‘The Values We Really Care about Are on the Line’

It's a Friday afternoon in mid-August, and Premier David Eby, in a navy suit and white dress shirt, is standing on a residential street in Duncan telling NDP volunteers how much their contribution matters.

Research shows that meeting a candidate is the No. 1 reason people will change their vote, he explained to the 14 people facing him in a loose semicircle. Standing beside him was Debra Toporowski, the party’s candidate in the Cowichan Valley.

“The No. 2 way is if they meet one of the representatives of the candidate, one of the volunteers, who explains why they’re excited about voting for an amazing person like Debra,” said Eby, before moving into talking about the importance of the Oct. 19 election.

“So much is on the line this election,” he said. “It’s really stark between us and the Conservatives.” Twelve days after Eby’s remark, BC United Leader Kevin Falcon withdrew from the election and suspended his party’s campaign.

The government is making progress on child care, housing, health care and climate change, Eby said. “We’re just starting to turn the corner on these things.” A change of government threatens those gains, he said.

“I know that we have the solutions that the other parties can’t match with their proposals to cut billions of dollars in funding.”

Delivered with his hands in his pockets, it was the kind of speech Eby will give countless times over the next two months, reminding people what his party values and has tried to achieve in seven years in government, while at the same time raising fears about what his opponents would do if they were to win.

Cowichan Valley, traditionally NDP territory, was won by BC Green Leader Sonia Furstenau in the last two elections. But she is running in Victoria this time, and the NDP can reasonably expect to pick up the riding.

For Eby personally there is much at stake as well. The former attorney general succeeded John Horgan as leader of the NDP a little less than two years ago through a contest that ended abruptly when the party disqualified his only challenger.

Now it’s Eby’s first opportunity to lead the NDP into a general election. He will either win and earn a mandate of his own, or go down as someone who inherited a strong situation only to have it crumble. For someone whose third child was born in June, he appears rested and ready for the demands of the campaign. That morning he had come via Nanaimo on the Helijet from Vancouver.

“Really at this stage of where I am and we are, I’m hopeful that most British Columbians are familiar with where I’m hoping to move things, with who I am,” Eby told The Tyee in an interview.

We were in an Island Health meeting room in Duncan a couple of hours ahead of his meeting with party volunteers. He had just wrapped up an hour-long discussion with staff and patients about the Cowichan District Hospital’s hospital-at-home program that since April has been providing team-based medical care.

“I’ve spent a lot of time travelling the province and working on different issues in this role and in my previous role,” Eby said, “so the campaign is really going to be about ‘Here are the challenges we face and here’s how I think we can fix them together and ensure that everyone can build a good life here.’”

Eby became premier promising action on housing, health care, the environment and public safety, all of which are big, long-term issues where it can be hard to see progress. The standard critique from the opposition parties is that while the government makes lots of announcements that sound good, the results have been poor.

Change on big issues takes time, Eby said. “The speed of government means a lot of the initiatives that were started at that time are just starting to really hit the ground now, and so it’s critically important to me that we get those initiatives advanced as far as possible,” he said.

There are no easy solutions, he acknowledged, but the government has been laying a foundation, taking on big problems “and trying to show how we can fix the housing crisis, how we can address growing the economy while taking climate action, how we can address the health-care crisis by showing progress on these things, and that by changing and being innovative and doing things differently we can really deliver results for people.”

On housing, the government has made wide changes, including taxing empty homes, restricting short-term rentals and changing the rules for stratas, all aimed at bringing more units into the rental market. It has also made secondary suites for rental legal across the province and changed rules so that more than one home can be built on a lot, a policy Eby says will create 300,000 homes for people with middle incomes.

“The one I’m most excited about is the BC Builds program,” he said, “where we’re using publicly owned land and leveraging that into affordable rental in this first phase and eventually into housing for purchase.”

The NDP government is putting the pieces in place to transform housing in the province, said Eby.

“That really underlines the choice coming up in the election, because when John Rustad is asked which of these pieces is he going to keep if the Conservatives are elected, he says not much.”

A year ago it looked like the NDP would cruise to victory over a divided opposition. More recent surveys showed the Conservatives led by Rustad were consolidating the opposition vote and closing on the NDP, with Falcon’s BC United trailing. But with Falcon pulling out of the campaign Wednesday to support the Conservatives, the stakes are even higher.

“It’s pretty clear to me that British Columbians are looking to the Conservative party in the polling numbers that we’re seeing,” Eby said. Before the party's formal dissolution yesterday, Eby and the NDP seldom mentioned BC United, the renamed party that once held power for 16 years as the BC Liberals.

That means it’s important to introduce Rustad to people in the province and remind them of his record, he said. “I think there are some people who think he is a break with the past, that he represents change, and in fact as a longtime BC Liberal MLA he represents some of the worst tendencies of that party.”

Rustad, a former BC Liberal cabinet minister, became leader of the BC Conservatives a little more than a year ago after Falcon booted him from BC United over a dispute around climate change and party discipline.

Eby said the BC Liberal record in government includes increasing Medical Services Plan fees, charging bridge tolls and driving up ICBC insurance rates.

