VANCOUVER — Tuesday is Day 22. The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade convenes David Eby, Lorne Doerkson and Emily Lowan at the Hyatt Regency for a noon tête-à-tête gathering of the province’s political and corporate establishment. The Western Standard will be on-hand to cover the proceedings.
It will be the only time the three share a stage before the only scheduled leaders' debate on October 14, ten days before voting ends on October 24.
Family brunch
The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade puts Eby, Doerkson and Lowan on the same stage Tuesday at the Hyatt Regency. It is the only time the three will share a room before Wednesday’s broadcast debate. The Western Standard will be in the room to report on any fireworks and the quality of the food. No public stream is listed.
The Board of Trade calls it a chance for its members to hear the leaders present their visions ahead of the October 24 election.
The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade is the largest business association in Western Canada. It began as the Vancouver Board of Trade in 1887, after the Great Fire.
Iain Black ran it as president and CEO from 2011 to 2019 and oversaw the name change. He is now a campaign co-chair for the BC Conservatives.
Bridgitte Anderson has held the top staff job since November 2019, the first woman in the role. Stuart Louie, co-president of H.Y. Louie Co. Ltd., is the current board chair.
CentreBC Leader Elenore Sturko and OneBC interim Leader Dallas Brodie will not be on the Hyatt stage. They will not be on the only televised leaders’ debate either.
That one is set for Wednesday, October 14, from 6:15 p.m. to 8 p.m. PDT. Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute moderates.
It airs on Global BC, CBC, CTV, CITY TV and CHEK under the BC Broadcast Consortium. The consortium has said the participation rules were agreed by its members.
Both the Board of Trade page and the debate announcement list only Eby, Doerkson and Lowan.
It remains to be seen whether they’re still hungover from the previous night’s Thanksgiving dinner wine and tryptophan, acting like one big happy family, or whether they’ve overdone it on Tuesday coffee after a long weekend and behave like a dysfunctional family sharing a stage.
The daycare dilemma and the ‘donation’
The big story this morning, however, is Premier Eby’s confirmation that his family has secured a heavily subsidized $10-a-day childcare spot — despite his six-figure salary, while thousands of lower-income families remain on a sometimes years-long waiting list.
During a campaign event in Delta on Monday, Premier David Eby confirmed his family had accessed the $10-a-day childcare program when asked whether he had personally benefited from it.
“Has your family ever benefited from a $10-a-day child care program? And if so, can you clarify when and how?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” Eby replied. “My family has. Yes.”
The reporter followed up, asking how Eby reconciled his family's access to the program with his refusal to commit to expanding it into a universal $10-a-day childcare strategy, as promised by his predecessor.
“How do you think just the optics of that and how people would feel knowing that you benefit from a program that very few people have access to and one that you won't expand?” the reporter asked.
Video of the exchange, shared on X by several prominent accounts, including official Conservative Party of BC accounts, does not show Eby responding to the follow-up question.
With many stuck at home for the holidays and using social media doom scrolling as a safe alternative to speaking with family, the backlash was fairly immediate.
Global BC’s Jordan Armstrong was among the first reporters to put numbers to the question of why Eby’s decision to use the program is so controversial.
Only about 10% of daycare spots in the province are $10-a-day, despite a commitment from Eby's predecessor, former BC NDP Premier John Horgan, to make the program universal back in 2017.
Eby earns $227,000 as premier, and his wife is a doctor, leading many to question why they would take such a limited spot when there are many parents in far greater need for the subsidized program.
Political strategist Cole Hogan posted Eby's confirmation of receiving the program, along with Eby's salary figure, and a point about wait lists: “...where there are wait lists, surely a wealthy family like Eby's shouldn't be taking advantage of $10/day daycare. Think about a working single mother? David Eby deserves the spot more than her?”
National Post columnist Amy Hamm quoted the post moments later Monday and wrote that while she has struggled as a single mother to pay for care, Eby, with a premier's salary and a doctor wife, gets it for $10 a day.
Veteran BC politics reporter Bob Mackin quoted the NDP attack on the Conservative incumbent Heather Maahs and wrote the “program cannot be a failure if the premier himself is paying the discount price.”
The backlash was so swift, the BC NDP’s official campaign X account posted a response and explanation (of sorts).
It says the Eby family has benefited from a “wonderful local child care centre,” that “a couple of years ago the centre one of their children was attending was designated a $10-a-day site,” and therefore they chose as a family to make a donation because they did not need the discount.
