98.2% Strike Mandate: Nurses Deliver a Warning Eby Cannot Spin Away
More than 50,000 B.C. nurses have voted overwhelmingly for job action. This is no longer a warning from the margins of the health-care system; it is the front line speaking almost with one voice.
Update — May 27, 2026
This article remains accurate as a record of the May 12 strike-mandate result. The file has since moved: B.C. announced a tentative NBA/HEABC agreement on May 22, and BCNU says member ratification voting is scheduled for June 15–19. BC Gov · BCNU
The BC Nurses’ Union announced May 12 that more than 50,000 nurses voted 98.2 per cent in favour of job action, calling it the strongest strike mandate in the union’s history. The vote ran May 8 to 11 after six months of bargaining and after the Nurses’ Bargaining Association provincial bargaining committee declared an impasse on April 20.
Global News reported that the Health Employers Association of BC said both sides would return to the bargaining table after the strike mandate was approved. HEABC told Global that negotiations are best kept at the table where the parties can work on solutions that support government and employer priorities. Health Minister Josie Osborne said essential services plans would be in place in the event of any job action.
Those statements do not erase the scale of the vote. A 98.2 per cent mandate from more than 50,000 nurses is not routine labour noise. It is a referendum on working conditions inside the health-care system the NDP says it is fixing.
The union says nurses brought forward proposals tied to patient care, only to see most of them rejected by HEABC. BCNU identified crushing workloads, unsafe staffing levels, workplace violence, occupational health and safety concerns, and continuing vacancies as core issues. The union also says implementation of minimum nurse-to-patient ratios remains challenged by thousands of nursing vacancies across the province.
This matters because the NDP has spent years promising that better staffing, new contracts, and system reform would stabilize health care. Yet nurses are now telling the province that the system is not safe or sustainable enough to retain the people patients rely on. They are not merely asking for a press release. They are using the legal leverage of a strike mandate to force movement.
Government can point out, accurately, that a strike vote does not automatically mean a strike. It can also say, accurately, that essential services planning exists. But neither point answers the deeper question: why did the people keeping hospitals running feel they needed the strongest strike mandate in their union’s history to be heard?
If Eby’s health-care plan were working, nurses would not be voting 98.2 per cent for job action.