YOUR PERSPECTIVE: David Eby ignored serious mismanagement at BC Housing
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The NDP have a lot to answer for on the housing file. Not only has the government failed to build anything close to the 114,000 housing units they promised, it turns out former Housing Minister and current Premier David Eby buried a report that outlines severe financial and organizational mismanagement at BC Housing and Atira Women’s Resources Society, B.C.’s largest housing provider.
When he was minister, Eby ignored the findings of a now-leaked BDO report that showed considerable financial mismanagement by Atira Women’s Resources Society. Whistleblower documents show that NDP housing ministers David Eby and Selina Robinson consistently supported Atira with record levels of funding, despite knowing its track record of questionable financial practices.
There is no way Eby was unaware of the situation at BC Housing and Atira, and yet he chose to bury the report and hide that information from the public — all while pouring hundreds of millions of public dollars into an organization that not only couldn’t be trusted to manage money, but was also failing to look after vulnerable British Columbians.
The leaked report reveals that Atira’s board was making decisions based on, “incorrect, incomplete, or misleading information,” and operated under “assumptions that [budget] overages will be covered by BC Housing.” The ongoing dysfunction at Atira led staff to “look for ways to reduce the pressure on cash flow with other downstream consequences.” Media reports and FOI documents show that before the deadly fire at the Winters Hotel in Vancouver’s Gastown, fire extinguishers were empty and had not been replaced by Atira staff. The leak of the BDO report, commissioned by the former BC Liberal government but delivered to government after the NDP came to power, comes in the wake of an Ernst and Young review, released on June 30, 2022, which found significant and widespread mismanagement problems within BC Housing had spread under Eby’s watch. At 6:34 p.m. on Friday, July 8, 2022, Eby quietly announced he had fired seven members of B.C. Housing’s NDP-appointed board.