The statement further promises that they will make a similar donation for their youngest child who attends the same facility.Hamm replied asking for proof of the donation and noting that the family took spots from families who could have desperately needed them.
As of Tuesday morning, no proof has been provided of any donation.
Everyone is racist
The NDP has spent the long weekend demanding that Lorne Doerkson fire his campaign director over posts critics call Islamophobic. It is the same charge the party levelled at Joachim Agou last week. Meanwhile, Attorney General Niki Sharma once called the whiteness of local election results unbearable, and Burnaby East MLA Rohini Arora has told non-indigenous people, white folks in particular, to call themselves settlers, colonizers or uninvited guests.
Katy Merrifield is the Conservative campaign director. In June she posted, in response to a privately funded British report on child sexual exploitation, an expletive in front of the word Islam and called the ideology abhorrent and in need of expulsion. She later amplified other posts, including one that called Islam a literal rape culture and another that blamed Islam as a whole for the September 11 attacks.
She has said she took the original post down within hours, that her anger was directed at extremism used to justify horrific crimes, and that as a rape survivor she was brought to tears reading the report.
The National Council of Canadian Muslims and the BC Muslim Association have called for her removal.
So too did a federal NDP Member of Parliament.
David Eby did so, as well, on Saturday from Courtenay, saying Doerkson should live by the words he used when he removed the Victoria-Beacon Hill candidate.
That October 8 release said the candidate was no longer a Conservative candidate and would not serve in caucus if elected. It did not name Joachim Agou, but the subject of the release obvious.
Agou’s posts, which have been referred to as “horrific racism,” included a comment on a video of a car driving into pro-Palestinian protesters that the driver “should have reversed too,” and a meme that described Pakistan as a shithole that looked like London.
He has since apologized, said he categorically rejects racism, and said the Lausanne comment was not about nationality or faith. He remains on the ballot.
The NDP’s own record on the topic is not perfect either, albeit it tends to flow in the opposite demographic direction.
In October 2018 Niki Sharma, now Attorney General and the NDP candidate in Vancouver-Hastings, posted, “The unbearable whiteness of local elections results.”
The post has been circulating again this week on X, including from OneBC and others, as the Merrifield charge had run its course.
Rohini Arora, the NDP MLA for Burnaby East, has gone further. In a May 2025 legislative statement she urged non-indigenous British Columbians, and white folks in particular, to self-identify as settlers, colonizers or uninvited guests.
She has also posted, in reply to a critic, “The white guy telling me as a brown woman what racism is. LMAO.”
The pattern is familiar. The NDP calls a Conservative candidate or staffer racist or Islamophobic, the Conservatives remove or distance themselves, and the same charge is not applied, or is applied lightly, when the speaker is on the NDP side.
Arora has previously accused the Western Standard of racism for pieces critical of high levels of immigration from India. Neither Sharma’s 2018 post on “unbearable witnesses” nor Arora's “uninvited guest” line has drawn a comparable demand for her removal from the NDP slate.
The doctor will see you now
While the public is busy questioning the ethics of Eby's daycare decision, a municipal slate in Surrey is questioning the mental fitness of a mayoral candidate.
Jas Johal posted Monday afternoon that Surrey Conservatives want Doug McCallum to release a current physician's assessment and any cognitive or dementia test results, including when they were done. The slate argues that a candidate asking for voters' support must be able to do the job.
McCallum, 81, is the Safe Surrey Coalition candidate for mayor. He previously served as mayor from 1996 to 2005 and again from 2018 to 2022, and lost the 2022 race to Brenda Locke by fewer than 1,000 votes.
He is back with an ambitious platform: a 0% property tax increase for four years, a full-service hospital in Newton on city-owned land, a police helicopter and drone fleet within 90 days, and a rebuilt racing oval and horse barns at the Cloverdale Fairgrounds so harness racing can return by fall 2027.
The demand comes from the slate. No medical finding has been reported, and McCallum has not released any assessment. Surrey votes Saturday. The post has drawn the usual replies. Some say that if Surrey votes him back in, the city is cooked. Others call the demand a human rights violation and say Elections BC should look into it. McCallum's own record adds colour. He was acquitted in 2022 on a public mischief charge after he alleged a political opponent ran over his foot. His lawyer told the court at the time that the incident was “frightening and disturbing.” It is Day 22 of the provincial campaign, with Final Voting Day October 24. The municipal races run on their own calendar, and McCallum is on one of them. The Surrey Conservatives want a doctor's note before he even has a chance to get the job back.