BC New Democrats, still stunned after suffering enormous losses in the election, will meet this week to pick an interim leader to replace David Eby.
Eby resigned Saturday night, accepting responsibility for his catastrophic decision to call a snap election with two years left in his majority government’s mandate. The NDP lost 19 seats as the BC Conservatives surged to a 63-seat supermajority.
New Democrats are set to meet twice this week to regroup.
The first gathering, on Wednesday, will be a final caucus meeting of the 47 MLAs who went into the Sept. 22 election campaign. The meeting is expected to be sombre and tense, as those who fell to defeat will be seeking answers from Eby and his senior advisers as to what went wrong.
It’s unknown if Eby, who was re-elected as MLA for Vancouver-Point Grey, will attend.
The second meeting is on Thursday, where the new, much-reduced, 28-person NDP caucus will convene for the first time. The group will eventually form the official Opposition at the legislature, after being sworn in next month.
Three names are being seriously floated for interim leader: Bowinn Ma, Adrian Dix and Mike Farnworth.
They all represent different eras and styles for the party, with Farnworth as the more traditional choice, Dix the most likely to bring about reforms to get the NDP back on track, and Ma the youngest and most modern.
Whoever wins will inherit a dispirited group of legislators, who are about to face a rough transition from the power of the government benches into the obscurity and futility of opposition.
Dix led the BC NDP from 2011-14, including through an unsuccessful 2013 election campaign. He went on to become B.C.’s longest-serving health minister.
Known as a workaholic, with a near-photographic memory, Dix has been an MLA for 21 years and was a party staffer for a decade before that. He’s a loyal soldier. When campaign headquarters needed someone to speak to the media in the wake of Saturday’s crushing defeat, Dix went out to take tough questions about the party’s loss.
Farnworth has an even longer pedigree within the NDP, having narrowly won his seventh straight term as Port-Coquitlam MLA on Saturday.
Most recently the transportation minister, Farnworth also served in cabinet roles in the 1990s NDP government. He’s a longtime house leader, and knows all the secret procedural rules in the legislature.
Dix and Farnworth have both served in Opposition, which is an entirely different beast than government. There are sparse resources and fewer staff. Most MLAs end up having to juggle a variety of roles, including their own research and preparation.
Ma, who was elected in North Vancouver-Lonsdale in 2017, has only served in government.
She arrived in the election that saw John Horgan take power, and has held cabinet roles since 2020. Most recently, she was the infrastructure minister, tasked with getting major projects done more quickly. But she’s younger and of a more current era of the NDP than Farnworth and Dix. She’s had two children while in cabinet portfolios over the last three years, often bringing them to the legislature while she works.
Whoever the party chooses, they will not be eligible to run for permanent leader. But a full leadership race is a long way in the future for the BC NDP.
The party needs someone who can pick it up and get it some sort of presentable shape, after the drubbing it took from voters. Not a glamorous job by any means. And a far cry from being premier. But somebody has to do it.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 18 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for BIV. He hosts the weekly show Political Capital and has a daily podcast, Political Capital Daily.
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