David Eby is pivoting in panic away from the NDP’s unpopular policies
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Summary
To help us understand what's happening on Canada's left coast, we've reached out to Vaughn Palmer, the Dean of the Press Gallery out in Victoria, and someone who's been writing about this for a long time for Postmedia, Vancouver Sun, and elsewhere.
Transcript
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The New Democrats have been in power in British Columbia for the last seven years, and it looked
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like they could lose power. They've got an election coming on Saturday, and polls now
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show that the British Columbia New Democrats could in fact hold on, beating back the surging
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B.C. conservatives. Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name's Brian Lilly,
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your host. And to help us understand what's happening on Canada's left coast, we've reached
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out today to Vaughn Palmer, the dean of the Press Gallery out in Victoria, and someone
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who's been writing about this for a long time for Postmedia, Vancouver Sun, and elsewhere.
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Well, thanks for asking me, and that dean of the Press Gallery just means I'm the oldest
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guy in there, still breathing, that's all. 40 years and counting, so there you go.
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So you've seen a few wacky things in B.C. politics over the last little while. This election,
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it was wacky before it officially started, with the B.C. liberals having changed to B.C.
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United, and it looked like they were going to be the party to challenge the NDP. Then they
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pulled out of the election, but then not completely, and then the conservatives looked like they
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were going to beat the B.C. NDP, and now it is up and down. Give us a lay of the land of
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where things are at, because for those of us not in B.C., this is looking a little confusing.
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Well, the opinion polls at the start of the campaign, the official start of the campaign,
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showed generally, if you averaged it and took into account the margins of error, suggested
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we were into a dead heat. That's the way it looked after two weeks. But in the past few days,
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last week, the third week of the campaign, we had a debate. The opposition, John Rustad,
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the conservative leader, didn't do all that well. And you're right. Some of the opinion polls suggest
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that the new Democrats may be building a bit of an advantage and that if you're going to insist on
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betting, probably you bet on the NDP. But in no sense is it over yet. There have been a couple of
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opinion polls that continue to suggest the conservatives are ahead. So last week of the
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campaign, these parties are going to be working very, very hard to close the deal with the electorate.
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And as I said, it's still, I think, an open question as to who is going to win government
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or whether we may have a narrow result or even one of those results like we had in 2017,
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where no party won a majority of seats and the parties had to bargain with a third party or
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independents in order to be sure they have a majority. In most provinces, Vaughn, there is,
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you know, different voting patterns. You get regions of the province that vote traditionally
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one way or the other. There's the urban-rural split, the urban-suburban split. What's it like
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in British Columbia? Because once upon a time, the BC NDP did quite well outside of Vancouver. Has
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that changed? Are the conservatives doing well in rural and suburban areas? Is this an urban-suburban
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split and fight going on? Well, yeah, for simplicity's sake, three regions,
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city of Vancouver and its suburbs, the north and interior of the province, and Vancouver Island.
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Vancouver Island has tended to be very strong for the NDP over the years.
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The north in particular, and a lot of the ridings in the interior, have tended to vote for the
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center-right alternative, and city of Vancouver is a big battleground, and city of Vancouver has
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half the seats in the legislature, Vancouver and its suburbs. So, but this time, you know, again,
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with the closeness of the opinion polls, the fact that news media can't afford the kind of polls that
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get down to writing by writing, we have to look at where the parties are campaigning to go, oh,
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they're worried about that one. They're spending their money in that writing. So, and I would say from
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that, that an awful lot of the province is in play. The New Democrats have been spending more time
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campaigning on Vancouver Island, which in the past they've tended to take for granted. And clear from
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the amount of energy and effort being put into the battle in and around Vancouver, particularly big
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suburbs like Richmond and Surrey, those seats are all in play as well. It's, yeah, it's always
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fascinating watching where leaders go, you know, where are they spending their time, their effort,
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their ad dollars, and it can tell you quite a bit. So if the whole province is in play, that makes
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things a bit more difficult for everyone involved. I understand that there was an attempt by the BCNDP
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to try and force your elections commission to, to make sure that the, the ballot said BC or British
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Columbia conservative. Is there a legitimate concern or spillover between Pierre Polyev in the
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conservatives and John Rustad in the conservatives? Well, you know, this is one of the more, to me,
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preposterous things that has happened in the middle of the campaign because the New Democrats hired lawyers
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and went into court and tried to persuade a judge to overrule the independent chief electoral officer
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of the province in the middle of an election campaign, like as if the chief electoral officer
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didn't have more important things to do. And the issue they raised was they wanted the ballots to list
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the conservatives as the BC conservatives. And the reason they wanted to do that was because the
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New Democrats concluded from their opinion polls that a whole bunch of BC voters were totally confused.
