British Columbia's polarity shift: an election that changed the face of provincial politics

Although Premier David Eby's NDP eked out the narrowest of wins, the 2024 election saw the elimination of the existing 'free enterprise' option in favour of an insurgent BC Conservative party

Premier David Eby campaigning on the day before the election. The torrential rain was a good fit for an election that washed away long-held truths about BC politics.

• This election report first appeared December 18 in Inroads, a Montreal-based journal of opinion.

Torrential rains lashed British Columbia’s Lower Mainland on election day, October 19. The atmospheric river soaked battleground ridings, washing away both the province’s longstanding centre-right “free enterprise” party and NDP Premier David Eby’s dreams of a solid majority. When the polls closed, Eby found himself in a 46-45 dead heat with his right-wing opponent, one seat short of a majority. His caucus was reduced by ten seats, including five cabinet ministers, from the record majority he had inherited from Premier John Horgan in 2022.

Elections BC took nine days to declare Eby the winner of a one-seat majority, thanks to a riding that changed hands when the recount gave the NDP a 27-vote margin. The outcome on the right of the political spectrum is even more dramatic. The BC Liberals, who ruled the province for 16 years until Horgan finally won a minority mandate in 2017, no longer exist. Standing in the ashes of that centrist “free enterprise coalition” of federal Liberals and Conservatives is a rampaging, solidly right-wing Conservative Party of BC, led by relative unknown John Rustad.

A year ago, Rustad’s team was polling in single digits. Today it has 44 seats. The only other survivors of the electoral storm are two rookie members of the BC Green Party, their hopes of holding the balance of power destroyed and their leader Sonia Furstenau defeated. It’s an election outcome that echoes familiar themes of BC’s polarized, populist past, but also sounds a warning for “progressive” politicians in the runup to Canada’s 2025 federal election. BC’s electorate has special significance for federal Conservatives and New Democrats, who see the province as a critical battleground.

Eby, who just four months ago was widely expected to win a second hefty majority, must now somehow determine the reasons for voter anger, design concrete responses, recall the Legislature, elect a speaker and pass a new budget under daunting fiscal circumstances, all in just 120 days. Yet these are good problems to have. Had a few hundred votes gone differently, the NDP could have been reduced to a minority or even defeated.

It was never supposed to be this way. As the Labour Day weekend came and went the election seemed to be Eby’s to lose. He nearly did.

The rise of David Eby

When Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin delivered the Speech from the Throne on February 20, Eby was far ahead in the polls and soaring in personal approval, his opposition divided and in apparent disarray. Not surprisingly, the NDP signalled a stay-the-course approach, “bringing people together to solve big challenges and help everyone build a good life here.” The looming fixed election date seemed like a routine democratic check-in, a chance to confirm voter satisfaction with the government rather than to engage in electoral upheaval.

Many people, including some who previously voted NDP, had a different plan. By election day, with more than 40 per cent of a polarized electorate prepared to vote Conservative, Eby’s confident unity pledges had become desperate appeals.

As the storm blew in, the Premier made his last campaign stop in an NDP-held suburban swing riding, doing some performative door knocking in pelting rain before issuing a brief statement with supporters huddled around him. “This election is the time for us all to stick together,” a wan Eby pleaded, a huge black umbrella in one hand and soggy leaflets in the other, “to ensure we are building a strong health care system for people, (and) to ensure we are expanding the services people need, like child care, building new hospitals, roads and transit.”

Eby at a Surrey rally, the booming suburban city south of the Fraser River that held the key to an election victory.

Thirty-six hours later, Eby found himself facing the cameras at the campaign’s “victory party,” claiming “a clear majority for progressive values” in an apparent nod to the Greens, but acknowledging “there is also another message, in this narrowest of margins, that we’ve got to do better, and we will do better. The work has just begun.”

The election outcome was a rare reversal for Eby, now 48, who was marked for political leadership almost from the moment he arrived in BC in 2005 to join an activist law firm in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. At six feet, seven inches, armed with a lawyer’s stern and acerbic style, he was hard to miss and often in the news.

The street lawyer turned politician in 2013 when he defeated BC Liberal leader Christy Clark in her own seat in the leafy, wealthy westside constituency of Point Grey, a remarkable victory in an election where the NDP went down to a bad defeat. From there it was an easy transition to the opposition front bench, where Eby built a reputation as a superior inquisitor in Question Period, hammering the government on the impact of money laundering on BC’s sky-high housing prices.

