HANNAFORD: Eby's $10 daycare — likely the most expensive he'll ever pay for

So BC Premier David Eby and his wife, who, by published estimates, have a combined household income close to $500,000, availed themselves of scarce government-funded $10-a-day daycare.He did nothing illegal. But when BC votes on October 24, that’s going to cost him. People do not like ‘cheap.’Most voters do not understand policy. They do not track legislative clauses. They pay little attention to fiscal projections or the precise wording of a memorandum of understanding. What they do understand, however, is that somewhere out there a struggling single mom is juggling two rubbish jobs in an effort to get by. She would have been glad of that inexpensive daycare slot but was bumped by her affluent premier and his doctor wife. Mr. Eby says he donated the difference, which is fair enough. But the single mom didn’t get the spot and would have ended up paying more elsewhere.You can’t talk your way out of that.There are abundant reasons to condemn Mr. Eby’s ministry.This is the leader of a government that insisted on giving clean drugs to addicts in the mistaken belief that overdose deaths would thereby be reduced. (A great many addicts simply sold the clean government issue for cash and continued with the cheaper rubbish they were smoking before.)He is the master of running up BC’s credit card; British Columbia’s total provincial debt has risen by roughly $65 billion (about 70%) since David Eby became premier in November 2022..And in his bid to present himself as morally superior to the descendants of BC’s pioneers who took a wilderness and made it a safe, comfortable, modern place to raise a family, he aligned himself with indigenous interests that now seek to insert Aboriginal title above fee simple into provincial property ownership. People living in fear of losing their property know their premier is not on their side.The list is illustrative, not exhaustive. The man and the government he leads have been a disaster for British Columbia.But all that is for political nerds.David Eby’s vulnerability now is that a senior politician in the top 1% of Canada’s household incomes grabs cheap daycare from a program established for poor people. And that person is their premier.He may survive, although polling suggests the NDP is coming to the end of its run in office. However that may be, hypocrisy is the one political sin that requires no briefing note to recognize. It registers as a character failure rather than a technical disagreement, and character is what large numbers of people use as a proxy for trustworthiness.David Eby is learning this in real time. Having spent years presenting himself as the steady, principle-driven alternative to Alberta’s more combative style — particularly on energy and the environment — Eby has found his practical record increasingly difficult to square with his rhetoric..Projects once treated as existential threats have been accommodated when the politics or the fiscal numbers shifted; consultations once described as non-negotiable have been managed when delay became costly. Certain projects — remember the Trans Mountain oil pipeline? — and aspects of LNG development were often framed as environmentally unacceptable, inconsistent with climate goals, or requiring ironclad indigenous consent and a process that could not be rushed.They were routinely described as “existential threats” and “non-negotiable.” Later, though, under fiscal pressure, political incentives, or shifting market conditions, the same government has advanced or accommodated significant LNG expansions and adopted more pragmatic language about energy exports, revenue, and jobs.It is well that it did.Still, the gap between Mr. Eby’s language of moral clarity and his pattern of selective flexibility has not gone unnoticed in a province that is neither uniformly green nor uniformly indifferent to resource development. If this election turns into a referendum on whether Eby’s government has been honest with British Columbians about trade-offs, an easily understood charge of hypocrisy will do more damage than any single policy critique. And cheap childcare will be revealed as colossally expensive, at least for Eby and the NDP.Voters may not be able to quote the regulatory text. But hypocrisy is cognitively cheap to detect and expensive to ignore. Parties and leaders who treat this as a communications problem rather than a substantive one tend to discover, usually too late, that the electorate’s grasp of policy may be slender, but its tolerance for being lectured by people who exempt themselves is thinner still.

HANNAFORD: Eby's $10 daycare — likely the most expensive he'll ever pay for

Related Stories

FLETCHER: David Eby’s $10-a-day daycare subsidy trips him up before debate

Eby’s polling numbers are in free-fall as a daycare debacle lands

Day 16 of the 2026 BC provincial election: Eby shifts to running against his own government's record

Day 14 of the BC provincial election: Conservatives hold lead in new Angus Reid poll