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They thought that they were voting for Pierre Polyev, who was very popular in BC, and those voters
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didn't realize that John Rustad wasn't that same political party. The two parties are separate. So that's
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why they wanted to do it. And there may be, you know, you could say because Polyev is so popular and so
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prominent nationally. There may be some confusion there. BC United used to argue the same thing. But
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the idea of forcing the chief electoral officer, when the ballots had already been printed, to cross out
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conservatives and write in, no, not the Pierre Polyev conservatives. I mean, really, the government
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is supposed to respect the independent officers of the legislature and to be harassing him and
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effectively during a campaign with this kind of court action. It tells you a couple of things. One,
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the New Democrats are worried about the confusion. And two, they've got a staggering amount of money if
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they can afford lawyers to go into court to fight that kind of thing. I can see that there would be
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confusion for some people. I think most voters are smart enough to know the difference. But we all have
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those people in our lives who don't, you know, they pay next to no attention to politics and are
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outright confused when you talk to them about any issues. So I, but I imagine that's a pretty small
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percentage. Well, and you know, what is the essence of the confusion? I mean, if you're attracted to
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Pierre Polyev, one of the issues that's going to get you attracted to him is he's going to get rid of
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the carbon tax. Well, John Rustad is going to do the same thing. And Polyev is going to get tough
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on crime. Well, John Rustad is going to do the same thing. I mean, it's not as if these two parties are
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miles apart. They, it's true, they're separate constitutionally, but the BC conservatives and the
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federal conservatives have a lot of common ground between them. David Eby is telling us that BC is
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getting a rotten deal from the federal government. Now that he's in a campaign, although he worked
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very closely with Justin Trudeau for several years. Well, you know, every time he said that,
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that Ottawa is not giving us a fair deal, I'm going, well, the federal wing of your party,
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which is the same party. It's a federated party. Yeah, it's been propping up the Trudeau government.
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So if you want a better deal out of Trudeau, why don't you call up, you know,
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Jagmeet Singh, who represents a BC riding and ask him to put some pressure on his partner in power
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sharing? Because for, you know, I know that Singh has now bailed on that relationship, sort of. But
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for a long time, the only reason Justin Trudeau was prime minister was because Jagmeet Singh was
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supporting him. You mentioned that John Rustad says he'll get rid of the carbon tax.
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Yep. David Eby used to be a big fan, defender, supporter of the carbon tax. And he hasn't said
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he'll get rid of it. But he does say he'll get rid of it if it goes away federally. Talk to me about
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all the ways that David Eby and the New Democrats are flip-flopping. I mean, my joke of late has been
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he is essentially campaigning against himself now. Well, you know, again, we know what their opinion
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polls have been telling them, because you look at where he's changed his position. So for a long time,
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David Eby not only raised, BC has its own carbon tax, not the same as the federal one.
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David Eby raised the carbon tax every April the 1st, because it was a schedule to do that.
