Marking 20 years
of bold journalism,
reader supported.
Analysis
Rights + Justice
BC Election 2024
BC Politics

What’s Pushing Eby to Change His Positions?

There’s hard logic, and risk, to his pivots on the carbon tax and involuntary treatment, say experts.

Harrison Mooney 23 Sep 2024The Tyee

Harrison Mooney is an associate editor at The Tyee. He is an award-winning author and journalist from Abbotsford, B.C., who recently won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for his memoir, Invisible Boy.

As he threw in the towel on behalf of his party two weeks ago, BC United Leader Kevin Falcon made a point of painting David Eby as a far-left radical.

“I came back to politics,” Falcon said then, as Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad hovered behind him, “because I was genuinely concerned about the direction David Eby is taking the NDP, which I would argue is an extreme left, not like the more moderate party of John Horgan.”

It was a notable claim, as Falcon appeared in that moment to embrace the polarizing rhetoric of Rustad and his alt-right analogues across the continent, whose tactic has long been to counter accusations of their own extremist views by attacking their opponent as the actual extremist.

But in the days since, Premier Eby has seemed to go out of his way to rebut Rustad, Falcon and others by changing his tune on two issues at the core of the BC Conservatives’ campaign: drug addiction and the carbon tax.

Revisiting involuntary care

Two years ago Eby, then campaigning to be BC NDP leader, generally endorsed expanding use of involuntary treatment as a response to the “crisis” of opioid overdoses, subject to a review by experts and community members.

But not much happened — until now. Having already dropped a brief experiment decriminalizing drug use in public spaces, Eby is making involuntary treatment for people with severe mental health and drug dependency issues a clear priority.

“If we’re returned to the legislature, we will introduce legislation to clarify authority under the Mental Health Act for involuntary care for people who can’t ask for it themselves, including youth,” Eby said on Sept. 15.

This comes after the fatal drug poisoning of teenager Brianna MacDonald. The 13-year-old died in August in an Abbotsford homeless encampment.

On Sept. 11, the Conservatives responded to the tragedy by announcing a plan to force those at “serious risk due to addiction,” especially youth like MacDonald, to undergo treatment.

Many experts are skeptical that involuntary treatment would result in a high success rate. Gillian Kolla, for example, an assistant professor of population health and applied health sciences at Memorial University of Newfoundland and collaborating scientist at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria. She told The Tyee that what’s needed instead is affordable housing and mental health services.

The making of a ‘political jam’

But Eby no longer appears to be heeding the experts he pledged to first consult on overdoses and mental health.

Instead, he’s reading the writing on the wall, said public policy analyst Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, a public opinion research organization. She told The Tyee that the political landscape has shifted dramatically since the downfall of BC United. The centre-right vote has galvanized into a formidable threat, Kurl explained, pressuring the premier to address his vulnerabilities on drug decriminalization and public safety, among other issues.

“Nearly half of existing NDP voters in British Columbia do not think their own government has done a good job on these files,” Kurl said, citing Angus Reid polling from early September. “David Eby is backpedalling or reversing or course-correcting or flip-flopping, or call it whatever you will. He is trying to get himself out of the political jam that he put himself into.”

Political scientist Hamish Telford agreed, pointing out public safety is an issue particular to B.C.’s more urban, populated areas — ridings the BC NDP typically holds, and will need to retain, if they want to remain in control of the province.

“I think they are sensing that voters in those areas are concerned, if not frustrated, and if the Conservatives are going to win the election, those are the seats they have to pick up,” Telford said. “To avoid that, the NDP needs to defend this territory.”

Refusing to be a carbon tax outlier

Eby’s heel turn on the carbon tax came two days prior to his pivot on involuntary care. After nearly two years of defending the measure, not to mention hammering Rustad for climate denial, Eby threw his party off balance by all but abandoning the deeply unpopular levy in a bid to address affordability on Sept. 13.

“If the federal government decides to remove the legal backstop requiring us to have a consumer carbon tax in British Columbia, we will end the consumer carbon tax in British Columbia,” he said at a campaign event in Vancouver.

While Eby’s opponent was quick to accuse the premier of a flip-flop, political scientist Hamish Telford disagrees.

Much as Eby might prefer to keep the tax, he won’t have much choice if the federal Conservatives seize power next year and follow through on their promise to put it to pasture, he said.

“I don’t view that policy as a flip-flop,” said Telford. “It has been patently obvious for the past year that if the federal government scrapped the carbon tax, B.C. couldn’t go it alone. It just would not be economically tenable for B.C. to be the only jurisdiction in North America with a carbon tax. I think, wisely, he has sort of acknowledged that reality before the election campaign started.”

Chasing after ‘orphans’

The pre-election collapse and withdrawal of the BC United party has left certain voters — self-described “moderate centrists” — in the lurch, and Eby’s recent position switches seem designed to attract some of them. As Rustad stakes out hard-right positions by, for example, shrugging at climate change and targeting how sexual orientation and gender identity is discussed in public schools, there seems to be an opportunity to reach so-called “political orphans,” many of whom say that all B.C. parties are too extreme in their positions.

Voter options changed dramatically with the disbanding of BC United, explains Mario Canseco, president of Research Co., a public opinion research firm based in Vancouver. “We would have had two different groups attacking the NDP [while] clearly attacking each other also,” he said, but now the political spectrum is cleanly split in half, a dynamic he compares to “essentially a U.S. presidential race.”

