BCNDP Snap Election Nets Political Own-Goal

Eby on October 19 -- image via David Eby on X

By Gabriel Haythornthwaite, The DNA Report

Winter has come early to the Westcoast. BCNDP now ex-Premier David Eby leapt upon the apparent opportunity of a divided and leaderless hard Right in a 33-day snap election campaign—only to leap into the political void and consign his majority government to oblivion.

The DNA Report offers here a part one rundown of Eby’s Potemkin election debacle with a note on the strange role that the Trump threat played in the affair; from Eby’s hollow starting election pitch to the Trumpian glee which followed the NDP defeat. A second part of this election review will provide a local snap shot of candidate attitudes to the question of annexation in the wake of the Alberta referendum.

A Potemkin Election

Eby’s ill-fated snap election call on September 22—four days into a scheduled local municipal campaign—resulted in a record low 48% voter turnout on October 24, 10 percent drop from 2024. This electoral contraction came primarily from a collapsed NDP vote which shrank by more than a quarter—273k votes—compared to Eby’s narrow win two years ago.

The Conservative’s hefty two-thirds seat majority was won with 48k fewer voters than in 2024; if not a ‘loveless’ landslide, certainly a contest won by default. The Green vote was up by a modest 23k from their last outing but lower than the party’s tallies in 2017 and 2020.

There were other signs of an unusually shallow contest. The bullshit bubblegum slogans of the three main parties come to mind, each interchangeably sans content— ‘Build BC Strong’, ‘Believe In Better’ and (the less pithy) ‘Strong Leadership For Serious Times’. The political marketing firms must have had their juniors on deck for this one while the real work of the US mid-terms was being attended to.

Local party organization also seems to be in short supply. Candidate meet-and-greets for the main parties at a civic-minded café in Langford (a northern suburb of Victoria) revealed that both the Green and Conservative campaigns lacked riding associations. An NDP campaigner in Victoria testified on social media about organizational shambles at the local level. This snap election revealed that these establishment parties do little to nothing to maintain their local organizations in between campaigns.

Eby’s Unconvincing Case

David Eby’s case for an early election was premised on the US-Canada trade deal collapse three weeks before which apparently required a renewed public mandate against a hard Right cast as undermining the ‘Team Canada’ counter to the Trump tariff war.

This Eby NDP political case was unconvincing on its face. The Conservatives had only two days before the election call lost their short-lived Trump-USA leader, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who had presided over a loss of more than a quarter of the Con caucus in a 20-day period (see The DNA Report article on September 22). A divided hard-Right opposition with an interim leader, six-year MLA Lorne Doerkson, was not a compelling Trumpian threat.

This reactionary opposition did not remain divided for long. The corporate class had already started to scramble and they successfully seized the day to push Conservative MLA defectors to rejoin the party within hours of the snap election call. In what looked like a corporate Cinderella story, the untested Doerkson stuck to a business-magic message discipline (with the supplement of a hardline against First Nations political rights, embodied in the 2019 Declaration aka DRIPA Act) to overcome Eby’s arrogant electoral ambush to win a massive legislative majority.

A Historical Precedent

Recent history confirms that the NDP seems to have a knack for political debacle. Only 18 months ago, the federal New Democrats were busted down below official party status and have lost two seats since for a current grand total of five MPs stuck at the bottom of the Ottawa River.

The Eby self-immolation has a more distant yet nearly exact historical precedent as well. In 1975, another NDP Premier Dave Barrett triggered a snap election three years into his term hoping to take advantage of an electoral split in the hard-Right—only to find himself facing a unified corporate opponent, then under the aegis of the quirky Social Credit brand. The electoral result was nearly identical; the hard-Right in 1975 also won a two-thirds seat majority with a ten-point vote spread.

The Trump Threat Recedes…And Returns With Taunts

Meanwhile, after erecting corny ‘Never 51st State’ signs at the border, Eby quickly dropped his rhetorical run against Trump. A leaders’ debate on October 14 demonstrated that none of the party heads thought the Trump threat was even worth mentioning even as the spectre of the October 19 Alberta pre-annexation referendum loomed overhead.

While a surprise Conservative government means a particularly hungry winter for First Nations’ political rights, public services and environmental protection, the outcome is instead an early Christmas for Herr Trump, something he has not been shy to boast about on anti-social media. The Orange Menace’s schadenfreude over the Con win was very much on brand while providing a strange confirmation of Eby’s original snap election premise.

The US ambassador-antagonist Pete ‘Fuck You’ Hoekstra had taken aim early in the campaign at Eby’s grandstanding ‘Never 51st' border signs, saying that BC would be the “last province” annexed by the US. With this switch to a hard-Right government which meets Trump’s approval, the Westcoast may now be privileged to have our fate moved up the American Annexationist wish list.

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Gabriel Haythornthwaite is a former labour-allied school board trustee in BC and currently advises First Nations around political and intergovernmental relations. He is also a leftwing writer and political organizer.