Premier David Eby doesn’t give a whit about my opinion. As it turns out, I feel the same way about his.
But we are stuck with each other – him with his Premier-level access to the traditional media, me with a blog and social media. And I’ve got a few things to say.
Anything said about a politician seems to get interpreted as a statement of political support for or against them. That’s not what this is. I don’t care for politics.
So there’s no politics in what is bothering me about David Eby. And just to be transparent, I loathe the BC Conservatives.
What is actually bothering me about David Eby is the great discomfort of seeing that a man who I once believed in can be acting this way. It’s quite a different level of betrayal than the usual political stuff.
David Eby is a lawyer. His dad was a lawyer too, and his mom a teacher. He once headed up the BC Civil Liberties Association, and I interviewed him a number of times in those years. He was always a sharp thinker who I had a good opinion of.
He headed up Pivot Legal Society, too, which is literally one of a handful of organizations in the whole country to make serious gains through law that made a positive difference for people living in poverty. He’s known as “an ambitious policy reformer.” When it became clear in 2022 that he’d be our premier, I thought, hot damn, here we go.
BC was emerging from the pandemic that year. Surprisingly, those two pandemic years had been a period when the most brilliant things had happened really quickly in the world of street-level social services. There’d been quite a panic around COVID in the context of people living homeless and using drugs, and doors had opened to doing things well in ways that got people off the streets.
Governments were being kept very, very busy by the pandemic, which allowed the people who actually know how to do things – the people on the front line, the people in the experience – to step up to figure things out while government funded it. I can’t tell you how hopeful that felt to people like me.
And then David Eby becomes the premier. I really thought it was going to be a moment. But it took no time at all to see that whatever I’d been imagining from a guy like him, I was wrong.
David Eby, that has been pretty crushing.
The premier knows from his own work experience what it takes to solve entrenched social problems. He knows very well what fuel feeds the stigma, and further reduces the rights of people living in poverty.
Yet he chooses to step deeper into the polarization, with his public statements featured in the Vancouver Sun yesterday connecting a 33 per cent decline of toxic drug deaths year over year with his government’s decision six months ago to walk back on BC’s brief decriminalization pilot.
Toxic drug deaths in that same period have in fact fallen by a similar amount across the country and in the U.S. Nobody knows why deaths are falling. But David Eby knows it has nothing to do with a little three-year decrim pilot in BC, whatever he’s saying in public.
Here in Canada, 15 people are dying every day now instead of 20, and that’s good, albeit still more deaths than all other accidental causes combined. In the US, toxic drug deaths dropped 27 per cent in 2024, and another 14-20 per cent in 2025.
“The reasons behind these shifts are unclear, and it is important to avoid drawing premature conclusions,” noted the Canadian AIDS Treatment Information Exchange (CATIE) last summer. “The number of deaths remains staggering and unacceptable, even with the decline last year, and there is no cause for celebration. Far too many lives have been lost in this decade-long public health emergency, and far too many people continue to die.”
But there’s David Eby, spinning the drop in deaths – deaths that he and his predecessor have resolutely ignored for 10 years now – as being about the end of a pilot that allowed people to possess 2.5 grams of illegal drugs.
“I was wrong on decriminalization and the effect that it would have,” Eby told the Urban Development Institute a few months back, repeated by Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer this week. “What it became was a permissive structure — that it was OK to use drugs anywhere.”
Ah, yes, that was it.
What’s happening on the streets of our communities isn’t about homeless, which has grown significantly under David Eby’s leadership. It isn’t because of the four-alarm housing crisis that now means any of BC’s 200,000 caseload of people on income assistance aren’t likely to find a place to live that isn’t government-funded.
It’s not about health, mental health and child welfare systems that have been failing for years, or an opioid drug stream made up of toxic synthetics made in clandestine labs while everyone pretends that police could really get a handle on it if they just had more money.
It’s not about untreated, undiagnosed brain injuries. It’s not about the criminalizing of poverty and deliberate new laws removing more rights from people living homeless.
Nope, the whole problem here is open drug use, and it’s all about those three brief years when people could carry a very small amount of illegal drugs on their person. And next thing you know, weren’t they all just using drugs everywhere? (Or at least everywhere that they’re living homeless with years of trauma and disability, that being the actual problem.)
A lot of people might believe that. But David Eby doesn’t, and there’s the rub. I could at least hope for a better education in the real world for a politician who just had no idea, but what do I do with the emotions rising up in me when a guy I once had respect and even some excitement for says BS like this?
And surely people can see that this rote blaming of “harm reduction” and all those woke idiots getting their way is a political distraction from the reality of all the broken and beleaguered systems of government? It kills me to hear people pointing to the raging street crisis and trying to shame people who support harm reduction for what they’ve wrought, as if a single one of us ever wanted this.
The problem is not harm reduction, it’s that all we ever got was harm reduction – and enforcement, of course. David Eby knows that the public is so hooked on enforcement as the cure for what ails us, they won’t ever question why it never seems to work, especially if you toss them some distracting message once in a while reinforcing that it's all the fault of those bad drug users.
Here’s what I know, David Eby: In the end there’s just you and your thoughts about the life you’ve just had, and the impacts you’ve made. You ever think about how it will feel to think back on being the most powerful person in the province, and all you did was work to advance your political standing? Try being the guy we all thought you were.
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