So it was that Eby became Attorney General in Horgan’s 2017 minority government, which lasted for three years thanks to a Confidence and Supply Agreement (CASA) with three Green MLAs. (He added the housing portfolio in 2020.) While the Horgan administration racked up a series of important achievements, from establishing a child care program to landing a new liquefied natural gas project, the largest private sector investment in Canadian history, Eby completed a massive overhaul of BC’s public auto insurance system. saving drivers hundreds of dollars a year.

By 2020, with the CASA work plan substantially complete, tensions with the Greens began to mount. Horgan decided to go to the polls. The 2020 election produced a record NDP majority of 57 seats in an 87-seat house. Horgan’s personal popularity hit all-time highs, and the NDP’s prospects had never looked brighter. Then a cancer diagnosis forced Horgan into weeks of arduous radiation treatment. In the spring of 2022, he announced he was resigning, one of those rare politicians who leaves at the top of his game. Eby was acclaimed to the leadership with the unanimous support of caucus.

At first, it seemed like smooth sailing. BC’s rebounding economy generated a $5 billion windfall surplus in 2023 that Eby’s team distributed broadly. The 2024 budget continued the free spending, forecasting a record deficit of $6 billion. (Campaign pledges would raise that number to $9 billion.) Rating agencies flinched, but voters seemed unfazed.

On the political front, however, Eby’s team was stalling. A major bill to align land use decisions with Indigenous interests had to be withdrawn amid an outcry over consultation. Selina Robinson, a senior frontbencher and one of the Jewish community’s most respected voices, was forced into an apology and then out of caucus when her statements about Gaza sparked widespread anger. A poorly drafted bill to recover health care costs from corporations – primarily directed at social media giants – triggered panic and outrage in the business community. It never got to second reading.

In May, Eby was forced into a sharp U-turn on BC’s decriminalization of the possession of hard drugs. The policy had been a consensus recommendation of harm reduction advocates, police and health officials in the face of BC’s deadly toxic drug crisis, but in the public’s mind, decriminalization was a cause of public drug use, disorder and deadly overdoses. On the eve of the election, Eby executed yet another major policy reversal, vowing to dump the province’s carbon tax, which he had stoutly defended, if the federal backstop disappears. (Ironically, the BC carbon tax, the first in Canada, was a legacy of Gordon Campbell, three-time BC Liberal premier between 2001 and 2011.)

Despite these woes, Eby’s personal approval still exceeded his opponents’ by a wide margin. NDP support remained in the 45 per cent range, five to six points above historic levels. As recently as February 1, 2024, 338Canada.com put the odds of an NDP majority at 100 per cent, with 81 seats for Team Eby, six for Rustad’s Conservatives, two Greens and four for BC United. (Redistribution added six seats in 2024.)

Wait a minute. BC United? Who are they? The answer to that question is the most fascinating story of the election, a reminder of how much class interests still drive electoral politics.

A brutal end for Kevin Falcon

Demoralized by their walloping at the hands of John Horgan in 2020, the BC Liberals withdrew for a period of deep reflection. A lengthy leadership campaign ensued, one that, in retrospect, deepened the divisions festering in BC’s once-mighty “free enterprise coalition.” Based on the fundamental principle that all right-wing forces must unite in a single “not NDP” movement to stop the advance of socialism, the free enterprise coalition has existed in various guises, from Social Credit to BC Liberals, since 1952.

The eventual winner of the BC Liberal leadership was Kevin Falcon, a veteran of multiple cabinet portfolios under Premier Gordon Campbell. Falcon had departed for a senior position with a prominent development firm in 2012, smarting from losing to Christy Clark in the race to replace Campbell. In his successful 2022 bid, Falcon exceeded his spending limit by $500,000 to prevail, promising to change the party’s name, rout the NDP and return the coalition to the glory days of the past. A firm, though sometimes uncomfortable, centre-right politician with broad federal Conservative roots, Falcon rejected racism and homophobia, supported reconciliation with First Nations and believed climate change was real.