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And these were big increases that we were getting. You know, I'm not a hardship case. But I can tell
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you, Brian, that my natural gas bill, when I look at it, I'm paying more in carbon tax than I am for
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the gas. That's like a lot. That's a common story across the country. Yeah. So, you know, but Eby's not
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only was he raising the carbon tax regularly, but if you ever criticized it, well, that made you a climate
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change denier. And then on the eve of the election, he came out and said, you know what, this carbon tax,
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this thing is a is a real burden on British Columbians who are having trouble making ends meet.
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And we got to change this. And you're right. What he said was, we would like to get rid of the carbon
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tax on consumers. So home heating at the gas pump would be the two big still wants to hit corporations
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with it. And he said, I can only do that if the federal government gives me permission to do that.
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And so he's going to ask for permission after the election and see whether Trudeau will give him that
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permission. So that's his proposal. There's a couple of other things that he's. The New Democrats call it
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pivoting, by the way, don't call it flip flopping. He's going to pivot a long time. The NDP rejected
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the idea they considered, but rejected the idea of involuntary treatment for the worst cases of drug
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addiction and mental illness. They thought about it, but they backed away. It's finally come out and
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said, no, we're going to do that. So he's taken a harder line on crime, public disorder. He's weakened
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his drive for decriminalization. He's now saying, well, that didn't work very well. And we're not
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going to stick with stuff that didn't work. So yeah, you can, again, can tell from his opinion,
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you can tell from what he's doing that the opinion polls that we've seen ourselves are right. The BC
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public is unhappy with some aspects of what the New Democrats have done. And some British Columbians,
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a significant number are starting to think time for a change.
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The involuntary treatment. I mean, anybody that's visited, especially Vancouver's downtown Eastside,
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just sees how bad things are. And there was an interesting indication of how bad things are when
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Discovery Channel out of Seattle sent up a crew. And, you know, out here in the East, we think of,
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you know, Seattle is like, wow, that's America's Vancouver. I know there is a Vancouver in the
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United States, but, you know, very similar cities. They're out in the West Coast, very progressive
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politics. People from Seattle are looking at Vancouver and saying, wow, things are really screwed up
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on the drug front. And they blamed the various policies, including safe supply, all the not-for-profits
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that are handing out drug paraphernalia and kits. Is the public's mood changing dramatically on that?
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Because I can tell you, here in Ontario, where we started to go down the road that BC's on,
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specifically Vancouver, we didn't even get as far down the road as you did. And the public opinion
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has shifted dramatically on things like having consumption sites everywhere or safe supply being
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handed out. Yeah. Yeah, no, there's been a significant departure of public support for this. And I think
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when we went into the whole thing a few years ago, the initial view was nothing else is working,
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let's give it a try. It has led to, as you suggest, a significant backlash. And I can tell you the
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Victoria Tourist Bureau won't be happy about me saying this because it's my hometown and I live in
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Victoria. It's the provincial capital, but Victoria has got its own little downtown east side now.
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It's Andorra Avenue and it's an incredible, like, you do not want to accidentally drive down this street
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in Victoria. Fortunately, still confined to a relatively small area. But, and every town in
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British Columbia has a problem with open drug use, the disorder that grows up around safe injection sites.
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There's a backlash about, there's a backlash about building social housing projects for the people
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that live in the tent encampments, the homeless, because you get a level of disorder around them.
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So, significant backlash against all this. And as I said, the government has acknowledged it to some
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degree, Brian, because they're changing their policies. But whether they, you know, nevertheless,
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it's they, it's the NDP that embarked on this course. And it's the NDP that is now having to back
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away in the face of significant public disorder. And, I mean, one of the things that strikes me about
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this issue is, you know, we get the experts who come out with the statistics and they say, oh, you know,
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we're getting results here, there and everywhere. And then some awful story will come along.
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And it will overwhelm the statistics as the public will go, my God, they attacked some woman
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wheeling a baby down the street, or some poor guy got his hand cut off.
