BC NDP leader David Eby.
BC NDP leader David Eby. Credit: David Eby campaign / X Credit: David Eby campaign / X

No political party can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory like the NDP!

And, as we watched in horror Saturday night, no Canadian New Democratic Party does it with the flair of the British Columbia NDP. 

It’ll be a week before we’ll know who really won a majority in the Legislature in Victoria – although not because of anything like the tall tales Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s next chief of staff Rob Anderson has been telling about voting machines to keep this province’s United Conservative Party (UCP) base wound up.

Naw, they use plain old paper ballots in BC just like we do here. The problem is only that with the BC NDP and the BC Conservative Party nearly tied in several ridings, there are going to have to be recounts, and that’s going to take a while. 

Whatever your politics are, though, and whoever you’d like to see emerge as the winner in Canada’s westernmost province, you’ve got to agree that the biggest loser in last night’s fiasco is Premier David Eby, whose government went from posting polling leads in excess of 20 per cent last fall to teetering on the edge of defeat. 

The biggest winner, you can credibly argue, is John Rustad, the climate change denying, vaccine-skeptical leader of the revivified BC Conservative Party, which seems to have unexpectedly inherited the mantle of BC’s old Social Credit coalition and appears to want to outdo the UCP for sheer nuttiness. 

Of course, this is the second time the BC NDP has hosed away a 20 per cent lead in the polls!

Then-leader Adrian Dix did the same thing in the weeks before the 2013 election – in an even more spectacular fashion than Eby, taking only a couple of months instead of a full year to fritter away his party’s seemingly insurmountable lead and lose to the BC Liberals, who were confusingly really conservatives. 

So what’s with this, you have to ask?

Well, New Democrats are afflicted almost everywhere in Canada with a crippling need to behave like the Boy Scouts of politics, shooting themselves in both feet with their earnest good sportsmanship. 

Consider Dix in 2013: No negativity would be tolerated in the face of a tsunami of dreck from the BC Liberals, so called for mysterious reasons since they were basically Social Credit 2.0. Result: a fourth term for the Liberals. 

Rachel Notley in 2023: The principal unforced error of the NDP’s 2023 campaign in Alberta was her foolish decision to tell the truth about a three per cent tax increase for the largest corporations. Result: a second term for the UCP, now led by the execrable Danielle Smith.

David Eby on Saturday: Why the hell didn’t he call an election in the fall of 2023 when he had a crushing lead in the polls and the BC Liberals hadn’t yet committed political seppuku to make way for the full-blown MAGAtry of the B.C. Cons, Social Credit 3.0? We’ll likely never know for sure, but I’d bet it was that Goodie Two-Shoes things again. Can’t do that! Someone might remind us that we have a fixed-election date in BC result: To be revealed soon. 

It doesn’t help that in almost every recent election, except perhaps Wab Kinew’s 2023 victory in Manitoba, New Democratic Parties tend to run away from their base and campaign to win the hearts of undecided conservative voters who may not even exist.

Federal leader Thomas “No Deficits” Mulcair did this in 2015, and was outflanked by Justin Trudeau on the left.

Historian Alvin Finkel writes that Notley ignored a host of progressive policies that would have won votes for the Alberta NDP as just too radical, or something, for those undecided conservative voters. 

Eby caved to the federal Conservatives’ Axe the Tax hysteria and wobbled on the province’s pioneering carbon tax. Did that drive thousands of BC’s many environmentally concerned voters into the arms of the Greens and split the progressive vote in multiple ridings? You bet it did!

It certainly didn’t help that the NDP forced the huge Vancouver-area suburb of Surrey to abandon the RCMP for a local force, an unpopular decision that flipped many NDP votes to the Cons. (This ought to give the UCP something to think about here in Alberta.) And the weather Saturday was appalling. But one suspects the NDP could have survived those lesser calamities. 

And where was John Horgan, you may wonder, the old-style New Democrat who became party leader in 2014 when nobody else seemed to want the job, and BC premier in 2017 after a similar election result led to a supply-and-confidence agreement with the Greens? After all, he won a majority in 2020 and was probably mostly responsible for the strong polls enjoyed by Eby last year.

Alas, Horgan announced he would leave politics in 2022, after a second bout with cancer, saying he couldn’t continue as leader and premier after the rigours of his treatment. He resigned in February 2023 and a month later was named Canada’s Ambassador to Germany by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

Horgan was diagnosed with a third cancer in June and on election night was being treated in a hospital in Berlin. 

Of course, yesterday’s electoral result won’t matter to a lot of die-hard New Democrats. Indeed, there will be more than a few who will be relieved if, after the dust from the recounts has settled, the party emerges as the loser. 

After all, what’s sweeter than an uncomplicated moral victory? 

But as Canada’s Conservatives adopt the extremism of the MAGA movement south of the border and ratchet up their attacks on public health care, human rights, and the environment, I’m not sure we can afford an NDP that prefers moral victories to real ones any more.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...