FLETCHER: David Eby threw away his BC NDP government

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.VICTORIA — David Eby acknowledged that the most frequent voter question he got while campaigning in his disastrous snap election was this: Why now? Why drop a provincial election on top of local votes, two years early, when he had a thin but still functional NDP majority?Trying to take advantage of disarray in the opposition was the obvious answer. Eby thought he was going to run against the Trump-dancing Conservative Kerry-Lynne Findlay, whom he described as running for “MAGA regional manager.” When she abruptly quit, he wasn’t above trashing parliamentary tradition to take advantage of that too.When Lorne Doerkson emerged as the new interim leader, Eby was politely dismissive of the “nice guy” nobody had heard of.Eby’s stock response to the big question, why now, was that the opposition’s efforts to defeat the government’s legislation had made it difficult to take the “big swings” he said he needed to turn around an ailing economy. That is, of course, the economy his party has overseen for almost a decade, leaving a wreckage of debt, drugs, and disorder.Another problem was that Eby was dealing with his own low-key caucus revolts, some from the NDP’s internal “green party” that doesn’t like his embrace of natural gas export development, his acquiescence to another oil pipeline, and what’s left of our forest industry. This is what Jason Kenney calls the “mud hut wing” of the NDP.One telling indicator of this came when NDP candidate Randene Neill, formerly NDP minister of water, land, and resource stewardship, told a Sunshine Coast candidate forum that BC doesn’t need any more LNG plants..That would be shocking news for investors in the Woodfibre LNG plant, under construction near Squamish, or the Nisga’a-led Ksi Lisims LNG plant that is about to commit billions to a pipeline and export site on BC’s North Coast. Not to mention LNG Canada phase two, recently celebrated by Eby and Prime Minister Mark Carney.Neill’s appeal to the greying hippy voters of Gibsons and Sechelt allowed her to hang onto her seat. Eby held his wealthy Vancouver-Point Grey seat too — though not by much — and the Conservative candidate who came close to unseating him will soon get another chance when Eby resigns from that too.Here’s another indicator of what led to the disastrous snap election call.Boundary-Similkameen candidate Roly Russell, who lost his seat to the Conservatives in 2024, disclosed to a local news outlet last week that one of his fellow MLAs recently described to him an NDP caucus close to paralysis.The reason, Russell said, is “with only a one-seat majority, everybody around the table had a veto, so anything that someone really wanted to oppose, it became very difficult to move forward with legislation.”Eby’s desperate campaign pledges showed some of the other things his caucus was demanding. Tax the millionaires! Regulate grocery prices!Delays in reporting election-night results were another legacy of Eby’s surprise election call. Municipal elections were completed on schedule only a week ago, using the same ballot-scanning machines that are now in use for provincial votes. But Elections BC didn’t have enough time to get the machines repositioned and set up, so election-day ballots had to be counted by hand across the province.Even at that, the results were not in doubt from the moment the polls closed. The result was at least a 60-seat majority for the unknown premier-elect. Eby’s election call will go down in history as one of the worst political miscalculations ever in Canada.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: David Eby threw away his BC NDP government

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