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We had the heartbreaking story in Ottawa the other day, parents of a 13-year-old,
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I believe it was in the interior, you can correct me if I'm wrong. She ended up being addicted to
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opioids, ended up living in a homeless encampment and died at 13. And the parents were told there's
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nothing they could do to, to force her out of the encampment or to, to seek, you know, put her into
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treatment. Oh, no, you can't do that. Those are the types of stories that will blow away any statistics.
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But, I mean, I keep, when I write about this issue, I keep looking at the deaths. And I ask,
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you know, I know, I know the British Columbia Coroner Service, Dr. Henry and others, they keep
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saying it's all a success. And I ask, why do the overdose deaths increase every year?
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We've, we've, we've got six or seven still a day dying of drug overdoses. We've got significant
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disorder that, you know, the downtown east side in Vancouver has been a problem for generations,
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but we've now actually got little downtown east sides spreading around the province. Nanaimo has one
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big problem there, Kelowna, Maple Ridge, Victoria. And yeah, the public is just fed up with this,
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right? If, if you actually had, had good results from the combination of safer supply,
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which isn't safe, and harm reduction, which isn't reducing harm, and decriminalization,
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which has effectively legalized open drug use, if you're getting good results from that,
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I think there might be some public support. The problem the government has, and the advocates have,
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is that the results are still awful, and people don't feel safe going to their downtown,
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or living next to one of these facilities. And they're worried that their children, and we're
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hearing this now, the children are getting the idea, well, you know, the government says this
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stuff is safer supply. No, it's not safe. We need, they're now talking about changing the name of
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the safer supply drugs, because they're giving young people the wrong impression that it's okay to take
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this stuff. We need to take a quick break, Vaughn, but when we come back, I want to ask you about,
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you know, whether the government's decision, the NDP government's decision on Airbnb is going to hurt
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them at the polls, especially in tourism regions, and try and get a sense from you about the two
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Vaughn, I know several people that own secondary properties, vacation spots in the Okanagan.
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People from Alberta, people actually, a relative from up in Kamloops has a place in Kelowna.
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And they stay in them sometimes, but other times rent them out.
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Now, I understand that there was a legislative change that effectively made it illegal for you to
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rent these places out on Airbnb unless you were living in them on a regular basis.
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Is this going to hurt the NDP in areas where tourism is a big thing? Because you've just
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Well, it's certainly an issue. I don't know as though it's that big an issue, though. The housing
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crisis out here and the unavailability of housing and the unaffordability of housing and rental housing,
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I think, has built a certain level of support for what the government is trying to do. And I don't
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think those are going to be fatal issues. You're right. There is a bit of a concern from the tourism
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sector that Airbnb places that were built, purpose built for Airbnb, now can't be run that way and they
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have to be rented out. There is a bit of a backlash to over the secondary place. So you've got a house,
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you're living in Victoria or Vancouver, but you've got recreational property somewhere and you have
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to rent that out or pay an extra tax. I'm not saying that people don't care at all, but I think
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the overwhelming sense that the housing affordability crisis in BC is enormous and that we haven't made
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nearly as much progress as we should have, I think that's more the issue out here than some of the
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stuff they've done around the edges. Getting the housing supply built, getting more housing is
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much more of a struggle because it's hard to find the workers to build the places, hard to get the
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projects approved, hard to get private investors to risk the money in the current market and hard to
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get the stuff built. And that's been a bigger problem for the NDP than a bit of backlash over what
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they call a vacancy tax or the war on Airbnb. Let me ask you about the housing supply issue then.
00:22:11.160
Obviously, most of the country, but especially Toronto and Vancouver, this has been a major issue
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for a while. And yet CMHC, you've got every level of government saying they're doing their best,
00:22:23.860
right? Every level of government is seized with this issue, including the federal government, which
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has the least amount of responsibility for it. But Justin Trudeau is trying to take all the credit.
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Well, he's getting some of the blame. Is EB getting the blame for it? And walk me through the
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scenario, because it's not just that you can't find workers to build and it takes too long to approve.
