No political party can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like the NDP!
And, as we watched in horror Saturday night, no Canadian New Democratic Party does it with the flair of the British Columbia NDP.
It’ll be a week before we’ll know who really won a majority in the Legislature in Victoria – although not because of anything like the tall tales Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s next chief of staff Rob Anderson has been telling about voting machines to keep this province’s United Conservative Party base wound up.
Naw, they use plain old paper ballots in B.C. just like we do here. The problem is only that with the B.C. NDP and the B.C. Conservative Party nearly tied in several ridings, there are going to have to be recounts, and that’s going to take a while.
Whatever your politics are, though, and whoever you’d like to see emerge as the winner in Canada’s westernmost province, you’ve got to agree that the biggest loser in last night’s fiasco is Premier David Eby, whose government went from posting polling leads in excess of 20 per cent last fall to teetering on the edge of defeat.
The biggest winner, you can credibly argue, is John Rustad, the climate change denying, vaccine-skeptical leader of the revivified B.C. Conservative Party, which seems to have unexpectedly inherited the mantle of B.C.’s old Social Credit coalition and appears to want to outdo the UCP for sheer nuttiness.
Of course, this is the second time the B.C. NDP has hosed away a 20-per-cent lead in the polls!
Then-leader Adrian Dix did the same thing in the weeks before the 2013 election – in an even more spectacular fashion than Mr. Eby, taking only a couple of months instead of a full year to fritter away his party’s seemingly insurmountable lead and lose to the B.C. Liberals, who were confusingly really conservatives.
So what’s with this, you have to ask?
Well, New Democrats are afflicted almost everywhere in Canada with a crippling need to behave like the Boy Scouts of politics, shooting themselves in both feet with their earnest good sportsmanship.
Consider Mr. Dix in 2013: No negativity would be tolerated in the face of a tsunami of dreck from the B.C. Liberals, so called for mysterious reasons since they were basically Social Credit 2.0. Result: a fourth term for the Liberals.
Rachel Notley in 2023: The principal unforced error of the NDP’s 2023 campaign in Alberta was her foolish decision to tell the truth about a 3-per-cent tax increase for the largest corporations. Result: a second term for the UCP, now led by the execrable Danielle Smith.
David Eby on Saturday: Why the hell didn’t he call an election in the fall of 2023 when he had a crushing lead in the polls and the B.C. Liberals hadn’t yet committed political seppuku to make way for the full-blown MAGAtry of the B.C. Cons, Social Credit 3.0? We’ll likely never know for sure, but I’d bet it was that Goodie Two-Shoes things again. Can’t do that! Someone might remind us that we have a fixed-election date in B.C. Result: To be revealed soon.
It doesn’t help that in almost every recent election, except perhaps Wab Kinew’s 2023 victory in Manitoba, New Democratic Parties tend to run away from their base and campaign to win the hearts of undecided conservative voters who may not even exist.
Federal leader Thomas “No Deficits” Mulcair did this in 2015, and was outflanked by Justin Trudeau on the left.
Historian Alvin Finkel writes that Ms. Notley ignored a host of progressive policies that would have won votes for the Alberta NDP as just too radical, or something, for those undecided conservative voters.
Mr. Eby caved to the federal Conservatives’ Axe the Tax hysteria and wobbled on the province’s pioneering carbon tax. Did that drive thousands of B.C.’s many environmentally concerned voters into the arms of the Greens and split the progressive vote in multiple ridings? You bet it did!
It certainly didn’t help that the NDP forced the huge Vancouver-area suburb of Surrey to abandon the RCMP for a local force, an unpopular decision that flipped many NDP votes to the Cons. (This ought to give the UCP something to think about here in Alberta.) And the weather Saturday was appalling. But one suspects the NDP could have survived those lesser calamities.
And where was John Horgan, you may wonder, the old-style New Democrat who became party leader in 2014 when nobody else seemed to want the job, and B.C. premier in 2017 after a similar election result led to a supply-and-confidence agreement with the Greens? After all, he won a majority in 2020 and was probably mostly responsible for the strong polls enjoyed by Mr. Eby last year.
Alas, Mr. Horgan announced he would leave politics in 2022, after a second bout with cancer, saying he couldn’t continue as leader and premier after the rigours of his treatment. He resigned in February 2023 and a month later was named Canada’s Ambassador to Germany by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Mr. Horgan was diagnosed with a third cancer in June and on election night was being treated in a hospital in Berlin.