It was that last point that brought him into conflict with John Rustad, a BC Liberal caucus member from the Prince George area since 2005 and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs under Christy Clark. Rustad, who had built a career in the forest industry, was one of those diligent but unimpressive backbenchers who make the wheels of any party turn. In August 2022, when Rustad retweeted comments from eminent climate change denier Patrick Moore (ironically, a one-time cofounder of Greenpeace), Falcon saw a chance to make a statement. Rustad refused to take the tweet down, and Falcon summarily expelled him from caucus. Being fired by Kevin Falcon was the best thing that ever happened to Rustad, who decided a few weeks later to join the long-moribund Conservative Party of BC. The party had not elected anyone since 1978. In no time he was leader, and not long after, he doubled his caucus by adding Abbotsford MLA Bruce Banman, another BC Liberal maverick who ran afoul of Falcon’s regime

John Rustad’s partnership with BC Conservative Party organizers Angelo Isodorou (centre) and Azim Jiwani (right) launched a political insurgency that came close to defeating Premier David Eby’s NDP.

But Falcon was not finished putting his mark on the Liberals. The long-promised name change, designed to shake the dust of the Trudeau Liberals (with whom the BC Liberals had no connection) off the provincial party’s boots, came into effect in April 2023. The BC Liberals became BC United. They never recovered. From a respectable 34 per cent of the vote in late 2023, enough to win about 25 seats, Falcon’s party began an accelerating free fall, which was well underway when Rustad’s Conservatives began to rise just as quickly. Voters were confused by the name change, never warmed to Falcon and liked what they were hearing from Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre.

Rustad’s party tied for public support with BCU in early October 2023, each with about 20 per cent of the vote. Falcon’s response – to match Rustad point by point on policy while denouncing his “clown car” of candidates – just accentuated the confusion. The NDP’s dream scenario – a divided option on the right – appeared to be emerging miraculously from the fog of right-wing recriminations. For the grandees of BC’s “free enterprise” forces, however, this dream was a nightmare that could not be tolerated. Their bottom line remains, come what may, “not NDP.”

While Falcon’s Liberals, later “United,” had skilled staff, caucus resources, cash and a respected front bench, Rustad and his team were building their plane during takeoff, improvising a new organization in rallies and pub nights around the province. BC’s right-of-centre electorate deserted Falcon, first in small numbers and then in a wave, triggering a devastating series of defections from Falcon’s ranks. In the forthcoming “change” election, the first domino had already fallen. By midsummer, Falcon’s vote share had plummeted to 8 per cent and his projected seat count to zero. Rustad appeared poised to win more than 40 seats. For BC’s business leaders, Falcon had seemed like the solution to the rise of the NDP. Now he was clearly part of the problem. He had to go.

Precisely who convinced Falcon to withdraw, what arguments they used and what policies they expect from Rustad remain murky. Former Premier Gordon Campbell’s name circulated in some media reports.

A clue may lie in a vituperative op-ed piece, published in the Victoria Times Colonist just five days before the election, from the pen of Eric Carlson, chief executive officer of Anthem Properties, where Falcon worked in a senior role during his private sector phase. “Premier Eby needs to be replaced,” Carlson declared. “This new age autocrat is steadily undermining the very foundation of our civil society – individual freedom, property rights and the rule of law.” After leading a tour of a BC hellscape where “city sidewalks are owned by mentally ill drug addicts, lying in their spit, vomit, and excrement, ably supported by now-legal drug pushers presiding over their demise,” Carlson gets to the worst of the worst, the “putrefying Land Act,“ part of a plan to install an “increasingly permanent socialist regime” led by a “Premier for life.” Carlson undoubtedly reflected a mainstream view among business leaders.

The home of former Lululemon owner Chip Wilson, the most expensive residence in the province, had a distinctive lawn sign that spelled out the election stakes from a billionaire’s perspective.

When the end came, it was brutal. Late in August, without slackening his campaign, Falcon directed Caroline Elliott, his sister-in-law and a BCU candidate, to arrange his surrender. The same night Falcon hosted a fundraiser for hundreds of supporters, Elliott opened talks with Conservative operatives and turned over a binder of BCU’s opposition research, the political equivalent of giving vital counterintelligence to a rival. This included information like the Facebook posts of one Prince George Conservative candidate, later dropped, who saw 5G cellular service as a “genocidal weapon” and warned of the coming of the Antichrist.

