Every morning before six, the buses out of Surrey Centre fill up with the people who keep this region running. Care aides heading to a shift in a long-term care home. Nurses going to Surrey Memorial Hospital. Customer service reps, teaching assistants, restaurant staff, cooks, cleaners, production workers, retail salespeople. A lot of them are Filipino, or friends of the Filipino community. A lot of them are my friends.

If that’s you, you know what the fare costs, because you pay it twice a day and you count it. You pay the same TransLink fare as someone in Vancouver with a bus every few minutes, for a bus that comes every 20 minutes and a SkyTrain station you drive to. Rent takes the first half of the paycheque. The fare takes a piece of what’s left. And when the fare goes up, nobody at Surrey City Hall says a word, because they’ve never thought of it as their problem.

Here’s the plan. The City of Surrey will buy transit fares in bulk from TransLink and pass the discount to Surrey residents: a $70 monthly pass. An adult pays $117.20 for a one-zone pass today, so that’s more than $560 a year back in your pocket. Victoria already does this. The City of Victoria buys youth bus passes in bulk from BC Transit, at a fraction of the retail price, so every teenager who lives in the city rides free. Surrey is more than six times the size of Victoria. Our buying power is bigger. Nobody has ever used it.

The mechanism isn’t complicated. TransLink sells bulk passes to employers and universities every day. A city is the biggest customer on the block. Sit down, negotiate a bulk price, sign up the residents who want in, and the fare drops.

This sits beside the other half of our affordability plan for families: seniors’ recreation fees cut in half and select programs free, inside a budget where property taxes rise no faster than inflation for four years.

The same parties have run City Hall for decades. This summer, council agreed in closed meetings to a $360-million arena downtown. Not one dollar of the City’s buying power has gone to the people on the 6:10 bus. Affordability, to them, has been a word in a speech.

I’ve spent nearly 20 years volunteering in this city. I founded the Surrey Philippine Independence Day Society (SPIDS) to give Surrey’s Filipino community a voice where decisions get made. I served for years as a parent advisory council officer at my children’s schools in Guildford. I’ve run food bank volunteer days, clean-up campaigns, and blood donor drives, and I’ve watched the people who show up for those things get on the bus afterward and count the fare. I’m a Realtor, and I’ve said publicly that I’ll give up my licence if I’m elected, because you should never wonder who your councillor works for. On this, you’ll know. I work for the people on the bus, as well as the drivers and families who pay the price when transportation costs keep rising.

Here’s the choice, in two mornings. In the first, the fare has gone up again, the bus is still every 20 minutes, and the care aide on her way to a 12-hour shift does the math one more time. In the second, she taps a pass the City bought in bulk; the fare is lower, and for once the city she lives in has noticed she exists.

On October 17, vote for Mike Starchuk and the Imagine Surrey team, and let’s cut the fare for the people who keep this region running.

Narima Dela Cruz, founder of the Surrey Philippine Independence Day Society, has volunteered in Surrey for nearly 20 years and is an Imagine Surrey candidate for Surrey City Council.