Good morning, Langley. We are sitting at about 17 C under partly sunny skies to close out the week, with a high near 21 C and a slight chance of rain later today. The weekend cools off a little more and gets a touch damper, so if you have been putting off the great ourdoors, this afternoon is probably your best window to enjoy good weather.
There is a lot of election news today. Langley School District board chair Candy Ashdown is running again in October, and she has joined the Langley Strong slate alongside fellow trustee Charlie Fox. Her pitch is a reset with Township council, and she points straight at the February 2025 decision to suspend the 30-year joint park-school land program without so much as telling the board it was on the agenda.
Provincially, the B.C. Conservative caucus is coming apart in real time. Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman has quit, making him the sixth MLA out the door since Aug. 14. Banman was the original defector who made that party viable in the first place, and his riding sits right beside the one Kerry-Lynne Findlay needs to win to get into the legislature at all. We have a longer read on why that geography matters.
Closer to home, Langley Forest School is laying off all 10 of its staff after Fraser Health declared its child-care licence expired. The program was fully booked with 32 children for September, and families say the loss falls hardest on neurodiverse kids who thrived outdoors when indoor classrooms did not work.
Also today: Langley-Abbotsford MLA Harman Bhangu has cleared Elections BC to run a petition seeking to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. Metro Vancouver eases water restrictions Sept. 1, so lawn watering returns one day a week. The province has capped 2027 rent increases at 2.2 per cent, with the vacancy loophole still wide open. B.C.'s wildfire state of emergency has ended while evacuation orders remain. And Ottawa still has no transition plan for its promised 2029 open-net fish farm ban.
Langley school board chair Candy Ashdown joins Langley Strong
Langley School District board chair Candy Ashdown is running for re-election in October, and she has joined the Langley Strong slate.
She sits alongside fellow trustee Charlie Fox on the slate, which is running candidates for both Township council and the school board. Jay Lundgren leads the slate and is running for Township mayor.
Ashdown says the relationship between the school board and Township council needs a reset. She points to February 2025, when Township council voted to suspend the joint park-school land program without telling the board it was even on the table. For more than 30 years, that program let the district and the Township buy land together so new schools opened with parks and fields already next door.
Ashdown has chaired the seven-member board since November 2022, a stretch that covers the fastest growth in district history. The district now serves more than 27,000 students at 46 school sites.
Two board seats are filled by Langley City voters and five by Township voters, but all seven trustees make decisions for the whole district.
Killing a three-decade land partnership without a phone call to the other side is a choice about how a council wants to govern, and voters get their say on Saturday, Oct. 17.
Banman abandons B.C. Conservative Party he helped build
Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman has left the B.C. Conservative caucus and will sit as an Independent.
He is the sixth MLA to go since Aug. 14, and the fifth since Monday. The party elected 44 MLAs in 2024 and is now down to 31.
Banman blamed new leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay, saying constituents keep telling him she is unelectable. Findlay won the leadership at the end of May but holds no seat, and Abbotsford-Mission MLA Reann Gasper has offered to step aside so Findlay can run there.
That riding shares a border with Banman's own.
The exodus is not limited to the caucus. Almost the entire party executive has quit in the past month, including president Aisha Estey and executive director Angelo Isidorou. On Wednesday, Findlay fired her own caucus operations director, former Republican Party of Alberta staffer Apollo Chung.
The editorial read
Banman is not just another name on a growing list, and the fact that he is a Fraser Valley MLA is not what makes this significant either.
Banman was the original defector. In 2023 he walked out of BC United and into John Rustad's tiny, then-irrelevant Conservative caucus, and that single move is what turned a fringe operation into a credible alternative. It gave the party a second seat, national coverage, and a permission structure for every disaffected BC United MLA and donor who followed. The near-win in 2024 does not happen without it. He said as much himself this week, taking pride in how close they came.
So when the man who started the stampede into the party is now joining the stampede out of it, the signal is not about Findlay's polling.
It is about what Banman has always been reliable at, which is reading the room and leaving early.
He has now abandoned two parties in three years, both times at the exact moment the exit served him and the party he left was weakest. Banman does not leave sinking ships out of principle. He leaves because he has already run the math on what comes next.
The geography makes this worse for Findlay than the raw caucus arithmetic suggests.
Abbotsford South sits directly beside Abbotsford-Mission, the riding Findlay needs to win to get into the legislature at all.
Those two ridings draw from the same local networks: the same riding association volunteers, the same donor lists, the same municipal-politics veterans, the same church and business circles. Banman has been embedded in that machine for a long time, including a term as Abbotsford's mayor.
A leaderless-looking party asking those exact people to knock on doors for a parachute candidate is a hard sell on a good day. It is a much harder sell when the sitting MLA next door has just publicly told them she is unelectable.
And Abbotsford-Mission is not a fortress. Pam Alexis won it for the NDP in 2020, and Gasper took it back in 2024 on the strength of the same wave Banman helped generate.
Findlay would be contesting a genuinely competitive seat, without a functioning party executive, without a full caucus, and with the region's most recognizable conservative name now sitting as an Independent and inviting others to join him.
Open questions worth watching: Does the Ian Paton and Peter Milobar breakaway project become a real party before that byelection, and does Banman surface there? Does Gasper's offer to step aside survive a caucus this unstable? And what happens to Findlay's leadership if she cannot get into the legislature at all?