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Housing starts are down. They're down 20% in Vancouver, according to CMHC, year to year.
00:22:56.620
Well, I think the one issue that EB has going for him on the housing crisis and real and the
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affordability crisis is pointing out that the national government has been flooding British
00:23:13.420
Columbia with immigrants so that even if we have 40 or 50,000 housing starts in BC, which is a really
00:23:21.600
good year, it doesn't actually do much more than run in place. So initially, the New Democrats were
00:23:28.880
reluctant to make a big issue out of the immigration numbers. And in fact, they started off boasting that
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it meant people were coming to British Columbia, the province was well-governed, a province of
00:23:39.420
opportunities. But as it's gradually dawned that the massive influence of immigrants, and they come
00:23:48.760
mostly to BC or Toronto, places like that, is what is driving the demand for not just housing and rental
00:24:01.160
housing, but space in the schools, record numbers of portables, access to a family doctor. The burden on
00:24:11.960
government-supplied services is enormous. So I think you've seen now, they don't boast about the
00:24:21.520
immigration levels anymore. They now use it as an excuse for why they're having trouble keeping up.
00:24:29.080
Odd to hear a progressive party go that route. But it's reality. It is reality.
00:24:36.140
No, it is. And when you have to pay the bills and provide the services, you know, you suddenly start
00:24:42.100
to go, okay, well, what will it take? And this government is running big deficits. So it's not
00:24:47.300
like they're reluctant to go into debt. But they're still also going like we are running as hard as we
00:24:54.520
can, just to keep up with and a good example is the demand for space in the schools, school port.
00:25:00.280
I liked how Pierre Paulyev put this a little while ago when he said he would
00:25:05.760
cap immigration so that it was in line or actually a bit below housing supply. And he pointed out that
00:25:15.080
we're nationally increasing our population by 3% and increasing our housing stock by 1.3 to 1.4%.
00:25:23.860
And he said, this formula isn't being against immigration. It's about math. And you can't
00:25:32.580
increase the population in the middle of a housing crisis and everything else that you just mentioned.
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You can't increase your population at more than double what the housing stock is increasing by,
00:25:42.820
or you create problems. And, you know, so it's interesting to see how that's playing out in
00:25:49.180
British Columbia. Now, I don't really know either leader. Over the years, I've, you know,
00:25:55.480
covered in a very small way British Columbia politics, you know, Christy Clark, Gordon Campbell,
00:26:02.820
John Oregon as well. But these two leaders are quite new to me. So I look at someone like David
00:26:09.120
Eby's very different leader than Oregon, from my perspective out here. He comes from the more radical
00:26:16.640
side of the NDP, doesn't he? Like, Horgan was a blue-collar, oh, you know, golly gee type guy.
00:26:25.080
Eby's from the activist side. You know, he used to go on panels with Harsha Walia and people like that,
00:26:30.540
who, in my view, most politicians should stay clear from. Tell me about Eby and who he is and how he's
00:26:38.540
governed British Columbia since taking over from Horgan.
00:26:41.040
Well, a very sharp contrast to the Horgan style of government. And, you know, I give you a couple
00:26:50.300
of examples. Horgan was known to delegate. He appointed cabinet ministers, gave them their
00:26:56.420
assignments. And, you know, if they had a crisis, they could come back and see him. And once in a
00:27:01.540
while, he would have to say, you're not doing a very good job. Eby is really not a delegator at all.
00:27:07.680
He runs an extremely centralized premier's office with a platoon of lawyers that is probably larger
00:27:15.100
than the number of lawyers working for some of the major law firms in the provincial capital.
00:27:20.980
And he knows best. David Eby knows best. So it's a very centralized, you're right, activist government.