Falcon then met directly with Rustad to close the deal. On August 28, just days before the unofficial start of the election period, Falcon consulted briefly with his executive and then suspended his campaign, telling candidates already nominated provincewide that he was using his prerogative as leader to strip them of party endorsement. BCU would be reduced to a shell. Those who wished to continue would have no BCU money or resources and would have to start from scratch as independent candidates. Party veterans, including longtime deputy leader Shirley Bond, heard the news in a caucus call they had to convene on their own. Ultimately, Rustad’s team allowed only six more BC United MLAs to run under the Conservative banner, in addition to those who had crossed the floor in the weeks before. BC’s centre-right party was dead.

Overnight, Falcon and his shadowy backers had carried out a coup, without the knowledge of caucus or party members, to throw the election to the Conservatives. In the annals of political betrayals, Falcon has few peers.

The BC Greens, meanwhile, were flirting with their own pathway to oblivion. Although founded in 1983, the Greens never elected anyone to provincial office until 2013 when climate scientist Andrew Weaver won Oak Bay, a wealthy enclave of Victoria. The 2017 election of Sonia Furstenau, a teacher and environmental activist from Cowichan, and Adam Olsen, an Indigenous leader from Saanich North and the Islands, catapulted the Greens to minority government power brokers. The Confidence and Supply Agreement was the result.

Weaver quit politics before the 2020 election, which brought the CASA to an end. In 2024 Furstenau, his successor as leader, declared her intention to leave her relatively safe seat in Cowichan in an ill-conceived attempt to challenge the NDP incumbent in Victoria–Beacon Hill, an NDP fortress, for “family reasons” that included a shorter commute. Then Olsen announced his decision not to stand for re-election. Short of cash and unable to find candidates in 24 ridings, the Greens seemed to be heading for a life-or-death election, with no incumbents reoffering in their current seats. No wonder Furstenau was door-knocking all summer.

Reason versus passion

So things stood as the campaign began: Eby struggling on some fronts but strong in personal approval and campaign readiness; BC United dead; the Conservatives on a roll; and the Greens with one foot in the grave.

The election issues were clear: the cost of living, housing affordability and health care., with crime and public safety close behind. In a warning sign remarked by many, British Columbians had for months declared the province “on the wrong track” on each of these issues. If Eby’s NDP was to win, his campaign needed to convince voters he held the key, after seven years in office, to turning things around. Rustad just needed to ask, “In seven years, why haven’t you?”

As the old saying goes, “campaigns matter,” and the BC election was a study in campaign contrasts. The NDP’s huge campaign bus, emblazoned with colour graphics of Eby and his family surrounded by supporters, rolled out to battleground ridings south of the Fraser River trumpeting Eby’s pledge of “action for you.” From Surrey, BC’s second largest city, to burgeoning suburbs in the Fraser Valley to the east, these communities are the province’s new political powerhouse. Ethnically diverse and home to hundreds of thousands of working-class families, the south-of-Fraser communities struggle with congestion, inadequate health care, school overcrowding and inadequate policing.

The NDP’s campaign-closing message: reason over passion

The NDP message: we feel your pain, we know you’re struggling, but we’re turning the corner on housing and health care. John Rustad is too big a risk. The party’s platform, issued mid-campaign, was a catalogue of promises touching everything from tax breaks to new initiatives on reproductive rights and free transit for seniors. On the negative side, the NDP hammered at Rustad’s “clown car” candidates and the leader himself, dwelling on Rustad’s vaccine scepticism and his candidates’ social media lapses. Yet nothing seemed to stick. Poll after poll, day after day, Rustad’s Conservatives were barking at the NDP’s heels, sometimes inching ahead and then falling back.

Rustad’s approach was disarmingly direct. Using a homeless encampment on Vancouver’s waterfront as a backdrop, the Conservative leader launched his campaign with a slashing attack on the NDP’s drug policies, vowing to shut down life-saving overdose prevention sites (“drug dens”), roll back decriminalization even further and ban public drug use. There was no bus, just a simple podium.

Other targets of the Rustad bazooka: full rollback of the NDP’s housing plans, which have increased density and reduced approval timelines provincewide; repeal of the province’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ Act, passed unanimously by the Legislature; an end to Clean BC, the province’s emissions reductions plan; and cancellation of prescribed safe supply opioid alternatives, the critical element of many substance abuse treatments.

