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.
Comments
We will all survive and strive.
Thank-you for your ongoing support of our homeless and marginalized people.
See you on THE BLOCK
Reminded of Eby going off-script and singing a cringeworthy karaoke of Bon Jovi's "We're Halfway There" at the 2011 NDP leadership convention ---the one Adrian Dix won ( John Horgan in 3rd place). He embarrassed our party big time by behaving like a sniggering, adolescent prankster. It was appalling and, before running against premier Christy Clark in 2013, he promised to never sing in public again. He defeated her.
Horgan appreciated Eby's impressive CV, his progressive pedigree as head of the BC Civil Liberties Union, his remarkable election embarrassment of the BC Liberal premier, and, I'm convinced, his dare-devil tendency. One of Eby's first moves was to implement no-fault auto insurance to save the veteran Crown Corp from intentional bankruptcy by the outgoing BC Liberal regime which, after 16 years of secrecy and corruption, would make any subsequent remedial action necessarily bold. Eby was Horgan's point-man for many such bold policy moves to recuperate from BC Liberals' cooked-book market-fundamentalism and stealth bankruptcy of Crown Corps to rationalize privatization (i.e to sell to crony insiders for pennies on the dollar). The Green-Dipper alliance that toppled Christy's minority in 2017 (on its first bill) was replaced by a strong NDP majority won in an early election in 2020. Voters rewarded Horgan's bold self-confidence.
Eby was commended when Horgan gave him the nod as his successor---but Eby was not so self-confident---or at least not so consistent, having to reverse or abandon a number of policy objectives, some of which were far too bold for voters---decriminalization of small amounts of drugs, for example, which he boldly copied from Oregon just as the state was about to rescind its own experiment. His native impulsiveness often went off too soon or too late. In retrospect he should have taken his party's razor-thin 2024 win more seriously. His response to the hollow (and, as it turns out, tendentious) threats from farmers and their totally false alarm that the Cowichan Tribes court decision nullified their "private property rights" was not only lame and unnecessary, it lended unwarranted legitimacy to the false claim. It's like he didn't think about it long enough. Or something...
But the most glaring example of knee-jerk will go down in history as Eby's utterly stupid early election call. He even got the timing wrong, of course: he announced it AFTER his racist ace-in-the-hole Kerry-Lynne Findlay had resigned as BCC leader. I can't imagine he couldn't or didn't hear immediate concerns about going early, rather I can see him hearing them but simply dismissing them.
My darling, on the other hand, thinks Eby was controlled by his wife's crony-cabal of social justice warriors. I dunno. Maybe... but I maintain that to indulge his natural risk-taking and danger-rush-seeking behaviour, he dismissed fears that many BC citizens will be hurt by the result. Way to go, Dave!
Eby strikes me as a person who does not take advise well. He thinks he knows better than others. Now he is intelligent but book smarts don't equal real life. I've read RossK's post, Norm Farrell's and yours. I need a drink.