Who were the man’s political advisors? Whoever they are, it will be best for any future political hopeful to avoid them like the plague. They remind me of a particular phase of “Young Liberals” in BC, when boys who knew nothing about anything were pulling stupid stunts with a kind of Watergate-lite feel to them. Ugh.
As for Eby, he has been a crushing disappointment for people like me for a while now. But to then run a campaign that alienates your traditional voter base in order to court voters who are never going to choose the NDP – wow.
Ivory towers, emperors without clothes, closed-loop cabals of young advisors with political science degrees and zero world experience – such things have come to my mind routinely throughout these past four years as I wondered what the hell Eby was thinking.
I don’t know what it means to “be NDP,” but if I were the newly obliterated party in the aftermath of this election, I’d be doing some serious soul-searching about that, and how to choose a leader next time who holds those values in his heart, not just on his work resume.
John Horgan was that kind of guy. Eby most definitely was not. I had hopes, I admit, because he sure has the work chops. But instead he just reigned from on high, like a king who had no interest in hearing about the plight of the little people. All doors were firmly closed to the people who had elected him. All ears were set on “Don’t listen.”
As the days closed in on this election and I felt anxiety growing among the people who care about social issues, I reflected back on nine years of NDP government – how nine of the 10 years of the toxic drug crisis in BC have been under an NDP government, how social health in BC communities has plummeted, how more and more people are scraping by and genuinely afraid that they’re not going to make it.
Homelessness has ballooned. Evidence-based strategies to get people away from the poisonous street supply have been attacked and weakened. The housing crisis has exploded, and we get a guy whose solution is to buy out the speculative developers so that BC can acquire condos that will still be totally out of reach for the people who most need housing.
The reflection helped me prepare for this day. The NDP lost because they deserved to. Yes, I am horrified that a party rife with hatred for so many stripes of humans is now in power, but at least I don’t have to mourn the crushing loss of a good government. In terms of the issues I care about, we haven’t had a good government in years.
How did Eby come to believe that his position on being fierce against Trump was going to be the winning strategy? That’s ivory-tower thinking if ever there was. People are actually going hungry in BC. There is real suffering going on.
Where’s the kind of NDP leader who reaches out to the masses and actually tries to hear the things they’re saying? That they can’t find work. That they can’t afford a place to live. That they don’t see a trace of their own lives reflected in Eby’s elite vision of a province doing so well in its day-to-day that its primary worry is what another tone-deaf, well-fed dude down south is up to.
Then to find out during this election campaign that Eby’s youngest child goes to a $10-a-day childcare.
Good grief, man, could you not see the optics on something like that? A mere 10 per cent of the people with kids in BC daycares are able to access the program, and one of them is the guy who is actually responsible for the whole thing? The guy earning $18,000 a month from the public purse?
This is how governments topple. They lose touch – and not by accident, but deliberately. They shut their doors. They cover their ears. They surround themselves with people who are just like them, who laugh loudly at their jokes and assure them their political instincts are killer.
Here’s a small but telling anecdote of the kind of arrogance that gets a party obliterated: My 11-year-old granddaughter and three of her classmates had been learning about democracy in their class, and took it upon themselves to send emails to their MLAs – all of whom were NDP – to voice their concerns on issues they cared about.
Not one of them got so much as a “thanks for your email but we’re real busy” message back from anyone. What a lesson to be learned at such a tender age - that government doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what you think, kid. You want to have influence, go get yourself a poli-sci degree and shut yourself in a small room with a weak premier.
Today is a new day. For many of us, it isn’t a happy one. But may we take comfort in remembering that we haven’t had a government who reflected our values in quite some time anyway.
To all the people who think like me: Elbows up, friends. Another battle lost, but we haven’t been winning any for a while. Better to fight the wolf than waste any more time on the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
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