The party leaders’ key encounter on the campaign trail was the October 8 television debate. Eby was overwhelmingly judged the winner overall and Sonia Furstenau scored marks for poise and passion, while one media critic tagged Rustad as “cadaverous.” Yet Rustad won by not losing, refusing to be baited by Eby and calmly declaring him a “liar” and a “weak leader.” Although the Conservative leader’s polling sagged for a few days, he was back in contention by the end of the week.

It was worrying evidence that the NDP team was fighting the wrong battle. A mid-campaign ad showed Eby and his family walking through a leafy forest, far from the day-to-day realities of most British Columbians. “Life feels heavy and uncertain for too many people,” Eby said gravely, staring straight into the camera. “I have work to do to lighten the load, helping you get ahead, not just get by.” It seemed as if Eby believed he personally could change the lives of voters just by stepping up his pace. The contrast with Rustad’s fire-and-brimstone attacks could not have been starker. In the battle between reason and passion, passion was winning hands down.

Then two events occurred which, in a previous election, could have boosted the New Democrats and sunk the Conservatives. The fact that neither had that result laid bare the new realities of politics in the social media era.

The first was the case of the battling billionaire, Lululemon founder and David Eby constituent Chip Wilson, who lives in BC’s most expensive house, worth some $81 million. Wilson posted a bespoke lawn sign reading “Eby will tell you the Conservatives are ‘Far Right’ but neglects saying that the NDP is ‘Communist.’” The sign story quickly went viral. Wilson elaborated in an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun that NDP handouts, generated by “penalizing the uber-successful one per cent with high taxes,” were breeding “laziness” in the undeserving poor. Such ammunition in the hands of a gifted populist is priceless political gold, but Eby never warmed up to the task of class war, even though Wilson had declared it.

If Wilson symbolized why the NDP should win, the other story that dominated the end of the campaign underlined why Rustad should have lost. For days after the debate, Rustad was forced to respond to social media posts from 2015 and 2017 by Brent Chapman, the Conservative candidate in Surrey South. In one 2015 Facebook comment, Chapman described Palestinians as “little inbred walking talking breathing time bombs.” In another, he denounced reports of abuse and death at residential schools as a “massive fraud.” Chapman first apologized in a tweet, later apologized personally to Rustad and to Muslim members of the campaign team, and then went into hiding. Rustad wrung his hands but refused to act. In any other election, in any other party, Chapman would have been cut loose. Not this time.

Business leaders like Wilson, even former Premier Campbell, continued to support Rustad vociferously despite the Chapman episode, mindful of their prime directive: “not NDP,” no matter the cost. Voters, to the degree they heard about the controversies, largely ignored them. On election night, Chapman won his seat with 59.7 per cent of the vote.

Something new on the conservative side

Within an hour of the polls closing, BC’s new automated counting machines delivered a flood of results that showed the dead heat foreseen by pollsters had continued into the voting booths. Early returns showed the NDP at 46 seats, the Conservatives at 45 and the Greens at two, with 47 required for a majority. For more than a week, the election hung in the balance as Elections BC prepared to count mail ballots. The loss of two ridings where the parties were only a few dozen votes apart would have handed the election to Rustad. In the end, it was the NDP that won an extra seat and a majority, but that didn’t take away from the closeness of the result.

The New Democrats suffered heavy losses in rural and northern BC, where the Conservative tide ran especially strong, and were wiped out in the Fraser Valley, where Horgan had fashioned his 2020 breakthrough. The shockers, however, were Surrey and Richmond, BC’s exploding cities south of the Fraser, where either party needed to prevail to win a majority. South of the Fraser, the NDP was defeated in 11 of 24 seats. In two of the seats eventually won by the NDP in recounts, the margins were vanishingly thin. North of the Fraser, in Vancouver and the ridings north of Burrard Inlet, the NDP won all 15 seats.

From a demographic standpoint, BC politics have undergone a polarity shift. Working-class and immigrant voters and younger voters with less education have thrown their support to the Conservatives. Better educated and more prosperous voters, as well as seniors, have voted NDP.

No matter how hard Eby was working, people on the ground weren’t feeling it. Their votes were more practical than ideological. As populist Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West puts it, “The material things in people’s lives make a difference.” Kareem Allam, former Conservative campaigner turned New Democrat, makes the same point about Surrey. For a family struggling to get a senior into long-term care, sending kids to schools where portable classrooms are stacked two high, waiting hours in the emergency room, fighting brutal traffic, wrestling with food bills, dodging a mentally ill passenger on a bus or stepping over unconscious addicts in the park, the province is definitely on the wrong track. That sense of grievance will find expression at the polls, no matter how much the Premier promises to “work harder,” be “laser-focused” and “have your back.”

