09/08/2026
A statement from Every-Day Computers Inc.
Good morning.
Last month the Business Development Bank of Canada, a federal Crown corporation, filed a claim against our company in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. They named both of us, me and my wife, personally as well. Our customers should hear this from us and not find it in a court file.
Here is who we are. We are a small telecom carrier in Terrace and Kitimat. We hold federal spectrum licences. We built our own network and we run it ourselves. We have been in business since 2025 and selling mobile service since June of this year.
There are not many of us doing this in the north, and there is a reason for that. It is very hard to get a new carrier funded up here. We know, because we got turned down.
In December 2025 our MLA wrote to the provincial Minister of Jobs and Economic Development about it. She was writing about a project to bring service to Old Remo, New Remo and Lakelse Lake, communities that still do not have anything reliable. She wrote that Futurpreneur had turned down a bridge loan "solely on the basis of an algorithmic credit-score threshold," and had "declined to consider the co-founder's eligibility, the company's federal spectrum assets, or the strength of their business plan." She wrote that Community Futures had "imposed delays and procedural obstacles that are entirely out of step with the urgent realities of building rural telecommunications infrastructure in the North." In our case that was Community Futures Nadina and Community Futures in Prince Rupert. That started in 2025, and we have the correspondence, including a written apology for the months our file went unanswered. She asked the Minister to look at why publicly funded agencies turn down rural projects "based on narrow credit-scoring models rather than project merit or community benefit."
We eventually got approved under a joint federal program for young entrepreneurs, with Futurpreneur lending one part and the Business Development Bank lending the other.
Here is what happened next, and it comes down to a date.
That program collects loan payments on the tenth of every month. Nobody discussed that with us. It was not negotiated and it was not raised. It sits in the printed definitions on the last page of a standard form, the same form every borrower in the program signs, and we were asked to sign so the funds could be released. What we were told, in conversation, was that the collection dates would line up with when our own customers pay us. Our customers pay us in the middle of the month. That is when there is money in the account.
They never lined it up. So we asked, in writing, to move the collection to the fifteenth.
Futurpreneur said yes. In July they wrote to us:
"the team member who was managing your file is no longer with Futurpreneur. I can confirm that all NSF fees have been removed and will not be charged to your bank account… Your next regular payment is now schedule for August 15th."
The Business Development Bank said no. Their Office of the Ombudsman had already closed our complaint the month before, and this is what they told us:
"per its agreement with Futurpreneur, BDC is not authorized to make any changes to the conditions of your loan including the payment date."
Both of those cannot be true. One lender told us their partnership agreement would not let them move the date. The other lender, the other side of that same agreement, moved it twenty-five days later. We have asked the Business Development Bank to show us the part of that agreement that stopped them from doing what their own partner did. They have not.
Here is the part people need to understand, because it is the whole thing. We were not a business that could not pay.
On the tenth of April they took the payment. There was almost nothing in the account. Five days later our customers paid us and there was more than enough sitting there. Five days. That is the entire problem.
And every failure after that one was caused by the first one. A payment gets returned, the bank charges a fee, the fee leaves the account short. The next collection comes on the tenth against an account that is short because of the last one, so it gets returned too, and there is another fee. By July we were missing a payment by a few dollars. The money was there. It was going to charges from a lender collecting on a date we had asked them, in writing, to move. They tried again and again, each time for more than the last, into an account they knew was empty because their own last attempt had come straight back to them.
And they filed this claim before a single dollar of principal was due. The loan was still in its interest-only period. None of the principal was owed yet.
We were never silent through any of this. There are months of correspondence with both companies. We raised it in writing, over and over, from April onward, and we went to the Business Development Bank's own Ombudsman. When a customer says a charge is wrong and holds off paying until it is sorted out, that is what a dispute is. What we ran into was two organizations with no room for one. No leeway, and no process for a customer who says the problem is on their side.
We are not asking anyone to write off a loan. We asked for a date to be moved. That is the only thing we ever asked for.
So here is what I want answered. Why does a federal program built for brand new businesses put the same collection date on every borrower in the country, no matter when that business actually gets paid. Why did two lenders in the same partnership give us opposite answers about whether it could be changed. Why is the answer to a few months of missed interest, on a start-up loan, a lawsuit against two people personally. And why, nine months after an elected member asked government to look at exactly these barriers, is a northern start-up in court over one of them.
We are a small company. We are still here. The network is still running and our customers are not affected by any of this. We will deal with the court process properly and we will keep serving the people who signed up with us.
But I would ask anyone reading this, especially anyone in Ottawa, to sit with one fact. A simple date change, moving a collection from the tenth to the fifteenth, could have changed the outcome of all of this. Instead, rigid rules and a lack of conversation have brought us here.
Thank you.
Baljinder (Billy Olak) Basra
CEO and Founder
Every-Day Computers Inc.
