Who pays for growth in Port Moody-Burquitlam? Rick Glumac and John McEwen give different answers.

Sixteen. That is how many Metro Vancouver mayors signed a letter to Premier David Eby on 16 November 2025 asking him to repeal the province’s housing orders: the laws on small-scale multi-unit housing, housing target orders and transit-oriented areas. All five Tri-Cities mayors were among them. The letter argued the orders had undermined local planning and had not delivered the promised supply.¹

One of the sixteen was John McEwen, then the mayor of Anmore. Port Moody Mayor Meghan Lahti and Belcarra Mayor Jamie Ross signed too.² On 11 December McEwen stood at the press conference where Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West said: “Rather than unleashing more housing units like the province promised, it has unleashed chaos.” The province, for its part, pointed to higher vacancy rates and lower rents.¹

Eleven months later McEwen is the Conservative candidate in Port Moody-Burquitlam, the riding that takes in Anmore, Belcarra, Port Moody and part of Coquitlam north of Austin Avenue.³⁴ He is running against Rick Glumac, who has been the BC NDP MLA here since 2017 and sits in Premier Eby’s cabinet as Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies.⁵⁶

John McEwen

Conservative Party of BC candidate, Port Moody-Burquitlam

Home

Anmore, for more than 20 years

Local office

18 years on Anmore council, 12 as mayor

Region

Vice-chair of the Metro Vancouver Board; chair of its parks committee

Business

Built two small businesses and sold them

On growth

“Mandates alone will not create affordability.”

Portrait: Conservative Party of BC

01 Where Rick Glumac and John McEwen stand, in their own words.

This month Freshet News put the same questions to every candidate in the riding. Here are the two front-runners’ answers on the issues that define Port Moody-Burquitlam, side by side and quoted exactly.⁷⁸

John McEwenConservative · Anmore mayor, 12 years

Rick GlumacBC NDP · incumbent since 2017

The most important issue

“The most important issue is managing growth while protecting affordability, livability and the services residents depend on.”

“Our healthcare system must keep up with the needs of our growing population.”

Paying for growth

“Municipalities cannot be expected to accommodate provincially mandated growth without the resources to support it.”

“It’s all the more reason the province has and must continue funding local infrastructure to support growth.”

Housing that people can afford

“We need to remove unnecessary barriers to building homes, but mandates alone will not create affordability. Housing supply must respond to real demand and market conditions while respecting established neighbourhoods and community priorities.”

“Density must serve community needs, not speculation. Our proposed 2% Unsold Condo Tax would encourage lower prices on completed condos left empty and unsold for over a year.”

What they point to

Eighteen years on Anmore council, 12 as mayor: water, drainage and roads brought up to municipal standards, a Community Village Hub, and reserves his campaign puts at more than $10 million; eight years chairing Metro Vancouver’s parks.⁹¹⁰

“That’s why we have already expanded the ER at Eagle Ridge Hospital and built a new Urgent and Primary Care Centre to ease pressure on the ER.” Locally, he says, “…we’ve built new Moody Elementary and Moody Middle Schools, and helped fund an all weather soccer field, a shoreline boardwalk, a Community Hub in Anmore, and more.”⁸

Both candidates’ answers to Freshet News’s candidate questionnaire, published 16 October 2026, quoted exactly; the record rows draw on the sources noted.⁷⁸

Both men say the province should fund the infrastructure growth needs. They part on the housing orders themselves, and that is where the rest of this piece goes.

02 John McEwen says growth has to come with the money to carry it. Rick Glumac says the province’s orders are “quite modest.”

This month Freshet News put the same question to both men: provincial housing legislation has mandated more density, so how will you make sure communities have the infrastructure money to support it? McEwen answered from 18 years on the municipal end of roads, water and sewer.⁷

Asked what would make the density work for residents, he added: “A one-size-fits-all approach does not work for every community. We need to remove unnecessary barriers to building homes, but mandates alone will not create affordability.”⁷ His most important issue, he said, is “managing growth while protecting affordability, livability and the services residents depend on.”⁷

Glumac answered the same question this way:⁸

In our view, that exchange is the race. Every mayor in the Tri-Cities says the orders have gone wrong, and the sitting MLA answers that Port Moody’s own council went further than it had to. McEwen spent 18 years on the council that pays for growth where the bills land, and he is asking to take that argument to Victoria.

03 John McEwen ran Anmore for 12 years and chaired the parks the Tri-Cities spend their weekends in.

McEwen has lived in Anmore for more than 20 years. He was first elected to its council in 2008 and was its mayor for 12 years.⁵ His campaign says that when he was first elected the village faced an infrastructure deficit of about $10 million, and that it now holds more than $10 million in reserve.¹⁰ Freshet News reports that his time as mayor included bringing Anmore’s water system, drainage and roads up to municipal standards and building a Community Village Hub where residents can gather.⁹ He withdrew from this fall’s mayoral race to run for the legislature, saying growing tensions over Anmore’s growth contributed to the decision. “I’ll never stop fighting for our amazing village,” he said.⁹

He also served four years as vice-chair of the Metro Vancouver Board and eight as chair of its parks committee.¹⁰ In July Metro added 154.5 acres to Minnekhada Regional Park, on the eastern slopes of Burke Mountain, buying four private lots for $14.5 million from its parks land acquisition fund. The agency was, McEwen said, “fortunate that we were in a position to buy these properties when they became available and preserve habitat for generations to come.”¹¹ In October 2025 Metro Vancouver announced that Widgeon Marsh Regional Park, closed to the public for years, would reopen to visitors.¹²

As mayor he also pressed Port Moody to keep the capacity of Ioco Road, the route to Belcarra, Buntzen Lake and Sasamat Lake, as the city densifies.¹³ In our view, that is the backcountry side of the same argument. The lakes, the trails and the roads that reach them are part of why people pay to live here, and they are the first things that growth without a plan puts at risk.