Tempting as it is to dismiss BC’s rambunctious electoral culture as a one-of-a-kind West Coast circus, Canadian political observers do so at their peril. Something new has happened in BC on the conservative side of the electorate that requires deeper analysis. The longstanding BC centre-right option in provincial politics was literally terminated by powerful economic interests determined to avoid an NDP victory, even if that meant electing a party that tolerates racism.

Soon after Rustad was fired by Falcon, he shared a beer with two talented and solidly right-wing Conservative strategists who were looking for a project. One was Angelou Isidorou, a Trump-adjacent Vancouver political activist, now the BC Conservatives’ executive director, and the other was Azim Jiwani, now Rustad’s chief of staff. Rustad and the Conservative Party of BC seemed like a good fit. It was a fateful meeting that led directly to 44 seats.

In a postelection podcast with CHEK TV’s Mo Amir, Isidorou explained their plan to “redefine the conservative coalition as a coalition of rural voters, Indo-Canadians in Surrey, Chinese in Richmond, people 18 to 34, and 34- to 55-year-old working people. “We set out to create a right-wing alternative in the province,” he said, “to supplant the current centre-right party – that’s done – and to be a viable alternative to the NDP. At 45 seats, we’ve sent that message.” (Isodorou was speaking before the final count.) Eby’s main error? Isodorou didn’t hesitate: “his hubris that only vile, disgusting lepers would vote for this party.” Would a Conservative government now tack back to the centre? No way, Isodorou replied: “Centrism does not exist.”

Supported and amplified by a broad network of polarizing YouTube shows, alt-right podcasts, “news” websites and corporate-funded think tanks, the Conservative movement now has access to voters that centre-left parties can only dream of. Who’s prepared to bet against Isodorou now?

On election night, a reporter interviewed Marina Sapoznikov, the Conservative candidate in Juan de Fuca–Malahat. This new Vancouver Island riding is the unceded territory of multiple First Nations. Sapoznikov trailed New Democrat Dana Lajeunesse by only 23 votes. Indigenous people “didn’t have any sophisticated laws,” Sapoznikov told the reporter. “They were savages. They fought all the time.” In addition, “90 per cent of Indigenous people use drugs.” There was more, all tantamount to hate speech.

The comments made him “appalled and deeply saddened,” Rustad said, adding that her “remarks do not reflect the value of our party or the vision we have for a united British Columbia.” Would she stay in his caucus if elected? Rustad’s silence was a sign of the indifference voters can expect from him when candidates cross a line. (After the recount confirmed her defeat by 141 votes, Rustad said he would not approve her to run in a future election.)

But as Conservatives have learned, and progressives are finding out, a ten-year-old racist tweet quickly fades into insignificance when the cost of living is sinking your family’s dreams, the emergency room is closed or you’ve lost a family member to addiction. In BC’s election, voters made their views clear: the politician who promises concrete action to fix their problems is more likely to win their vote than the one who said he would but has not.

The NDP’s very bad year continues

Lieutenant Governor Austin finally invited David Eby to form a government October 28, but the NDP’s very bad year was not over. Much-loved former Premier John Horgan, just 65 and Canada’s Ambassador to Germany, died November 12 of a recurring aggressive cancer, shocking the province. His family secured an arena in his riding to handle the expected throng of mourners to the state funeral scheduled for December 15.

That news was still reverberating November 18 when Eby at last saw his cabinet sworn in, only to be forced into an additional shift three weeks later with the news that Victoria MLA Grace Lore, who had just defeated Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau in the election, was stepping aside to deal with her own cancer diagnosis. The party was then rocked by the sudden death of its provincial executive director.

No wonder then that Eby hailed a new Cooperation and Responsible Government Accord with the BC Greens, a confidence and supply agreement by another name, intended to keep his ship afloat for four years. “This agreement will strengthen the stability of government,” Eby said on December 13, “and help deliver on the priorities of British Columbians.” Strangely, however, Eby passed on a news conference, leaving Deputy Premier Niki Sharma to answer questions about the agreement now shoring up the NDP government’s meagre majority.