Of course, yesterday’s electoral result won’t matter to a lot of die-hard New Democrats. Indeed, there will be more than a few who will be relieved if, after the dust from the recounts has settled, the party emerges as the loser.
After all, what’s sweeter than an uncomplicated moral victory?
But as Canada’s Conservatives adopt the extremism of the MAGA movement south of the border and ratchet up their attacks on public health care, human rights, and the environment, I’m not sure we can afford an NDP that prefers moral victories to real ones any more.
David, you are so right! We in BC are pretty much f*#ked right now. Ultimately, it’s our own damn fault.
It’s the NDP’s fault. They should have called a snap election last year when the right-wing was in disarray. Stupid bastards! It’s like they enjoy losing elections.
Well depending on how you look at it, this is a glass half full or half empty, also depending on those recounts. If the NDP maintains more seats and makes some arrangement with the Green’s, it will be a sign that a progressive government facing significant economic and other headwinds can still survive.
The first problem is Eby was not his popular predecessor Horgan. The second problem was the Federal turn towards the Conservatives has impacts provincially in some parts of the country.
It might have been a good idea to call an earlier election before the BC Conservatives killed off their provincial rivals on the right. But then you never know how an early election would have been received by cranky voters.
BC voters are facing a lot of pressure on housing affordability and the current still high interest rates are squeezing or making suburban voters very anxious. And people who do not feel comfortable about their current economic situation do not turn out in droves to support an incumbent government.
If Eby is lucky, the recounts will maintain or increase his lead, interest rates will fall more, the economy will improve and the Trudeau anchor dragging down support for progressive parties will soon be gone one way or another. Or it could go another way, if he is not as fortunate.
John Rustad’s gleeful address around midnight left me feeling sick to my stomach and wondering if there was any safe spot left in Canada to move to; and it has nothing to do with the drug issues.
It has to do with the lunatic fringe Conservative candidates that have been elected as the so called representatives of the people.
But when you have the leader of the party commenting the day before the election that he “doesn’t disagree with Chip Wilson * ( the sign man) calling David Eby a communist “, you can’t expect him to have anything but like minded candidates in his caucus.
* to borrow a quote- “a right wing billionaire leotard salesman.”
After all the information that came out about the aisle jumpers, and the hand picked from the Q-anon political candidate express catalogue, (we make them: you just wind them up, put a big C pin on them and let them say whatever comes into those K-juiced heads and you have the next BCCP politician). If they don’t come with controversial baggage you don’t have to accept them.
The fact that Chapman, Brodie,
Dr Kindy— that’s just 3 off the top of the list— won their riding is beyond belief— makes me wonder if the leotard salesman isn’t pulling an EM move.
And my tolerance threshold was reached with some character from the Fraser Institute sounding off after midnight. It’s probably a good thing that the atmospheric river was keeping me indoors.
The only bright side for me was our NDP candidate was elected and by a good margin along with the other family members in their respective ridings- so we have that.
And apparently Rustad is already talking about another election. It’s not even ironic anymore how the Cons go on about Axe the tax, all the while wasting taxpayers money.
The next 11 days are going to be excruciating, counting in SK & NB elections.
I hear Iceland is an interesting spot to visit; at least there you know you just have to deal with Mother Nature and not a bunch of bigoted, homophobic, climate denialists **, anti vaxxer covidiots.
I’m not going to be in the least bit surprised if one or all of Rustad’s brain worm graduates start blaming the atmospheric river on David Eby.
Next thing you know we’ll be having tire fires here in “beautiful BC” as well.
For the 43% that didn’t vote, I hope for your sake that it was only atmospheric river brought by Mother nature that kept you away— if not, the Con river could be on the way, and their ‘promises river’ is just an election slogan that they do not have to follow, and the mud & debris is just below the surface getting ready to sweep you away.
POGO– it’s Bob Marley time.!!
Normally if prefer a thrice stated invocation for requests, but in your case? I’ll make an exception! Enjoy! https://youtu.be/uLYOy15gz_Q?t=1
DJC–Please excuse the rant…
And the ** was the climate denialists party getting party status just as we’re breaking record rainfall numbers-go figure.
I would put Horwath, Dix and Eby to be the 1. 2. and 3. of poster children for why the NDP struggles to win. At least Notley and Horgan got some things done. Mulcair? Now that’s a sad story, best told over a whiskey in a “vieux-port” bar of choice!