00:27:28.300
So that's one big difference with Horgan, who had a bit of a populist touch and it served him well,
00:27:34.960
and who was more of a chairman of the board than a premium. The other big difference, and this one
00:27:40.380
fiscally just stands out enormously, John Horgan actually believed in balancing the budget. And he
00:27:46.520
did. In his first year, he paid off a billion dollars in direct debt that he'd inherited from
00:27:52.400
the previous BC Liberal government. And Horgan left, this is an enormous amount, when Horgan left office
00:27:59.240
in November 2022. And when Eby took over, the British Columbia public accounts showed a six
00:28:09.440
billion dollar surplus. Eby spent it, virtually all of it, then brought in a four billion dollar
00:28:19.260
deficit. And that wasn't enough. He increased it to five. And this year, he brought in an eight
00:28:24.960
billion dollar deficit. And that hasn't been enough. And he's increased it to nine. So
00:28:30.280
added up, there's like 20 billion dollars there. So Eby is an enormous spender. He's now saying,
00:28:37.420
oh, one of these days, we're going to balance the budget. But and it's a giant right wing plot
00:28:42.800
to think you should balance the budget over a budget cycle.
00:28:45.540
Well, I mean, you just pointed out that the last new Democrat premier did that. And
00:28:50.040
Roy Romano was famous for balancing budgets in Saskatchewan.
00:28:54.580
Yep. No, it's it can be done. It's, you know, you have to be able to manage. But there's no sign
00:29:01.400
of that all with Eby. So that's Eby. So from the activist wing of the NDP, very centralized,
00:29:07.440
ruthless, you know, and maybe you need to be to be a premier. But you put it all together,
00:29:13.220
he is to the left of Horgan. And I think that's why he's not, you know, I hear from New Democrats
00:29:20.880
every day, if John were still our leader, we wouldn't be worried. You know, unfortunately,
00:29:26.760
Horgan has had a series of cancer scares, and he left office, you know, for for health reasons,
00:29:34.160
really. And he is now Canada's, you know, representative in Germany, but he's,
00:29:40.860
again, had another cancer scare, and he's having to have his health dealt with. So that that's a
00:29:46.640
sad story. But no, David Eby has not performed in the eyes of New Democrats, the way John Horgan
00:29:53.360
did. And yet he's still ahead, according to the polls. Yep. Now, a few months ago, we we had
00:30:03.680
John Gormley on to talk about Saskatchewan politics. And in there, the NDP was starting to threaten
00:30:09.860
to take over from Scott Mullen's Saskatchewan party. But Gormley said, well, when you look at the map
00:30:17.060
and where the writings are, they'd have to be well ahead in order to win, just because of where the
00:30:23.900
seats are. Is that something that happens in in BC politics? I mean, right now, it looks like the NDP
00:30:31.080
is ahead by a couple of points. I know they're very efficient vote in certain areas. But,
00:30:36.360
you know, does Rustad, and we'll talk about what kind of a politician he is in a moment,
00:30:42.360
does he have a shot at winning, even if there looks like they're trailing? You know, is there a
00:30:47.880
silent block that will come out and vote for him? Or is there a way the map works that will favor him
00:30:58.920
come election day? No, I think the map favors the NDP. We had an election 1996, where the New
00:31:08.240
Democrats won a majority with three points fewer in the popular vote than the BC liberals. The NDP
00:31:18.400
vote is distributed more evenly around the province. And it is the political scientists call that
00:31:25.320
efficiency, although you might not associate that word with their fiscal program. But yeah,
00:31:31.140
they have an advantage. The other advantage they have is significant. We have public funding of
00:31:35.640
political parties in BC. But your funding is based on how you did in the last election. You know,
00:31:42.080
it's the number of votes. Well, the conservatives barely existed in the last election. So they're
00:31:46.620
getting no public funding at all, zero. Whereas the NDP is rolling and dough. And we're seeing it
00:31:52.600
every day in the advertising. You know, advertising is expensive. Social media advertising is expensive.
