BC: Is David Eby Going To Blow It?

Spoiler: I Am Unconvinced

The 1990 Ontario election is probably the most famous of an unnecessary snap election failing. David Peterson went after only 3 years, had no argument for why he did, and Bob Rae accidentally won an NDP term in office right before a bad global recession and fucked the NDP’s reputation for a generation.

There are some indications that this could be in play in BC now, where David Eby is in a dogfight of his own creation. In trying to capitalize on the BC Conservatives’ chaos, Eby has (mostly) unified them while pissing people off at the blatantly opportunistic nature of the move. But it’s safe to say the narrativizing about the early bad polls has gone too far, and in my view there’s every reason to think the NDP are still favourites to win the BC election.

The Early Polling Is Not Actually That Bad

One Angus Reid poll had the Cons up 8%, but otherwise the polling has been fine. Leger and Liaison have the Cons up 3% and 1% respectively, and Innovative Research Group have the NDP up 2%. Obviously you’d rather be winning in every poll, but the narrative got started with Angus Reid and it’s spiralled out from there.

It’s also worth remembering that the NDP only barely won the popular vote in 2024. A 1.58% popular vote lead translated into the bare majority on election night last time, which means that the current ~2.5% Conservative margin in the polls is not a substantial swing - and a result it should be very easy to claw back. This could be especially true, given …

The Greens Won’t Get Double Digits

All five polls since the Findlay resignation have the Greens on for double digits and they won’t get that. My contempt for the Green leader is known, and it’s entirely possible she takes some additional votes in Victoria, Saanich, and parts of Vancouver, but her stridently left wing nature won’t play well outside those areas. But more than anything about her, the Green vote right now is a Progressives Mad At Eby vote, which will do what every Progressives Mad At Centre Left Incumbent protest movement does, and reluctantly come home.

In some places the Greens might not even be able to field a candidate, which would be immensely helpful to consolidation of the vote behind the NDP, but even if they ran a full slate, the threat of letting in the Conservatives will serve as an effective squeeze threat. If the Greens get 9%, but it’s more effectively concentrated in “safe” NDP seats - or more accurately “unwinnable for the Conservatives” seats that the Greens could flip either this time or soon after - then both Lowan and Eby would be happy, probably.

There’s Every Reason To Think The BC Conservative Coalition Will Be Less Efficient This Time

John Rustad’s lasting legacy, beyond the victory of the Conservative Party being the main opposition force and the chaos of his departure as leader, was his results in the multi-ethnic outer ring of the Lower Mainland. The list of flipped seats from 2020 to 2024 was right trending working class seats on Vancouver Island and the interior - places Pierre Poilievre would flip in 2025, and that made sense to flip given the global trends in areas like that - and hugely impressive results in what you might call the Greater bits of Greater Vancouver. Four seats in Surrey all flipped by 7.1% or less, including 3 on a margin of less than 3%. There’s also two Langleys within 5% and Maple Ridge East won by less than a point.

Rustad did so through a very effective campaign of populist conservativism. Crime and disorder were at the top of the issue set, as well as the SOGI education stuff and some of the Indigenous rights issues. Now the Conservatives are running on a much more BC Liberal playbook of tax cuts and economic focus, and that’s not really what attracted the big swings. It’s also worth pointing out Eby’s been better - or less shit, depending on your view - on a lot of crime and drugs questions since 2024, which should help.

If the Conservative vote looks more like the 2017 Christy Clark-led BC Liberal vote, then you’ll probably win back Langara and lose Point Grey and seats like that by less, while seeing the gains of the Rustad coalition go out the door.

Eby Has Been Awful So Far

This is counterintuitive as a reason for NDP optimism, but stick with me. The relative strength of the Conservatives in the polls is not because Lorne Doerkson has been impressive, it is because David Eby has been awful. Doerkson hasn’t had a good announcement or a smart idea, he’s just standing there saying smooth sounding idiotic things. He’s somehow committed to no new taxes and no cuts to services, and a pretty pricey tax cut for BC wines for a province with a genuinely alarming budgetary situation. Nobody has really noticed or cared, however, because the story is Eby being a fucking incompetent.

I know it seems crazy to be emphasizing how bad the NDP campaign has been as a way to make an optimistic case for them winning, but it’s important to be clear eyed about what’s happening here. The NDP are entirely capable of cruising to an election win if they get their heads out of their asses and even remotely try. All they have to do is hammer two messages - that the Majority In Name Only (with the Speaker’s vote taken away, he had exactly half the House) he had wasn’t a mandate for the kinds of tough decisions that need to be made in these challenging times, and that the BC Conservatives have had more chaos and instability than the Covid-conscious lesbian bar and therefore can’t be trusted to govern. (Or something along these lines, just a first thought …)

It is very important to know the difference between losing because you’re getting outplayed and losing because you’re playing like shit. The NDP aren’t being outplayed, they’re playing like shit, and they’re the political equivalent of being down 1-0 at the first intermission because they turned the puck over 77 times against the worst team in the league. All they have to do is remember how to do the basic blocking and tackling of political campaigning.

Maybe Eby and co are so up their own asses they can’t do it. Maybe they’re so convinced of their own genius that they’ll actually blow this race. But fundamentally, the Conservatives are an untested entity with an unknown leader, a chaotic history, and no clear plan or vision for government. The NDP would have to be the most incompetent party in modern Canadian history to lose to them.

It’d be really funny, but it won’t happen.