Robin Martin

Progressives blaming Eby’s defeat in the election timing are totally missing the point. The whole purpose of the early election was to try to overcome the government’s unpopularity rooted in its poor outcomes. The real problem was the cumulative cost of Eby’s ideological agenda. His government was the last holdout of the failures of Trudeauian progressivism: a subordination of economic growth in favour of deficit financed welfare spending, a dogmatic commitment to climate change and its anti-development effects, excessive identity politics and an overly self critical posture towards Canadian history, and its radical experiment with the harm reduction model. Election timing and campaign choices didn’t defeat the Eby government. A broad cross-section of British Columbians—from rural parts of the province to downtown Vancouver—rejected it based on the self-evident failure of its ideas.