FLETCHER: Another year of defeat and retreat awaits BC’s NDP

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.The last day of 2025 marked the final step in reversing one of the BC NDP government’s most obviously disastrous policies, the free distribution of “safer supply” opioid pills.Known on the street as “dillies,” short for the pharmaceutical brand Dilaudid, the synthetic heroin pills began showing up in large numbers in police drug busts. Users were selling them, sometimes right outside the doors of pharmacies authorized to dispense them, or trading them to street dealers for the more substantial kick of fentanyl.For a government known to accuse critics of outrageous mass murder claims as “residential school deniers,” Premier David Eby and his cabinet colleagues showed a remarkable capacity to deny what was obviously happening to “safer supply” drugs..OLDCORN: Liberals $200 million racist slush fund.Eventually, police evidence and reports of the pills showing up at high schools forced them to stop handing them out on an honour system. As of December 31, prescription opioid users are mostly required to swallow the pills in front of a pharmacy witness.Another NDP low-light of 2025 was the police raid, arrest, and conviction of two founders of the Drug Users Liberation Front (DULF) for possession for the purpose of trafficking heroin, cocaine, and meth. This unfolded like a macabre Monty Python sketch with epic levels of NDP denial as the truth emerged.More than two years ago, Surrey cop-turned-MLA Elenore Sturko wrote to Attorney General Niki Sharma, demanding to know why DULF was given $1.2 million by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority to buy illegal drugs from the “dark web” to supply their self-styled compassion club..You know, use cryptocurrency to buy the stuff from organized crime, test it, and then give it out to your selected clients. As one does. It helps to have the written endorsement of multiple senior health ministry bureaucrats and doctors, some of whom set up side businesses to run a greatly expanded program that they insisted was necessary for harm reduction.DULF dealers Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx didn’t hide. They paraded through Vancouver streets handing out free dope. They bragged about ignoring drug laws at “safer supply” conferences.Turns out DULF was actually started at a BC government-sponsored conference at a luxury resort on Pender Island in 2019. The conference dealt with strategies for getting around federal drug laws..WIECHNIK: Oil and gas still 'run the world', someone should tell Mark Carney.To this day, Eby and Sharma insist they didn’t know what was going on, although Sharma is on the record as being interested in the development of hard-drug “compassion clubs.” Eby’s enthusiasm for legalizing all drugs dates back to his days with the Pivot Legal Society and BC Civil Liberties Association.Eby’s most pressing task for 2026 will be to somehow loosen BC’s embrace of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). He admits that his legislation to impose UNDRIP on BC law has been more successful than he anticipated..Eby has promised amendments after two court rulings. One proposes to elevate aboriginal title above private property rights, while the other would bind the government to incorporate UNDRIP into all its laws. Opposition critics have replayed videos of then-attorney general Eby insisting that these things would never happen.This issue is still unfolding, the latest development being another lawsuit from the Tsay Keh Dene tribe in northern BC, disputing one of Eby’s sweeping voluntary giveaways of Crown title to the neighbouring Kwadacha people. These kinds of closed-door deals are happening across the province..EYRE: Hands off my house.The threat to private property in Richmond and around the province has rocked an economy already known for uncertainty of aboriginal rights and title. Despite a record deficit, failing healthcare, and more wage demands coming in from teachers and other unions, Eby starts the year forced to put up more borrowed money to backstop mortgages for those whose property is threatened by the changes he designed.I was a lone voice back in 2019 when UNDRIP was applied to BC with a unanimous vote of the legislature, the first in the world. We were repeatedly told to ignore the plain meaning of “free, prior and informed consent” and accept that a racially divided legal system would work fine.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: Another year of defeat and retreat awaits BC’s NDP

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