After seven years in government, the NDP has its own record, and many voters may feel there’s been little progress on key issues. Polls suggest that a significant part of the Conservative support is young people and those concerned about affordability.

What would Eby say to voters who, despite all the housing announcements, continue to struggle to find and pay for a home?

“To fix the provincial car insurance program took four years,” Eby said. “Housing is obviously a much larger and more complex issue and we’ve been working on it since Day 1 of being sworn in, and our work has been complicated by the massive population growth we’ve seen in the province.”

Population growth has been needed to fill gaps in the workforce and keep the economy growing, he said, but it’s a challenge to accommodate the 15,000 people a month the province has been adding.

“It’s a really difficult balance and it’s a challenge, and I don’t pretend that there isn’t this compromise to be reached,” he said.

“But there’s no question that the growth that we’ve seen in the province has made the housing challenge significantly more difficult, and I think, and I hope, that as we get these rules in place around being able to build homes faster and get more homes started... we’ll be able to respond to that population growth.”

There have also been challenges of the government’s own making. In recent weeks a Kitsilano project that had been billed as affordable housing has been in the news and criticized by opposition parties as units have come to market at rents as high as $4,200 a month, well above the Vancouver average. The 68-unit building is in the Vancouver-Point Grey constituency that Eby represents.

Eby defended the project, saying the government providing financing for the project through the former $2-billion HousingHub program meant rentals, including 14 affordable units, were built on the former church property instead of luxury townhomes or condos.

“The thing that gets lost in the stories, repeatedly, and I think that there’s some interest in people confusing this from the opposition parties, is it didn’t cost taxpayers one dollar,” said Eby.

“To compare a program that delivered 14 affordable rental units for zero dollars with fully paid for, publicly funded social housing and say ‘Well it seems like the rents are lower on the social housing’ is a totally false comparison,” he said.

Eby said he’s proud the building will provide affordable housing for 14 families, rentals that wouldn’t have existed without the government program. “We have to do more of it, and this is the kind of program that will get cut if John Rustad’s elected,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that 14 units of affordable housing is better than zero, that a rental housing building is better than luxury strata, to my mind.”

The program has evolved and the government is now using the same approach on publicly owned land, which will deliver greater affordability, said Eby.

“When you’re taking on a problem like this, and the same is true for drug addiction or any of the other big problems we face, health care, you have to be innovative and be willing to try different things; then when you do, you learn from it what went well and what didn’t and then you iterate on it and you improve on it going forward.”

It’s an approach that comes with some political risk, Eby acknowledged.

“The problem with a program like this is you have to explain it and it’s not immediately obvious what happened or why government was involved. But I know that site would look very different if the HousingHub hadn’t been there, and there’d be 14 families that wouldn’t have housing.”

When it comes to affordability more generally, there’s no question many in the province feel financially strained.

What would Eby say to voters who believed NDP campaign promises in 2017 and 2020 to make life more affordable?

“When we look at the big challenges people face around affordability and the impacts of high interest rates and global inflation... for us it’s wherever we can assist people and support them in the cost of daily life, we’re going to do it,” he said.

When the NDP came to office, child care cost an average of $52 a day, and it is now down to $18 a day and the government is working to bring it down to $10 a day, he said. “On car insurance, ICBC was out of control, 30 per cent rate increases projected. Now we’ve cut rates by 20 per cent, savings of $500 per family.”

The government is committed to driving down costs for people rather than cutting the programs they depend on, added Eby. “That will actually be a live discussion in the election.”

With time running out on the interview, asked if he had anything to add, Eby talked about the balance the province is aiming to strike on environmental issues and what could be lost with a change of government.

“There’s a lot on the line in the election for people who are environmentally minded, and I know the NDP hasn’t been perfect from the perspective of many environmentally minded voters,” he said before highlighting the investment in green hydrogen, the province’s old-growth plan and the establishment of parks and Indigenous protected areas.

The province’s energy grid is already very clean, giving B.C. a competitive advantage selling low-carbon products in the global marketplace, Eby said.

“I know there’s more work that we can do, but what the province will look like under a B.C. Conservative government will be quite devastating to all of those things, and I know for Tyee readers that are interested in Indigenous rights or environmental protection or even basic human rights in the province, it’s going to be a pretty stark election.”

He finished up with one more attack on Rustad, who recently sat down with controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, listing comments by current and withdrawn Conservative candidates that were homophobic, anti-Indigenous or supportive of the anti-vaccine convoy.

“This is a throwback to an approach and a province that we haven’t seen in a generation and it’s profoundly disturbing,” Eby said. “A lot of the values that we really care about are on the line. I just want to underline that. He’s not only going to cost people more money, but he’s really putting on the ballot our values as British Columbians.”

That afternoon in Duncan, Eby met with Indigenous Elders, gave a short press conference and spoke to the local volunteers. He joined Toporowski to knock on a single door and had a brief chat with the couple living there, then got into a car to carry on to the next engagement.

Three days later he was in Oak Bay mainstreeting with an NDP candidate outside a coffee shop. The next day he was at the University of British Columbia announcing a 1,500-bed housing complex on the Vancouver campus.

With two months until election day, the campaign is well underway.

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