No more Mr. Nice Guy?
Just ask any kid who has been bullied on a playground how turning the other cheek so it can be slapped, too, works out. Eventually they figure out that when adults tell them to do this, it’s because adults can’t be bothered to do the right thing.
Doing the right thing doesn’t mean taking the easy road or being a doormat. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean turning the other cheek when the answer to a problem is an equal and opposite reaction. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean compromising to the point of being wishy-washy. Doing the right thing means setting boundaries for behavior, making tough choices and having the courage to carry through. Pleasing everyone pleases no one. Bullies like bending people pleasers.
You know we can’t afford it, David.
We are in a real war now. As is being so vividly shown in the States and in Albaturda. A real war with real repercussions. Repercussions like the end of democracy as we we know it, the end of bodily autonomy for anyone with a uterus, the end of universal health care for all and really, the end of the standard of living we’ve all grown accustomed to; a free and open system is necessary for our economy to function, indeed, prosper in continued profitable and efficient manner.
So yes, let’s talk and listen to those limp-wristed, weak-willed, teary-eyed scaredy-pants and do-gooders. They sometimes have good ideas and often provide another point of view.
But, dang it! Let’s get out there and kick some ass! These monsters in conservative garb are going take all that is good away from us. They will destroy everything we’ve worked, and bled, for. They will destroy community, they will wreck the economy and they will ruin the very environment we live in.
Let’s hear some unvarnished truth. Call it out the way you see it.
There is no second place if we lose. Either democracy prevails or everything you love and cherish is lost.
I have a somewhat different take on this election. When I look at the electoral map, I see a swath of orange all up and down the coastline from south of Vancouver to Haida Gwaii, and the southern half of Vancouver Island, with just a few blue and two green ridings to liven it up. But the Interior and the North is virtually all solid blue, except three southern Interior ridings out by Vernon. In fact, in the North, the Conservatives didn’t just get pluralities, or even simple majorities, in most of their seats: they got super-majorities of ⅔ or more of the vote.
It’s the same phenomenon that gives Alberta’s UCP a lock on most of the province outside the two big cities.
My theory is that Conservatives tend to win big in regions where the economy and the labour market are dominated by extractive industries and agriculture. On the other hand, progressives do better in regions where knowledge workers, service industry workers and the public sector are more predominant. But those progressives — including, in the context of this argument, Liberals, in campaigns where they remain a factor — also divide the anti-conservative vote between them in those areas, allowing conservatives to slip in regardless.
It will be interesting to see if this trend holds in today’s election in New Brunswick, and next week’s in Saskatchewan.
How foolish many of the voters in British Columbia are. They would rather vote for phony Conservatives and Reformers, who will destroy jobs, waste money on the most costliest shenanigans, wreck havoc on the public healthcare system, ruin public education, destroy the environment, increase hardship for people, while making their rich friends even richer.
NDP – So true Mr. C – Too many dreamy eyed romantics running the show. The preference is to lose politely and graciously. Politics is a professional blood sport and the NDP continue to send in the Junior Varsity.
Jaundiced Eye: The media lies and doesn’t take these phony Conservatives and Reformers to task, and that’s how they get into power. That’s the problem. If the media wouldn’t be sucking up to these phony Conservatives and Reformers, we wouldn’t see these problems, and the NDP would get into power.
Ah, “deja vue” all over, again….” (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/08/deja-vu-again/)
David, are you certain the BC used paper ballots just like in Alberta (as I recall from my long-ago inside scrutineering days? I shared your article with a friend who worked the election as an NDP volunteer, and she quite hotly claimed that tabulators were used.
D&G: I’ll check, and correct if I’m wrong, but I’m sure they use paper ballots with tabulators to count them. Anything that goes to a recount has to be counted by hand – from the paper ballots – for obvious reasons. It’s not 1970 in B.C. (as it still is in my mind, but never you mind that) but the implication by Anderson et. al. is that B.C. is using voting machines, as in some U.S. States, to steal the election and the that fact that the recount takes longer is proof of monkey business, not an in-person count. DJC
I think my friend was a little grouchy about the outcome in the Caribou-Chilcotin. They poured themselves into the NDP candidates campaign, to no avail.
We had tabulators ,which process the paper ballot. Last election was regular paper ballot hand counted. I believe it was only Saturna Island (?) that didn’t have tabulators.
