UPDATED: Keep Port Moody’s women’s transition housing project alive.
MLA Glumac’s office responded.
Scroll down for an update!
BC Housing has confirmed that the Women’s Transition Housing and Supports Program project in Port Moody won’t proceed. Forty homes for women and children fleeing domestic violence, with Beedie as developer and ACT 2 Child and Family Services as operator, have been shelved. There’s no replacement timeline. The project sits in limbo.
Port Moody has no transition housing. None. Women leaving violent situations in our city right now have nowhere to go within our community.
I’ve written an open letter to our MLA, Rick Glumac, asking him to do three things:
Meet with BC Housing within 30 days to establish a firm project timeline.
Raise the project directly with the Minister of Housing.
Report back to constituents in writing.
Why this got shelved
This wasn’t a wish-list item that got trimmed. ACT 2, Beedie, and the City of Port Moody all did what the province asked. The operator was named. The developer was named. The years of partnership work were in. Then Budget 2026 cut roughly $2 billion in taxpayer-supported capital spending, and this project, along with hundreds of similar units across BC, vanished from the build queue.
The Union of BC Municipalities has named the contradiction plainly: the province sets housing targets for municipalities while cutting the funding non-profits need to meet them. Surrey alone lost 954 units across eight cancelled or deferred projects, including additional women’s transition housing.
Why I’m asking you to sign
I’m signing this letter as a neighbour who’s watched ACT 2 and Beedie do everything that was asked of them. The land was sorted. The operator and developer were named. The City did its part. That work doesn’t get to be erased because the province changed its mind on the capital plan.
This is the kind of fight where pressure on the MLA can actually move something. Glumac sits in caucus with the Minister of Housing and at the Cabinet table as a Minister of State. He can advocate inside the room. We need him to.
If you live in Port Moody or the Tri-Cities, sign the letter. Forward it to a neighbour, a colleague, your church or mosque or synagogue or community group. If you represent a Tri-Cities organization that wants to add an institutional signature, email me at aaron@aarondemes.com and I’ll add you to the letterhead before delivery.
Forty families need this project built. And forty more. And then forty more.
UPDATE
Hi everyone,
Twenty-five days after we sent the open letter, and after a follow-up from me, MLA Glumac's office has now responded. I want to share what we've learned, including the parts that complicate the story we started with.
What the Ministry is now saying.
The project at 2806 Spring Street was planned for up to 60 units of second-stage and long-term housing for women and children, built in partnership with Beedie and operated by ACT 2 Child and Family Services. The province now describes what happened not as a cancellation but as a deferral: funding is being “re-paced,” with the money flowing later than planned because of Budget 2026 fiscal constraints.
Their key point is that this project was selected for deferral because it hadn't reached Provisional Project Approval, an early funding milestone. I'd be careful with that one. PPA is a provincial funding step, not a sign the project wasn't ready. Beedie had designed the building, ACT 2 was the named operator, and the City had rezoned the site and required this housing to be built first. Everything within the community's control was in place. The only thing missing was the province's decision to fund it, which is the very thing they deferred.
What I think still matters.
A deferral with no timeline is still a community without housing it was promised. The province says it remains committed to all 3,000 homes under the Women's Transition Housing Fund, with the rest delivered “over a longer period of time.” That isn't a date. Women and children leaving violence in Port Moody still have nowhere to go within the city, and that's true whether the word is “cancelled” or “deferred.”
There's also a new risk worth knowing about. When Beedie's broader development was rezoned, Port Moody council required this transition housing to be completed ahead of the rest of the project. Beedie designed the building specifically for BC Housing to purchase on completion. With that purchase now deferred, BC Housing has told us the building may need a redesign, and there's a real risk that the province stepping back puts the larger development at risk too. So this isn't only about one building anymore.
Where things stand.
MLA Glumac's office says he's in ongoing conversations with the Minister of Housing and her staff, and that he'll proactively update everyone who signed if there's news. I've written back to hold him to the three specific things we asked for: a firm timeline from BC Housing, raising this project directly with the Minister, and a written report back to constituents. “Continuing to dialogue” isn't yet any of those three, and I've said so.
Thank you for putting your name to this. One hundred and eight signatures got us a substantive response where silence had been the answer for over three weeks. I'll keep you posted as this moves.