make sure that we're able to support the people

[1:16] Housing and affordability
in our communities. In your view, what are the main problems with the current provincial approach to housing and affordability? And what would a Conservative government do differently? So we're staring at a $13 billion deficit caused by David Eby and the NDP government. That is going to cripple the next generation. So I worry about my kids, I worry about your kids, I worry about everybody's kids and what they're going to be left with if we don't act now. And so it's on us in the Conservative Party, if we form government, to look at the finances of British Columbia.

[1:49] Raising the basic personal exemption
So one of the first things that we would do is raise the basic personal income tax exemption rate to $32,000. So what does that mean for a family? A family could see up to $2,000 back in their pocket, an individual could see an extra $1,000 back in their pocket, and that will go a long way to helping people deal with the affordability crisis that the NDP has created here in British Columbia. A lot of people, they'll focus on cutting costs,

[2:14] Building a bigger pie
but one area that we can focus on is generating revenue. So how do we help small business owners? How do we help tourism? How do we help the resource sector? Build a bigger pie, because with that we can generate more revenue, which can then help everybody within our society, whether it's with better healthcare, we can find better ways for affordable housing, and we can keep people

[2:36] Priced out of home
in our communities. That's what really breaks my heart, is that a lot of the people I grew up with are no longer able to live in the community that they were born and raised in. I want to make sure my kids and the families in Langara can continue to have their children raised in the community that they grew up in.

[2:53] Health care
What do you see as the biggest failures in the current health care system, particularly around access to family doctors and wait times? So look, my relationship to healthcare goes back almost 20 years. My father died of leukemia when he was 60 years old, and he was waiting for a stem cell transplant. He wasn't able to get one. And so I looked at the system and said, how can I help? How can I help other people not go through

[3:20] Canada's cord blood bank
what my father went through? And I worked with Canadian Blood Services. We raised $12.5 million and built Canada's umbilical cord blood bank. And when my daughter was born at BC Women's Hospital, she was one of the first babies to donate her umbilical cord blood, and the stem cells from her birth can be used to save a life in the future. And now we have an amazing cord blood bank in Canada where people of all ethnicities, nationalities can get the support and service they need. So that's what's driven me with health care.

[3:53] Retiring without a family doctor
The biggest concern I hear from people on the doors is folks either born and raised in Canada or immigrated to Canada for a better life. They followed the rules, they worked hard, they paid their taxes, and now they're retiring and they don't have a family doctor. That's not fair. That's not my Canada. My Canada is a Canada where people have a family doctor and they have universal health care where they can get it in a timely manner, not having to wait 10 or 12 hours like we see right now with the Eby government and the NDP. So we need to put more money back into frontline staff, more doctors, more nurses, and make sure that we're taking care of people at the patient level. We're gonna focus back on the patients and the people that deserve the health care that they've paid into the system for.

[4:41] Why doctors don't come to BC
One of the biggest challenges we have in BC right now is with our rural health care delivery. So we have hospital closures happening all around the province. So imagine that you are giving birth, and you're in northern BC, and your hospital is closed, and now you have to drive three, four hours on a winter road to the next hospital. That's unacceptable in my view. So what we need to do is we need to find ways to incentivize doctors to come here, and one of the ways to do that is lowering taxes. Right now it's so expensive in BC because of the taxes of David Eby and the NDP government that doctors don't want to move here. It costs too much to move here. They'd rather go to Calgary or other places. So we want to make it so that people want to come to British Columbia, they can afford to come to British Columbia, and that will allow us to recruit the best doctors and make sure all communities are served.

[5:31] Taking care of society
We need to make sure people are taken care of. If we don't take care of society, then we've failed.