And just a little glimmer of hope, Brian Higgs lost his seat, and it will be a Liberal majority in New Brunswick with a first female Premier.
My ex-father in law, would have been thrilled with this result. After almost 30 years of gov. service, he took the pay cut and retired early because of Higgs and his policies.
Raised a glass in his honor!
Cheers!
And as Steve Boots said,
” You just know that Scott Moe is watching in horror”
David, you are correct paper ballots then a scan and electronic tabulation. The paper ballots are preserved. This is so an official hand count maybe done in close counts. Two here being Malahat-Juan de Fuca and Surrey Centre selected for recounts. Yes, I am in BC.
While it was a stupid idea to kick out the RCMP it gave a nephew of mine a chance to get a job. He transferred from the City of Vancouver Police Department to Surrey. His wife is an RCMP officer and I’m not certain where she is working.
We are hearing of more and more doctors and nurses who are waiting to see if Smith is re-elected and if she is they are gone creating a worse mess for our healthcare system. Let’s hope her supporters are smart enough to kick her out.
If her supporters were smart, she wouldn’t be Premier in the first place.
Alan K. Spiller: My nephew is an R.C.M.P officer. If Danielle Smith and the UCP decide to get a provincial police force for Alberta, where will these R.C.M.P officers go to? The UCP will be treating these doctors and nurses like garbage, just like their hero Ralph Klein did, and they will leave Alberta. Can you blame them?
You guys realize this is a very conservative country masquerading as a social democracy right ?
Two things that this brings to mind ; one, the idea that BC is a “liberal enclave” or “progressive paradise” should be taken behind the woodshed.
BC is culturally distinct from alberta but so is Saskatchewan and HUGE swaths of bc are socially, economically and religiously conservative. It shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone that those people vote for what they want.
Second, and this is a broader point about “progressives” in Canada in general. We are swiftly coming to the end of the contradictions that underpin these last decades of neoliberalism. Conservatives recognize the game has changed and they are trying their hardest to usher in a new global order (of fascism). Progressives are trying hard to stop this, but only in the sense that they want to continue with this broken system, albeit with some rearranging of the deck chairs in a more “equitable” arrangement.
My point is this, unless progressive parties (and voters) stop pretending we can have our cake and eat it too, the right will dismantle their coalition of identity based grudges and blast them into tiny bits that can no longer be reconstituted. If the right is going to base their entire politic on blaming other folks for why we can’t have nice things, the left really needs to focus on a broad coalition that MEETS people’s MATERIAL needs instead of pretending that having token members of the underclass represented in the ruling class represents any kind of change or hope for a brighter tomorrow.
The NDP should really think about sourcing leadership and party brass from the WORKING CLASS instead of a bunch of lawyers (cough, Eby, Notley) PMC types and political insiders.
Yes! Indeed! Very well said, Little Bird.
A little birdy told me so has never been more apt.
” … that they want to continue with this broken system …” is as good a description of the so-called left or progressive leadership that I have heard.
It’s 2024 folks, effectively 2025 if you want to govern. Amoung other things that means 1970 descriptions of the world and our society within are nonsensical as are any solutions based on that.
“… a broad coalition that MEETS people’s MATERIAL needs …” is why we elect a government in the first place. A bunch of well educated and well spoken pointed heads lecturing us on what we should want and more to the point lately, what we shouldn’t want, serves no one’s interest.
Good call, Birdy!
ANNDP insiders, “Nenshi, Nenshi. Something something. What about our principles?”,
should reflect hard on whether they
“prefers moral victories to real ones”
PJP, agreed! Too much patting on their own backs by long-time Alberta NDP party members who have not recognized that the political world has changed, especially in the last 20 years. Go strategic, go informed, go tough or go home.
The last provincial Alberta elections NDP loss was due to a self-inflicted wound and bone headed idea about raising corporate taxes. This played right into the UCP’s hands as they offered a personal tax cut that has still not materialized.
Instead of talking affordability all I heard was how bad Smith was. Who thought this strategy up. Are they the same folks that assisted the BC NDP cave in?
The NDs cannot improve on its numbers as the official recount is in two ridings claimed by the NDs. If the recount favours the Cons, they will have 47 seats, a majority, but after they name a Speaker they will be down to 46 which would equal the ND plus Green numbers. A split would give the Cons 46 and the NDs 45 (who with the Greens would be 47).
For me a bright spot was the Oak Bay-Gordon Head win by ND Diana Gibson who used to be at the Parkland Institute.
