“Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil,” Roger Scruton once observed. “Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.”
Scruton’s charity can be extended to David Eby, up to a point. The premier may be merely mistaken about what British Columbia needs. But his conduct this week reveals something harder. It shows a politician untroubled by striking an opponent at the moment it lies on the floor, and willing to call the blow a matter of principle. Ontario watched this kind of appetite at work once before.
In the summer of 1990, Madonna took her Blond Ambition tour around the world, and David Peterson took a 24-point lead to the voters of Ontario. The tour was a triumph. Peterson began the campaign ahead of the NDP by that margin in a June Environics poll, called an election he did not need, and lost his government and his own seat in London Centre. Ambition flaunted is a stage act. In politics, voters tend to read it as a questionable motive.
Premier David Eby has now tested that proposition. On September 22, two years into a mandate that British Columbia’s fixed-election law set to run until October 2028, he dissolved the legislature for a vote on October 24. He did so two days after Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned as Conservative leader, following a summer of mass defections, damaging leaks and a possible RCMP bribery investigation. The NDP caucus met the Sunday night of her resignation to discuss an early vote. Cabinet minister Lana Popham announced her retirement the next day. The writ followed a day later.
The opponent who cannot answer
The premier’s public case rests on Washington. He called the trade war “an existential moment” and cast the vote as a “firebreak” against Trump’s economic attack and the Trump-style politics he uses to smear his opponents. Doug Ford made a similar argument in February 2025 and won again; Mark Carney rode it to a mandate in Ottawa that spring. There is much anti-Americanism in this country. Eby’s defenders add that a one-seat majority is a fragile instrument, resting on Garry Begg’s 22-vote recount win in Surrey-Guildford, and that a single death or defection could have ended it.
Running against a foreign president offers the convenience of an opponent who never answers back. Trump will not appear in a British Columbia leaders’ debate, rebut a platform or face a voter on a doorstep in Surrey. A premier who campaigns against him need not dwell on strained health care, affordability or record deficits, or on his government’s reversals over the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, all of which wore down NDP support earlier this year. Angus Reid found more British Columbians rating the government’s performance poor (47 per cent) than good (39 per cent). Choosing an adversary who cannot fight back is clever and requires little courage. The tactic has worked for Ford and for Carney, and it will keep working until voters recall that the name on the ballot is Eby’s and so is the record.
Yet the sequence of events speaks louder than the rationale. The tariffs predate Findlay’s leadership. What changed in September was the opposition’s condition. In the days before the call, the government paused an expansion of the provincial sales tax and reversed its halt to promised services at Burnaby Hospital.
Municipal leaders asked Eby not to schedule his vote a week after their own local elections. Jenna Stoner of the Union of BC Municipalities asked what difference four weeks could make. Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim made the same request. The premier declined both. Asked why a majority government needed an election, he said that asking British Columbians what they think is never wrong. Presumably that holds even when the question is timed to the moment one’s opponent has no leader.
New Democrats have long presented themselves as the conscience of provincial politics: the party of fair play, of the underdog, of the scrupulous rule-follower. This call sits awkwardly with that self-portrait. The government watched its opponent lose a leader, counted the empty chairs across the aisle and sent voters to the polls before the Conservatives could choose a permanent successor. The compassion the party professes appears to stop at the opposition benches. Hard dealing is part of politics; preaching fair play while practising it is another matter.
Lawful, but unfair
British Columbia was the first province to legislate fixed election dates, in 2001. A statute with no penalty binds only a premier who chooses to be bound. Eby broke no law. Voters can nevertheless tell the difference between what a statute permits and what fair dealing expects, and Ontario punished a similar liberty in 1990.
John Horgan chose to ignore the fixed date in 2020, sending British Columbians to the polls on October 24 of that year, the same date Eby has now chosen, and Eby sat at his cabinet table. His party took the lesson that early elections pay. The lesson it may be about to relearn is the one Peterson taught: an unnecessary election invites voters to judge the man who called it, and the verdict can arrive fast.
The accidental unifier
Here the irony starts. Eby’s calculation assumed the right would stay divided. The call itself removed the conditions that kept it divided.
Before the writ, reunification was an open question. Rustad described “high level” unity talks with the breakaway CentreBC and put their odds at 95 per cent, which is how politicians talk about deals that have not closed. The deadline closed it.
