Hitting rock bottom then trying to fight your way out is a familiar theme. But the Conservatives did it twice in less than two years.
Even the new master of the absurd — B.C. filmmaker Nathan Fielder — couldn’t come up with the storyline leading to the Conservative election victory.
Hitting rock bottom then trying to fight your way out is a familiar theme. But the Conservatives did it twice in less than two years.
After the party was dormant for generations, Conservatives came within a seat of winning the 2024 election and were a new force to be reckoned with.
But most of their potential eroded during a year of vicious internal arguments over social and leadership issues that led to caucus expulsions and resignations, and eventually forced out then-leader John Rustad.
The subsequent leadership race made for a fresh start. But they picked Kerry-Lynne Findlay just last May. She turned out to be a blundering, hard-edged zealot who started alienating her team instantly.
The caucus lost 14 members in an atmosphere of backstabbing paranoia. By last month, they were back in familiar territory — rock bottom.
Soaring from there to a runaway win in the space of five weeks is an extraordinary double-comeback triumph. They won a marathon in record time after shooting themselves in the foot at the start line — twice.
They couldn’t have done it without NDP leader David Eby. His election call is being universally condemned as one of the dumbest political moves ever.
A lot of perfect hindsight is in play there. It was crass, self-serving and extraordinarily rude to municipal leaders. But strategically, what better time to start a fight with an opponent than when they are down and out?
There’s one fascinating moment in that election-call process.
He made the customary visit to see the lieutenant-governor at Government House and announced it in the driveway on Tuesday, Sept. 22.
Findlay had quit two days earlier and Doerkson was quickly selected by the caucus as the new interim leader.
Eby had one day to analyze that major change. The opponent he would have annihilated was replaced by an unknown whose only discernible feature was that he was a regular person.
Eby was privately committed to calling the vote by then and had to make a big guess.
Was Doerkson a sign his opponents were going to become viable? Or was he just an interim caretaker trying to minimize more failure?
If Eby concluded the first option, he might have held off. But dropping the writ had a lot of momentum by then.
So he let it ride and pressed ahead. The thinking was likely: “I can take this guy.”
Wrong call. His decision underestimated Doerkson by several orders of magnitude, and overestimated the NDP’s popularity by the same margin.
The truly mindless part of the decision was Eby’s thinking that people would buy the bogus reasons he kept offering for calling it.
First it was because he needed a mandate to take on Trump, which vastly overestimates his role in the trade war. He gave up on that and switched to the idea his one-seat majority meant his government was paralyzed and couldn’t accomplish much.
That ignored the fact that various changes had given him a bigger margin.
He could not bring himself to admit what was obvious to all — he called it simply because the Conservatives looked beatable.
There was a striking moment last week when a reporter queried what was the most-asked question of him. He said it was: “Why are we having this election?”
He paraphrased voters’ attitude as: “Just go do government stuff. Don’t bother me with an election.”
That was after 32 consecutive days of trying to explain himself. It was as close as he could get to conceding it was all over for him.
Doerkson, the first premier from the Cariboo in 144 years, was one happy cowboy on election night.
He alluded to the improbable storyline above, saying when you get thrown at the rodeo “you pick up yourself, dust yourself off and get back on… And the crowd gets to its feet for you because you’re trying.”
At a Monday briefing, he summed up his new mission: “Too many British Columbians have stopped believing the government can get anything done. My job is to prove them wrong.”
He said an independent review will be ordered next month into B.C.’s fiscal position.
It will report in the new year, likely that it is much worse than advertised. That will outline how much he has to prove.