David Eby had a great excuse to call an election in 2023 – John Horgan has retired and we have a new premier so let the people vote on it. Right at the height of NDP popularity before he had a chance to mess it up, at which he was pretty successful. John Horgan had even shown him in 2020 how it’s done properly!
While the B.C. election has disappointed me, I am happy to see Higgs has been tossed to the curb.
People of New Brunswick have shown sense!! Tossed a bigoted and transphobic old white man and elected a woman. Congratulations to Susan Holt!! The first woman elected as Premier in NB.
Sidebar— “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory “…..
“Western Standard–Smith’s leadership campaign manager says Muslims will flood Alberta UCP AGM”
He said he has busloads (2000ppl) of Muslims coming to it’s annual general meeting.
See also what Thomas Lukasauk tweeted on Sunday.
My oh my!!
But hey at least she posted a congrats to the new NB Premier, same can’t be said of Skippy…..tut tut ! Not a good look for someone who wants to be PM. I don’t suppose it had anything at all to do with her being a Liberal, would it?
As JSingh said in the HoC today,
” Country over party” is not a priority for Skippy.
And one final thought:
PLEASE for the love of god stop copying the democrats. They’re awful, to a person.
DJC, I have a slightly different take on this election. I agree that the BCNDP panicked a bit and veered off to the right in a lousy attempt to get con votes which were not there but they are operating in the classic quandary of progressive policies vs getting elected. I thought Rachel Notley was handling this problem quite well albeit with a few not-fatal errors but botched it up at election time. I’m all for progressive policies and have been critical of Social Democrats for not really accepting the radical ones which are necessary, but govt cannot get too far ahead of the electorate alienating voters who are not ready for the policies. Call it populism if you wish but the electorate needs to be educated about the values to accept them or at the very least the ideas have to be rock-solid good so the citizens will see the value in it very quickly. I’ll use two BC examples of the second type in Dave Barrett’s govt auto insurance and ALR farmland protection, leading edge stuff but still in place after 50 years because they were good policies which the citizens bought into. I have a feeling that David Eby was so comfortable in the NDP polling position that he thought he could bring in some radical but not necessarily popular policies (like say de-criminalization of hard drugs) and survive the opposition to them. He got too far ahead of the electorate.
The problem we have now is the Overton Window has been shifted way to the “right” away from the post-war community thinking we had for many years. The reasons, analysis, and what to do about this is a whole essay in itself but the old tired expression “It is what it is” applies. Successfully bringing in radical, progressive or even just healthy policies is a difficult act these days, unfortunately the BCNDP failed at it again.
On the surface it looks like the Greens are big winners too but they received only 1/2 of the percentage they got last election. Possibly their very public advocacy for the above mentioned free-drugs-for-all had something to do with this, or being the only party to come out in support of increased taxation which was bold and I applaud Sonia Furstenau for it. If we add all the Green votes to the NDP which is not by any means a given, they still only have barely 50% and you can expect the “independent” votes not to be available to the NDP.
That this is a BCNDP election fail is furthered by the almost-complete wipeout in rural BC combined with the more urban riding failures like DJC mentioned. I think Albertans are familiar with this. David Eby’s predecessors had chipped away at this long-standing phenomenon and anchored some south-eastern districts as well as Nathan Cullen’s big one in north-western BC, all out the window now even polling less than the party which withdrew from the election! Again this is something for a whole essay but fundamentally ISTM that traditional rural populations have a take-care-of-each-other inclination and are more working class than most urbanites but maybe not. Nonetheless the BCNDP hasn’t been able to deal with what it is. Incredible that John Horgan spent considerable political capital to continue with the Site C dam and the NDP gets trashed in the riding for it. And if anyone is thinking that the Cons would fix the problems with forestry industry closures they’re dreaming in technicolour.
Hi folks, I appreciate the thought that if the NDP had adopted more aggressive, arguably more cynical tactics perhaps the NDP could have avoided the significant setbacks of this last election. However, I was wondering your thoughts about the role Eby’s policies and the execution of those policies played in the outcome of these last elections.
I can’t recall an election campaign where the a conservative party was less disciplined. The NDP presented a long list of bozo eruptions from the BC Convervatives that in previous campaigns would have absolutely driven support to the NDP or a centrist party. It didn’t this time. My understanding is that ridings with the highest proportions of immigrants – historically not a strong constituency for conservative parties – were those that voted Conservative by the largest margins. The normal tactic – painting the opposition as unhinged – had no effect on voting attentions.