In this polarized political landscape, most of the votes that are still up for grabs are centrists who haven’t yet made up their minds. It’s not a huge group, but given that polls show the parties locked in a tie, landing the stragglers may make all the difference.

“It’s complicated because you’re fighting for a very small portion of the electorate,” said Canseco. “It’s ultimately about moving people from one side to the other. This might be the reason for Eby to say, ‘Well, if I’m seen as a little bit more centrist on the environment, maybe I can get some of those blue guys to vote orange.’”

The risk of deking left, then right

Eby’s strategy has weak spots. In a Sept. 13 column, the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer made the stakes plain.

“The premier did try to disarm a key issue for the Conservatives,” he wrote about the carbon tax backpedal. “But he also gave credibility to Rustad, with the premier conceding that Rustad was right about the tax while Eby, wrapped in the flag of climate action, had gotten it wrong.”

You can do this in sports. If you fake left and go right, you get buckets. In elections, though, stutter steps make you look flaky or, worse, like you’re losing.

Having stumped their involuntary-care platform while constantly criticizing the BC NDP’s drug decriminalization pilot program, Rustad’s Conservatives appear to have Eby playing catch-up. And he risks giving credence to overheated claims that his original positions were somehow extremist.

We’ve seen this before. We’re seeing it in the U.S. presidential election, where Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has been cast by Donald Trump’s side as extreme left, even supposedly “Marxist,” in spite of her anodyne progressive policies and a string of endorsements from longtime Republican figures like Dick and Liz Cheney.

Harris has worked to eschew these claims outright, adopting Republican stances on fracking and border security, for instance, while bragging that both she and running mate Tim Walz proudly own guns.

Here in Canada, Pierre Poilievre uses the term “radical left” to describe Trudeau Liberals so relentlessly that he corrects himself whenever he forgets the adjective. Far-right commentator, influencer and widely criticized academic Jordan Peterson frequently calls those who disagree with him Marxists, or postmodern neo-Marxists.

The same is true of the Russian propagandists attempting to fuel alt-right movements throughout the West, including in B.C., by pitting “supporters of the new globalist socialism” against “supporters of traditional values.”

The creation and framing of a classic fake dilemma is a core component of the Russian state-controlled disinformation campaign and ensuing rhetoric of their cadre of so-called “useful idiots,” uninformed people who can be taken advantage of for political gain.

The goal of such efforts by outside meddlers like Vladimir Putin is little more than to sow discord and chaos. But when homegrown conservative parties label their opponents “wacko” radicals, their goal is to shift the Overton window — the frame around what’s generally considered sensible political discussion — to the right. When they succeed, they drag the positions of progressive political candidates in the same direction.

And then they can pounce by affixing that potentially damaging label of “flip-flopper.” It remains to be seen if Eby has played into his opponents’ hands. If so, he shouldn’t be surprised. Flip-flopper is a favourite catcall from the BC Liberal playbook, employed to perfection a decade ago in the party’s bid to dishonour the Honourable Adrian Dix.

Like Eby a few months ago, Dix was the former BC NDP leader in 2013 and had been leading the polls in the 2013 provincial election, so much so that the province infamously ran a front page story with his photo and the headline “If This Man Kicked a Dog He Would Still Win the Election.”

Dix did not kick a dog. But the confident BC NDP leader would lose after pivoting left in a bid to draw votes from the Greens by speaking out against the expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, a policy change only three weeks ahead of the vote.

Many pundits have called it his fatal mistake. Christy Clark’s BC Liberals hammered him all through the home stretch for switching his stance, Photoshopping his head on a weather vane, flip-flopping in the wind. On game day, Dix’s BC NDP lost big.

Speaking from her vantage at the Angus Reid Institute, Kurl suggested things could still work out for Eby, provided his base sees a leader attempting to fix what’s not working — correcting course, rather than just changing course.

“Significant chunks of his own base are not happy with him about the direction the government has been taking on a number of really critical files,” she said. “David Eby, at this stage, is fully availing himself of his entitlement to change his mind.”

The September shifts on carbon tax and involuntary care, Kurl noted, may be just the beginning. Now that the election season has officially begun, we may expect to see more such moves in the coming days and weeks.

“He’s going to change his mind pretty hard.”


Want to get even more of The Tyee’s election coverage? Sign up today for The Run. It’s a free B.C. election newsletter full of smart voices unpacking key issues, fact-checking politicians and exposing disinformation to clarifying light. Go beyond the horse-race headlines and subscribe now.  [Tyee]

  • Share:

Get The Tyee's Daily Catch, our free daily newsletter.

Tyee Commenting Guidelines

Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion and be patient with moderators. Comments are reviewed regularly but not in real time.

Do:

  • Be thoughtful about how your words may affect the communities you are addressing. Language matters
  • Keep comments under 250 words
  • Challenge arguments, not commenters
  • Flag trolls and guideline violations
  • Treat all with respect and curiosity, learn from differences of opinion
  • Verify facts, debunk rumours, point out logical fallacies
  • Add context and background
  • Note typos and reporting blind spots
  • Stay on topic

Do not:

  • Use sexist, classist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language
  • Ridicule, misgender, bully, threaten, name call, troll or wish harm on others or justify violence
  • Personally attack authors, contributors or members of the general public
  • Spread misinformation or perpetuate conspiracies
  • Libel, defame or publish falsehoods
  • Attempt to guess other commenters’ real-life identities
  • Post links without providing context

Most Popular

Most Commented

Most Emailed

LATEST STORIES

The Barometer

Who Do You Think Will Win the US Election?

Take this week's poll