Lorne Doerkson, the Cariboo-Chilcotin MLA the party board chose as interim leader, readmitted five exiles, Rustad among them, on his first day. On the day of the call, he stood at CRAB Park with 13 caucus members, including former leadership rivals Caroline Elliott, Iain Black and Peter Milobar, who had been named CentreBC’s leader only the previous Friday. Doerkson told reporters Eby would “regret” giving voters a chance for change.
An election five weeks away concentrates the mind of every MLA who crossed the floor. The only party with a province-wide organization, a donor list and a recognizable brand is the one most of them left. The premier’s decision set their deadline. His rhetoric supplied their slogan. In a few days Eby accomplished what months of back-room negotiation had not.
The union remains incomplete. OneBC, led by Dallas Brodie, whom Rustad expelled from caucus in March 2025, still draws on the Conservatives’ right flank, and it picked up Findlay’s husband, Surrey South MLA Brent Chapman, the day the writ dropped. CentreBC, reduced to its leader, Elenore Sturko, has kept a slate of centrist candidates, including former Green leader Andrew Weaver.
At 4 per cent each in the latest Liaison Strategies poll, the two splinter parties could decide close Lower Mainland ridings under first-past-the-post. Doerkson begins the campaign largely unknown: 21 per cent view him favourably and 29 per cent unfavourably. Under his party’s constitution, an interim leader cannot seek permanent leadership, though Rustad insists there is a path for Doerkson to become premier. Voters are being asked to choose a government whose leader’s status is unsettled.
A lesson from the Chrétien years
Conservatives should take the warning. Their opponents will not wait while they settle internecine quarrels. The New Democrats play for keeps, and they will run down a divided opposition whenever it offers them the chance. Jean Chrétien’s Liberals taught the same lesson through the 1990s. With Reform and the Progressive Conservatives splitting the right, Chrétien won three consecutive majorities. He called the 1997 and 2000 elections early, the second barely three and a half years into his mandate and months after Stockwell Day took over a newly founded Canadian Alliance. The right reunited only in 2003, after a decade of defeats.
Politics has always been a craft of compromise. A coalition that cannot absorb disagreement cannot govern, and a party that expels its own members over doctrine writes the opposing party’s campaign for it. The Conservatives’ summer of purges handed Eby his opening and his slogan. Unless they learn to tolerate and deal with dissent in the ranks before the next leadership contest, they will offer him, or his successor, the same gift again.
The orphaned voter
The electorate has not reunited either. The NDP leads the Conservatives 41 per cent to 36 per cent, yet half of British Columbians say the province is on the wrong track, and the premier’s approval is split almost evenly, 42 to 43. Angus Reid found that 51 per cent feel like political orphans, a sentiment shared by 41 per cent of past NDP voters and 55 per cent of past Conservative voters. Those voters have yet to choose a party. Eby is betting that they will decide the Conservatives remain too chaotic to govern. The Conservatives need them to conclude that the chaos ended when the writ dropped, and that the one acting erratically now is the premier who called an election he promised by law to hold in 2028.
Peterson’s collapse shows how quickly a sour mood can find a punishing vehicle once voters sense opportunism. He announced his election at the end of July 1990, and by September 6, some five and a half weeks later, his government was finished. His standing as the best choice for premier fell from 39 per cent to 12 per cent in that span. Voters did not rally to Mike Harris, three months into his leadership, whose Conservatives won 20 seats.
They turned to a much worse punishing tool: Bob Rae, whose New Democrats took 74 of 130 seats with about 37 per cent of the vote and formed the first NDP government in Ontario’s history, while Peterson’s Liberals fell from 95 seats to 36. Eby has given himself a 32-day campaign, almost the same span. British Columbia’s anti-NDP vote now has a closer and larger vehicle than Ontario’s did in 1990, and the premier rebuilt it in a single week, hoping to profit from its collapse.
Ambition has its uses. It gives a politician the nerve to act while rivals hesitate. But ambition that times a vote to an opponent’s collapse gives that opponent a principled reason to reassemble and gives voters a reason to ask whose interest the timing serves.
British Columbians must now decide whether to reward a premier who chose the date for his own convenience, chose an opponent who cannot respond and chose not to run on his record. If the Conservatives win on October 24, the party may owe its revival less to Doerkson, Rustad or Milobar than to the premier who called the election and forced it back together.
Well said, very interesting and to my knowledge unique take. Let us not forget that Eby sent a $billion of ferry jobs to China & is now, with Carney in the process of bailing out off shore funded condos.