00:31:59.500
TV, radio is expensive. And the NDP is outspending the conservatives. So there's two reasons there
00:32:06.280
why the NDP has an advantage. I would say the other reason you were going to ask me this,
00:32:12.500
you know, the reason the NDP has a bit of an advantage, because there's a big question mark
00:32:17.140
around John Rustad. So tell me about Rustad. Unlikely political leader, just a few months ago,
00:32:26.920
he was kicked out of the BC Liberals, which changed into BC United. Tell me why he was kicked out
00:32:34.340
and how he ended up, well, replacing them. Yeah, so John Rustad has been in the BC legislature for 20
00:32:41.380
years, worked in the forest industry before that. Quite a nice guy, doesn't seem to have much of a mean
00:32:46.580
bone in his body, never seen as a party leader. But two years ago, he got kicked out of the then
00:32:54.480
BC Liberal Caucus by the then leader, Kevin Falcon, who wanted to make an example of someone and show
00:33:01.620
how disciplined he was. So he kicked Rustad out for not being a team player and for making a link to
00:33:09.200
what some people saw as climate denial stuff. Although, again, that's exaggerated. So Rustad's
00:33:15.200
out and is thinking of quitting politics, he says, because he's been at it for 20 years. He doesn't
00:33:21.520
seem to be going anywhere. And then, you know, there's the Conservative Party in British Columbia.
00:33:26.280
It's been sort of idling at the curb for decades. It's not elected and even a member of the legislature
00:33:33.860
since the 1970s and hasn't formed a government on its own since the 1920s.
00:33:41.500
And so they're not very good. The leadership of the Conservative Party becomes available
00:33:45.720
and Rustad steps into it. And he's got enough of a political instinct that he starts picking up on the
00:33:52.940
same issues that Poliev is picking up on. Time for a change. The carbon tax is a burden.
00:34:00.040
Public safety is not happening. Emergency rooms are closing all over the province in spite of the
00:34:07.820
government having government numbers increase the health care budget by 75 percent and hired 45,000
00:34:13.980
health care workers. And you're still getting ER closures. So he he makes a very good use of all
00:34:20.360
that. And he BCE United is just well, they disintegrate. They they basically they were falling
00:34:29.820
flat, right? They they were not. They were not making a dent against the NDP.
00:34:35.480
No. And their leader, Kevin Falcon, who'd been a cabinet minister, had a lot of experience, just
00:34:40.600
didn't seem to connect. And so what we find ourselves in right now is a David Eby and the NDP are
00:34:49.040
fighting for their political lives against the political party that barely existed when Eby took
00:34:57.640
over the leadership of the NDP two years ago. So that's what Rustad has done. But he's unproven
00:35:05.300
and people don't know him all that well. They're learning about him. We had an election debate
00:35:12.620
televised last week and he didn't do all that well. He came across flat, came across unprepared and
00:35:20.060
nervous. Understandable. He even though he's been in politics for 20 years, he's never been in the
00:35:25.680
spotlight the way he's been now. And so that's one of the big unknowns. If you ask people,
00:35:32.760
who do you think would make the best premier? They tend to pick Eby. He is premier. So you can
00:35:39.760
think of him as one. Rustad's numbers trail and he's got to get those numbers up, I think,
00:35:46.760
in the last week of the campaign, because not enough people see him as a potential premier of BC.
00:35:52.640
So Rustad is untested. I get that. Does he also have a problem with some of his candidates causing
00:36:00.460
him problems? There have been a, you know, the NDP's opposition research team has obviously done a good
00:36:05.480
job at bringing up, hey, this candidate said this or did that and caused him some headaches. And if you
00:36:13.300
get enough of those, it makes voters go, hmm, are they ready? Well, to give you, you won't need to
00:36:21.420
know how treacherous politics can be. But the dossier on John Rustad and his troubled candidates
00:36:28.920
runs 200 pages. And it wasn't compiled by the New Democrats. It was compiled by BC United when they
00:36:38.060
were trying to drive Rustad and the conservatives out. So they have these huge taxpayer funded
00:36:44.600
resource resources because they're the opposition. And so they produce 200 pages of damaging stuff on
00:36:52.320
Rustad, things people said, you know, 20 years ago and 10 years ago and all sorts of things.
