On September 20, Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as leader of the BC Conservatives. Two days later, Premier David Eby called a provincial election for October 24. One need not claim a window into the premier's soul to notice the arithmetic. The government will march into the campaign behind a seasoned leader; its principal opponent has scarcely had time to hang an interim leader's portrait in the corridor.Mr. Eby tells us the province needs a fresh mandate to meet the economic threats gathering south of the border. The threats are real, and a premier who ignored them would deserve reproach. But they do not explain why the question must be put this autumn. The New Democrats already hold a majority, won less than two years ago. What they lack, it seems, is not a mandate but a larger one.Nothing here is unlawful. An early election, unlike some other uses of executive discretion, has the merit of handing the final word to the voters.Yet legality has never been the whole of political virtue, just as it is insufficient to guarantee personal virtue. Our Westminster inheritance rests less on written rules than on conventions and habits of restraint that a first minister honours precisely because nothing compels him to do so. The system entrusts great latitude to the person at its head, and in doing so it quietly presumes a certain character in whoever holds the office: someone capable, now and then, of declining an advantage for the sake of a principle.British Columbians have particular reason to take this seriously. In 2001, the province legislated fixed election dates so that the rhythm of our democratic life would no longer be a tactical instrument in the premier's hands. The law has proved to be a garden gate held shut by a latch rather than a lock. In 2020, the NDP under John Horgan walked through it, calling a pandemic election a year early on the strength of favourable polls and fixing the vote, as it happened, for October 24. Precedents, once set, have a way of becoming invitations..Mr. Eby's own party has a better tradition. In October 1970, when Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act and the country rallied behind him, Tommy Douglas rose in the Commons to oppose it. He did not doubt that public order must be defended; he doubted that its defence justified the wholesale suspension of Canadians' civil liberties.Mr. Douglas was pilloried for it. History, however, has been kinder to him than his contemporaries were. Canadians admire men of principle.Mr. Eby faces nothing like the October Crisis. But he might profitably consult the example of a predecessor who understood that public service sometimes means leaving the easy path untaken.Nor is the temptation a New Democratic peculiarity. In January 2025, Justin Trudeau prorogued Parliament until March 24 while the Liberals chose his successor. He spoke of impasse and renewal; Canadians were entitled to ask why the nation's deliberative business should wait upon the Liberal Party's domestic arrangements. An election and a prorogation are different acts. Mr. Eby asks the people to decide; Mr. Trudeau sent their representatives home. What joins the two is the question each provokes: whether a power held in trust for public purposes has been exercised at a moment chosen chiefly for partisan gain. That question deserves to be put to every party with equal force.None of this absolves the Conservatives. Their troubles are of their own making, and no premier is obliged to wait until his opponents have tidied their house before summoning the electorate. But Mr. Eby does owe British Columbians a more persuasive account of why the province cannot wait. A premier who invokes the urgency of an emergency ought to be able to name the decision that cannot be taken in the ordinary course of legislative business. So far, he has not..What troubles me most is not this single call but the governing instinct it reveals. Michael Oakeshott reminded us that political life is conducted within a tradition of behaviour rather than by the mechanical application of rules; conventions survive only so long as those who could break them choose not to. When every convenient date is dressed up as a moment of provincial necessity, the conventions wear thin. Cynicism takes root in the cracks.Such manoeuvres may win elections. Repeated often enough, they turn solemn invocations of "our democracy" into a staging of Andersen's old fable: ministers and party loyalists are paraded out to admire the Emperor’s new clothes. Meanwhile, citizens are asked not to notice what stands plainly before them: a governing party wearing its naked advantage as though it were civic virtue.Mr. Eby may yet persuade British Columbians that his government deserves another term; the voters are sovereign and can be trusted to judge.But judgment requires candour. The premier owes the electorate an honest answer to a simple question: why did democracy's needs become so pressing at the very moment the NDP's prospects became so bright?.Restraint is the least celebrated of political virtues. It wins no campaigns, inspires no slogans, and earns no applause on election night. Its work is done in silence, in the advantages declined, and the powers left unused; it is easily mistaken for weakness.Yet it is restraint, more than any statute, that sustains the unwritten understandings on which parliamentary government rests. Without it, the institutions of a free people do not collapse all at once; they erode quietly, one convenient exception at a time, until the trust that sustained them has drained away.This election, called in the brief interval between an opponent's fall and her successor's rise, has every appearance of being one such convenient exception.British Columbians may be forgiven, then, for cynically suspecting Mr. Eby's motives. They will justifiably ask themselves whether the hour he has chosen serves the interests of their province, or merely those of his party.Patrick Keeney is a Canadian writer who divides his time between Kelowna, BC, and Thailand. His latest book is Liberal Learning and the Modern University: Reclaiming the Intellectual and Moral Foundations of Higher Education.