My question – why do you think immigrant communities sided with the BC Conservatives so conclusively? Is this a problem of marketing or did Eby’s policies have a direct role in alienating this large bloc of voters?
Martin: Probably a bit of both, but I also think it’s just a bad time to be an incumbent politician. Most mysterious to me, as stated, is why the NDP waited so long when it had the wind in its sails a year earlier. I stated the reason I think that happened in the piece. DJC
Shall I’ll offer some atypical pith whilst picking pieces of crow-feather quills out of my teeth, shut up and reread Jeremiah. Let’s see.
The party that doesn’t deserve to be BC government might yet cross the finish line like a Tibetan pilgrim with one, last, prostrate convulsion when, if it happens, its leader will doubtless mistake a dead-cat-bounce as resurrection and salvation—because disingenuousness works. He just proved it.
But can BCCon leader, John Rustad, hitch his as-yet unbroken mavericks to the bent-axle and cambered hubs of BC’s overloaded buckboard? Probably not if he pursues his misconceived plan to “open up” the forest industry by repealing the aspirational guideline of the UN’s (now BC’s legislated statute) Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It would be a big mistake, to put it mildly —and that’s not only my opinion but, rather, also of the absolutely binding decision of the unanimous SCoC bench as to mandatory protocols for developing resources on any First Nation’s “un-ceded” traditional territory, as the high court concluded in the 2014 William, or “Tsihlqot’in,” case. Because Rustad told so many whoppers on campaign, it’s hard to tell—yet— if he has simply mistaken UNDRIP, which is not Canadian law tested in any court, for the William decision which is, in fact tested in Canada’s highest court. William is a giant can of worms Rustad would be wise to leave unopened if he wants to maintain the illusion that his posse of vigilantes, for now circling their sweating steeds in celebration, whooping and firing their six-guns in the air, is the least bit ready to govern. BC’s already seen this Cowboy&Indian movie before—a the guys with the Stetsons didn’t win. Did he just forget, or just want to forget?
The appetite to get rid of Premier David Eby was whetted by faraway events—that is, by the vigorous throes of the dying, absurdist far-right all around the Western World and, further away, by the much more-vigorous convulsions of Mother Nature all around the whole world. He is a social justice lawyer who surrounded himself with social justice warriors after they failed to manoeuvre around the spike-belts of legal technicalities he deftly deployed to protect his coronation from their hostile takeover bid, and he tried to make nice for tranquility’s sake. Following behind instead of leading from the Dixtum of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer, he “accepted the resignation” of his higher education minister, Selina Robinson, who, in the heated days after the Hamas attack on Israeli peaceniks, quipped a hard truth when speaking to a Jewish group and was immediately vilified by marauding pro-Palestinian activists who saw it posted from somebody’s phone (by which no place is discrete, which I think she should have known), and she immediately petitioned the court of pubic opinion by accusing Eby of not protecting his minister, who happens to be Jewish, from Hamas-sympathizing SJWs on his staff who, she implied, are antisemitic. Ouch! (That Robinson misspoke to what she thought was a safe audience , and my initial take that she should have known not to do that in this day and age, especially in such a heated moment so soon after the Hamas attack, quickly became an issue between me and my darling, who happens to be Jewish, and the reason why so many of my belches of the past week have a distinct taste of crow. I’m just lucky she’s such a good cook…)
From his auspicious acclamation to bobbling this imported Gaza spot-fire, and on to snatching something-something-something-jaws-of-something, we might compare Eby to his predecessor, John Horgan, whose inauguration seemed as ominous when he appeared to renege on campaign promises, from cancelling the controversial Site-C Dam to terminating the TMX pipeline (neither of which was feasibly or constitutionally possible to do), to other enviro-ranklings like not responding to the heavily protested logging in Fairy Creek and, more explosively, his botched attempt , arm-in-arm with Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, to circumvent those very same “Tsihlqot’in” protocols while ramming the CGL natural gas pipeline through “un-ceded” Wet’suwet’en territory on its way to the huge LNG-liquefaction/export facility in Kitimat, the once-targeted terminus of Stephen Harper’s centrepiece Northern Gateway pipeline from the Bitumen Mines of Albetaria (which JT shit-canned for not respecting —you guessed it—the “Tsihlqot’in” decision). All of Horgan’s ‘ouches’ notwithstanding, he went on to win a strong majority in 2020 to become the first NDP Premier to serve two back-to-back terms. But Eby is not Horgan.
