David Eby has morphed into a Prairie pragmatist

With a week to go in British Columbia’s election campaign, BC NDP Leader David Eby is looking like he has won some momentum back. His platform announcements have been prolific, along with his potshots at Conservative Leader John Rustad.
But the outcome is far from decided, and this is what can’t be lost: Mr. Eby is a different politician than he was early in 2024. He’s now more like his NDP brethren – and one sistren – in the three provinces to the east, and even has some policy alignment with conservative premiers.
Mr. Eby has morphed into a Prairie pragmatist.
Mr. Rustad’s party won less than two per cent of the vote in the 2020 B.C. election, but he has risen from obscurity with his surprising summer consolidation of anti-NDP parties. He’s a contender because the mood for change is so strong. Voters across Canada, including B.C., are concerned about the viability of health care systems, outraged over increases in living and housing costs, and increasingly frustrated with crime and social disorder. You can connect it all to the rise of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who is either leading the parade or knew enough to jump in front of it.
No matter how you characterize the challenge from the right, Mr. Eby’s party – in power for the last seven years – is being forced to distance themselves from what they used to be.
It’s the lead-up to the election that has changed Mr. Eby. In April, for instance, his government announced it would ban all illicit drug use in public, a major reversal of its decriminalization pilot project. It came after health care workers raised concerns about patients using drugs in hospital settings, and increased public concerns about drug use in parks and on transit. That BC NDP about-face helped to reinforce the narrative, led by Alberta and embraced by Mr. Poilievre, that the emphasis on and execution of decriminalization and safer-supply measures in confronting Canada’s drug crisis has been flawed.
Mr. Eby’s change was also seen in his increased willingness to fight with Ottawa in a manner that’s more characteristic of oil-producing provinces than the NDP on the West Coast. He has been lightly criticizing the federal Liberals, traditional allies, for at least a year. But in July, Mr. Eby joined Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe in saying he would support Newfoundland and Labrador’s court case to seek a more equitable distribution of equalization payments.
And then there was the pre-campaign revelation that his government – instead of continuing in its long support of a consumer carbon price – is okay with letting the province’s signature climate policy wither on an Osoyoos vine if the federal government drops legislation requiring it. He told one interviewer that struggling families might want to vote for his party but “the carbon tax was just driving them away.”
Mr. Eby sounds just like every other influential NDP Leader in the West, including Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, who last year came out against Ottawa imposing a consumer-carbon-price backstop in his province. Mr. Kinew said leaders can’t afford to lose the support of working-class Canadians on the journey toward net-zero, and “we have to be flexible to show that we understand where people are at right now.”
And what about the concern that lower-income British Columbians will miss out on the province’s climate-action tax credits should the consumer-carbon levy be kiboshed? There’s something new for them in the BC NDP platform, too. At the beginning of the campaign in September, Mr. Eby announced a $1,000 tax cut for the average family starting in 2025. It’s not apples-to-apples policy, for sure. But it’s a remarkably similar number to the current maximum climate tax credit of $1,008 for a family of four in B.C.
The tax cut promise also echoes United Conservative Party Leader Danielle Smith, who pledged a cut during Alberta’s May, 2023, election campaign that would save individual workers up to $760 per year. (It’s also a promise some Albertans argued was fiscally irresponsible, and even 18 months later, remains unfulfilled).
Of course, what also distinguishes Mr. Rustad is his inability to clearly convey his thoughts regarding “Nuremberg 2.0″ or vaccines, or to accurately describe a drug toxicity event he witnessed in Vancouver. As a way of lambasting Mr. Eby’s drug crisis policies, the Conservative Leader said he saw a man die from an overdose on his way to the televised leadership debate last week. But he later revised his story to say that he saw someone who was unresponsive.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Rustad’s missteps end up defining this political contest. But if Mr. Eby manages to hold onto power, it will be in large part because he’s moved his centre-left party closer to the centre – because he has pivoted to become more like his colleagues on the other side of the Rocky Mountains.