00:36:57.780
And then when they're wiped out and they shut themselves down, that dossier manages to find
00:37:04.020
itself into the hands of the news media and eventually into the hands of the New Democrats.
00:37:08.960
So that's where the ammunition is coming from. The New Democrats are doing their own research too.
00:37:12.800
But as I said, the 200 pages of damaging stuff was actually compiled by a party that supposedly wanted
00:37:19.860
to keep the NDP out. They just didn't want that the party that kept the NDP out to be somebody else.
00:37:27.460
They wanted it to be that. When we've talked before, you've said to me that when the not NDP party
00:37:34.600
gets its act together, they win. Do you think that they have enough of their act together to win next
00:37:42.320
week? Possibly. But, you know, one of the people that's working with the BC conservatives and with
00:37:50.860
Rustad and trying very hard says to me, you know, you've got to realize we're trying to build a
00:37:57.400
political party at the same time as we're trying to win an election. Like, they don't have the
00:38:02.520
experience you've mentioned. They have a bunch of candidates who've never been exposed to the kind
00:38:08.860
of scrutiny you get from the news media when you're running from office, from your opponents.
00:38:14.380
They're, you know, trying to downplay the involvement of their own candidates in all candidates'
00:38:19.600
meetings because they don't want them to go off message. So it's a challenging thing that they're
00:38:27.000
trying to do here. They've got an opportunity. The polls show that a significant number of British
00:38:34.900
Columbians think the province is on the wrong track and are unhappy with the government's record.
00:38:41.280
But even with that, government has its advantages too. Money, resources, public sector union organizers,
00:38:49.520
of course, are working for the NDP. And they've got a premier who is pretty quick at thinking on his
00:38:55.660
feet. And John Rustad is not good at thinking on his feet. And we saw that in the debate. So
00:39:02.240
I would say still up in the air here. Angus Reid, the granddaddy of opinion polling in Canada,
00:39:09.920
said a while ago, if you're going to bet, bet on the NDP doing it again. But don't bet very much.
00:39:17.740
And maybe that's the best thing you can say. I look, Brian, I had the experience of going through
00:39:24.460
a 2013 election here in British Columbia, where on election night, I was sitting on a TV set,
00:39:30.480
putting the finishing touches on a column congratulating Adrian Dix on winning the election.
00:39:35.500
And then the returns started coming in. And Dix had lost and Christy Clark had won. And I said to the
00:39:41.860
producer on the set, I'm going to have to go and tweak my column. And what I did was blow it out.
00:39:49.620
If I ever been wrong, just ask Premier Adrian Dix.
00:39:51.700
Yeah. I was in Vancouver that night at Christy Clark's election HQ. And the, you know, her team
00:40:01.580
kept coming by and telling me, oh, we've got it. We've got it. No, you don't. No, you don't.
00:40:07.040
So, Saturday will be interesting. It is weird that your election day is on Saturday, but,
00:40:13.040
you know, British Columbia, you guys are different.
00:40:15.440
That's why we love you. So, Vaughn, thanks so much for this. We'll chat again after the election
00:40:22.400
It's a pleasure. And I will be counting on you to obliterate all traces of this in the event
00:40:26.700
that the Conservatives do pull it out and win. I'll deny absolutely having done it.
00:40:31.020
Thanks so much. Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host.
00:40:37.160
This episode was produced by Andre Pru. Theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive
00:40:42.240
producer. You can subscribe to Full Comment on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, wherever you get
00:40:47.580
your podcasts. Help us out by leaving us a rating, giving us a review, and telling your friends about
00:40:52.940
us. Thanks for listening. Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.