None of this makes the underlying politics disappear. The grievance coalition assembled around resource extraction, hostility to Indigenous rights, and culture-war signalling has not evaporated because its MLAs cannot get along. It is looking for a new container.
The collapse of a party apparatus is not the collapse of the movement behind it, and confusing the two is how people get surprised in 2028.
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Leave a one-time tipLangley Forest School loses licence, families left scrambling
Langley Forest School is laying off its 10 staff after Fraser Health declared its child-care licence expired, weeks before September classes were set to begin.
The outdoor program has run since 2014 and was fully booked with 32 children for the coming year. Board president Carol LaJeunesse says families put newborns on the waiting list, and that lawyers have told her there is no appeal process.
Fraser Health says the licence lapsed automatically because the premises it was attached to had not been used as a community care facility for 12 straight months. The health authority says no safety incident was involved, and that it is not ordering the school to close.
LaJeunesse says the licensing branch told the school in 2025 to use its indoor space more, but never defined how much time would be enough. The school's admin space is in Fort Langley while the children learn in Williams Park and a South Langley park, so meeting that expectation would mean hauling families across the Township twice a day.
Parents say the loss lands hardest on neurodiverse children, including kids placed there with help from Inclusion Langley because the child-led outdoor setting worked when indoor classrooms did not.
Langley MLA petition aims to undo Indigenous rights law
Langley-Abbotsford MLA Harman Bhangu has won approval from Elections BC to run a petition seeking to repeal the province's Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act.
The petition and a draft bill will be issued Monday, Oct. 26, and signature sheets are due back by Monday, Jan. 25. To succeed, Bhangu would need signatures from 10 per cent of registered voters in every one of B.C.'s 93 electoral districts, a threshold no initiative has ever cleared. Even then the process is not binding, and the result would only go to the Legislative Assembly for consideration.
Bhangu calls the law a disaster, and Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay says the act threatens property rights and jobs. DRIPA does not transfer anyone's private property. It commits the province to align its laws with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a standard Canada has already endorsed federally.
Chief electoral officer Shipra Verma noted that any Crown duty to consult First Nations could be addressed at a later stage of the process. That means a campaign to strip back Indigenous rights legislation can now collect signatures for three months before the rights holders it affects are formally consulted at all.
Stoking fear about property to build a movement against Indigenous title is one of the oldest plays from the darkest chapters of the province's history, and it is worth naming as what it is (another chapter in the ongoing genocide of indigenous people) rather than treating it as a neutral difference of legislative opinion.
Lawn watering returns one day a week starting Sept. 1
Metro Vancouver is moving from stage 2 to stage 1 water restrictions on Sept. 1, which means lawn watering is allowed again one day per week.
The region says reservoir levels are back within the normal range for late summer.
Your day depends on your address. Homes with even-numbered addresses water Saturday mornings, and odd-numbered addresses water Sundays. Automatic sprinklers run 5 to 7 a.m. and hand watering is allowed 6 to 9 a.m. Businesses get Mondays or Tuesdays with slightly earlier windows.
Trees, shrubs and flowers can be watered any morning with a sprinkler, or any time by hand or drip irrigation. Edible plants are exempt entirely.
Langley residents on municipal water are covered by these rules, and both the City and the Township post their own reminders as stages change. Rural properties on private wells fall outside the regional schedule, though the aquifers under Langley are a shared and finite resource regardless of who is metering them.
A stage 1 summer is good news, but the fact that a region ringed by mountains and rivers still rations water every August is worth sitting with. The single biggest thing we ask that water to do is keep grass green on land we have chosen not to build anything useful on.
BC caps 2027 rent increase at 2.2 per cent
The province has set the maximum allowable rent increase for 2027 at 2.2 per cent, tied to inflation, offering a measure of predictability for renters heading into next year.
The cap applies to existing tenancies. Landlords can still reset rents to whatever the market will bear when a unit turns over, a loophole that continues to fuel displacement across Langley and the Lower Mainland.
Renter advocates have long pushed for vacancy control, which would tie rent to the unit rather than the tenant, closing the incentive for renoviction and no-cause displacement.
For now, tenants staying put get a modest ceiling; those forced to move face a much less forgiving market.
BC's wildfire state of emergency ends, but risk lingers
The provincial state of emergency declared August 8 due to wildfires has been lifted, though officials caution that evacuation orders and alerts across affected regions remain in force.
The temporary ban on off-road vehicles is also being lifted Friday at noon, with the BC Wildfire Service citing decreased risk after recent rain and cooler temperatures.
Communities from the Okanagan to the Fraser Canyon are still counting the costs, with Highway 1 near Boston Bar only just partially reopening after more than a month closed.
The province continues to treat each wildfire season as a discrete emergency, even as climate scientists point to fossil fuel expansion and delayed forestry reform as the underlying accelerants.
Ottawa silent as 2029 open-net fish farm ban approaches
Advocates, industry, and even the provincial government are looking for answers on the federal government's promised 2029 ban on open-net Atlantic salmon farms in BC waters, with less than three years to go.
The ban was announced to protect wild Pacific salmon stocks that First Nations, scientists, and conservation groups have warned are being decimated by sea lice and disease from farm operations.
Ottawa has not released a transition plan, leaving workers, coastal communities, and Nations without clarity on what comes next.
The silence benefits corporate operators who have consistently lobbied to delay or dilute the commitment, while wild salmon populations continue to decline.
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