To be fair, Horgan was naturally advantaged by his imposing, supposed Irish-ruffian reputation and the not-less important fact that he caught the partisan-right in disarray with a snap-election, granted on the ground that Covid required a fresh mandate. Of course it was disingenuous, but he just went ahead and proved it was a successful tactic. Even then-Green leader, Andrew Weaver, whose party’s support allowed a Green-Dipper alliance to topple and, as it turned out, mortally wound the 16-year BC Liberal regime, could not push Horgan around; much less could Horgan’s staff.
I think British Columbians were too-complacently enjoying BC’s relative political tranquility, or the illusion of it, to demand Eby likewise move it for the kill when the Opposition BC United party had sunk to 12% in popularity polls, when the name the disgraced BC Liberals approved switching to indicated imminent demise, and when John Rustad, recently kicked out of the BCU for denying climate change, was the sole BCCon MLA. The question is not only whether Eby was asleep at the switch in asking the Governor for an early election (and take advantage of his only real rivals misfortunes), but by what premise he could justify it. Snap elections have been granted for much milder reasons than a spate of very costly natural disasters, a housing crisis, and the ongoing tragedy of fentanyl addiction during Eby’s government . IMHO, Eby probably didn’t feel he could legitimately resort to the tactic, possibly because he’d showed weakness, poorly disguised as temperance, in containing tumult within his administration, but also because he didn’t win his seat in the 2020 election as a party leader, and whose premiership hadn’t yet been popularly tested—until now; it contrast, Horgan was party leader when he assumed the premiership in 2o17 and very successfully tested it in 2020.
In comparison, one could say Eby was too nice but, in this case, he disproved that nice guys finish last because he didn’t (the NDP won the popular vote by about one percentage-point over the BCC), Come Moon’s Day next when the final result of the 2024 election is announced, he might just win, but most likely by some technicality of Westminster parliamentary tradition—selection of a Speaker and/or some kind of alliance with that other party, the one that won only 8.2% of the popular vote but, once again, appears to be holding the balance of power. I’m just hoping that, whatever the final outcome, the astounding charge of the BCCons’ intellectually-light brigade will in time turn out to be some psephological quirk —like the US Electoral College which has been providing conservative presidential wins with less than half the popular vote for years. BC’s quirk is Sonia Furtsnau’s Green Party, proven twice during half of the past seven years of NDP government, and again now—I mean, probably…
In sum, the NDP didn’t deserve to lose because of the rattletrap load of scapegoating crap the BCCons presented —Eby did not ‘destroy BC’s economy’ (certainly not on the Coast where construction towers bristle over every city landscape and trades are so busy it’s hard to find available tradespeople—even if one can afford the high price they can demand); neither did he cause climate-change (although old-growth preservationists regularly confuse climate issues for which no single government can be blamed with forest policy issues which no BC administration, regardless partisanship, can afford to change in any drastic way); nor is he culpable for inflation or the high price of housing; contrary to Rustad’s constant drone that tens of thousands of people are leaving BC because of the Eby NDP, more-relevant, relative stats—as opposed to his absolute numbers—simply confirm that all this economic activity is largely due to BC’s rapidly growing population: the 78,000 out-migrants Rustad likens to the 90,000 during the NDP regime of the 1990s was disingenuously applied to BC’s current population which has increased by few million people since—a plain example of statistical abuse which Rustad just proved still works in BC. That said, after seven very stressful years of Covid and its attendant inflation, and natural disasters like we’ve never seen before, not to mention worrisome political tumult around the world, the NDP was bound to have its sails trimmed. All things considered, it did pretty well as chickens it never sired flocked home in numbers the henhouse can barely handle.
The Conservatives did not deserve to win based on its grab-bag of rote, cut-and-paste MIBCGA (Make Interior BC Great Again) tripe, but if it does manage to become government, it will be a very thinly warranted devil we don’t know—and doesn’t even know itself. That might be justice for residents of hard hit mill towns of the Interior, but it definitely won’t be where most of BC citizens live, and where the Dippers held on against long odds.
The real winner is the party whose leader lost her own seat but whose two elected MLAs will likely hold the balance of power. The Greens probably deserved to win more seats, but two will do just as well, if…
Only in BC? Maybe… let’s see…