Former city councillor and MLA Mike Starchuk wants to become Surrey’s next mayor in this year’s fall election.

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Starchuk was the MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale from 2020 to 2024 with the New Democrats, but was defeated in the last provincial election by then-Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko. Starchuk was a city councillor from 2014 to 2018 with the Surrey First party after retiring as a firefighter and chief fire prevention officer for the Surrey Fire Service.

“His decades on the front lines have given him a firsthand understanding of the complex challenges facing Surrey — and what the community needs to feel safe, supported, and heard,” says a biography of Starchuk on his website.

Starchuk is, so far, running against current mayor Brenda Locke and Coun. Linda Annis.

“I’m pretty sure I can do better,” Starchuk bluntly said in an interview with Postmedia about his challengers.

“I want to go back to the way it was in 2014 when we weren’t the laughing stock for certain things — saying things like, ‘We’re going to build a canal through the middle of the city,’ or, ‘We’re going to get rid of a group of employees and fight with that group of employees the whole time,’” he told Postmedia.

Starchuk was referring to a goal of former mayor Doug McCallum and Locke’s battle against the Surrey Police.

Starchuk said he wanted to run under the Surrey First banner, but was not successful in receiving the nomination, and so he decided to start his own slate, Imagine Surrey.

“In 2018, I was two votes away from being the mayoral candidate (for Surrey First) but Tom Gill won and there was a parting of the ways,” he said. “There was a call that came from Surrey First in March (2025) and I waited for something to come out of that but nothing took place. … The phone call I was told was coming the next week never arrived.”

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Surrey First party president Norman Stowe said Monday that Starchuk never applied for the slate and that Annis has been the party’s choice for years.

“I’m not sure where that comes from,” Stowe said. “I haven’t talked to Mike for a couple of years. … In none of the conversations I had with anybody about the selection process was Mike’s name ever mentioned and we already had the mayoral candidate in Linda.”

Starchuk would not say what backing he has received at this point, but said he is likely to receive support again from the Surrey Fire Fighters’ Association, which also had a presence at his December announcement.

The top three concerns for Starchuk, if elected, are similar to the other two candidates running: crime and safety, housing and overall affordability, and traffic and congestion.

“We have one candidate saying they’re going to hire 75 police officers a year over four years and we have the current mayor saying, ‘I need 150 officers today,’ (but) I’m going to let the subject matter experts tell me what it is that they’re needing,” he said.

Making the public aware of the crises plaguing Surrey, such as extortion-related shootings, needs to come from those working in public safety regularly, Starchuk said.

When serving as an MLA, Starchuk said he was “shaking my head on a daily basis” at decisions being made on city council.

“The mayor and its administration really didn’t know how the city was supposed to be run,” he claimed, adding that the way the city has spent money in the past few years was the driving force behind deciding to run.

Like Annis, Starchuk believes Locke and her majority council wasted time and money on fighting against the province on policing, fracturing Surrey’s relationship with the provincial government in the process.

“I have the connections to the current provincial government and to the current premier that the other two people don’t,” Starchuk said.

While Locke spent most of her current term attempting and failing to stop the municipal police transition, Starchuk said many projects got stalled, like affordable housing projects for seniors, road infrastructure to accommodate expanding transit networks and building more houses faster.

“You need a professional mayor, not a petty mayor.”

smoman@postmedia.com