04 Eagle Ridge Hospital asked every party for an MRI in 2024. The Conservatives said yes, and Rick Glumac’s party did not commit.

Eagle Ridge Hospital, on Guildford Way in Port Moody, has no MRI. Freshet News reports that its patients travel to Ridge Meadows Hospital in Maple Ridge or Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster for the scan.¹⁴ Samantha Agtarap, a Port Moody city councillor who ran for the BC Greens against Glumac in 2024, wrote to the Tri-Cities Dispatch that patients are sent off-site, sometimes escorted by a nurse.¹⁵

Before the 2024 election, Greg Moore, chair of the Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation, wrote to every local candidate with one question: “If elected, will you and your party commit to funding an MRI for Eagle Ridge Hospital within the first two years of your mandate?” The foundation published the answers.¹⁶

The three answers as the foundation published them. The BC NDP’s is quoted in part; the full text is at the source.¹⁶

The BC NDP’s answer praised the new emergency department at Eagle Ridge, counted 18 new MRI scanners added around B.C., and turned to attacking John Rustad. It never promised Eagle Ridge an MRI.¹⁶ On 6 October, two weeks into this campaign, Premier Eby stood in Town Centre Park in Coquitlam with Glumac and promised one: “If we’re successful in the election, we’ll be ordering the machine right away.”¹⁵¹⁴ The foundation, which has committed to raise $10 million toward an MRI, said it knew nothing about the pledge. “The Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation has been advocating for an MRI access for a while now. … I would like to learn more about his plan.” said its executive director, Kristina Chung.¹⁴

Last winter, with long waits in the Eagle Ridge emergency department, Glumac posted in a community Facebook group that the problem was not “so much staffing” as a lack of beds. Wendy Gibbs of the BC Nurses’ Union replied: “From the nurses perspective, this is fundamentally a staffing issue.”¹⁷ A week later the hospital said it was hiring permanent staff for 25 beds that had been staffed only as needed, and Glumac said his post “doesn’t in any way disregard staffing challenges that nurses at Eagle Ridge Hospital face. And I very much respect the work that they do.”¹⁸

In our view, a promise made two years after the foundation asked, at a campaign stop and without a word to the people raising the money, is not a record of delivery. It is a reaction to an election.

05 Under his campaign posts, we found no reply from Rick Glumac to any of the 57 comments we read.

We graded all 41 BC NDP MLAs who are running again on how they deal with voters online during this campaign. Glumac kept his comments open on the campaign posts we could read, and he passes on that.¹⁹²⁰ But on X he answered no one, and under two of his Facebook posts we read 57 comments from the public and found no reply from him. His Instagram account was not available to us. Our rule is simple: if we could not find it in public, the MLA gets no credit. His grade is an F.²⁰

06 Port Moody-Burquitlam is projected to lean NDP, but the gap sits inside the margin, and John McEwen is the only challenger within reach.

338Canada, which turns the published polls into a projection for every riding, rates Port Moody-Burquitlam as leaning NDP. Its update of 16 October puts the BC NDP at 46% and the Conservatives at 41%, each with a margin of seven points either way.²¹

Port Moody-Burquitlam, projected vote

338Canada, update of 16 October 2026. Bars show the projection; the thin lines show its margin either way.²¹

Rick Glumac, BC NDP

46%

John McEwen, Conservative

41%

Wei Chou, BC Green

9%

Freddy Rawji, CentreBC

3%

0%30%60%

Wei Chou, the BC Green candidate, is projected at 9%, and Freddy Rawji, the CentreBC candidate, at 3%. Only McEwen is within the projection’s margin of the lead.²¹ In 2024 Glumac held the riding by 2,995 votes over the Conservative candidate, Kerry van Aswegen. If 1,498 of his voters had chosen the Conservative instead, the seat would have changed hands.²² On today’s projection, a swing of under three points would close the gap.²¹

In our view, the voter who wants a different MLA here has one realistic choice, and it is John McEwen.

07 Sixteen mayors asked Victoria to rethink its orders. One of them is now on the ballot in Port Moody-Burquitlam.

BC Ballot lists an all-candidates debate for Port Moody-Burquitlam on 22 October.²³ Go and ask both men about the housing orders, the hospital and the roads to the lakes. Advance voting runs from 16 to 21 October, and Final Voting Day is 24 October.²³

Last November, sixteen mayors put their names to a letter telling the province its housing orders were not working.¹ The sitting MLA calls those orders modest.⁸ The mayor of Anmore signed the letter, and now he is asking the riding to send him to Victoria to make the argument there.⁷

“Mandates alone will not create affordability.” In our view, John McEwen is the candidate in Port Moody-Burquitlam who means it.