Opinion: David Eby's BC NDP needs a better reason than Trump for a snap election | Daily Hive

David Eby at the Union of BC Municipalities Convention, September 2026. (Government of B.C.)

B.C. Premier David Eby already has the job, the majority power, and the authority to respond to U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic war.

He has yet to explain convincingly why doing that job required interrupting the municipal election campaigns across British Columbia, and sending everyone back to the polls roughly two years ahead of schedule.

Civic election day across this province for choosing mayors, city councillors, School Board trustees, and some Park Board commissioners is Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026. Eby has scheduled the provincial general election — for choosing the MLAs that will represent 93 ridings — a week later on Saturday, Oct. 24, with advance voting beginning the day before the civic election day.

In the weeks and days leading up to the snap election call on Sept. 22, municipal leaders explicitly asked him to avoid this overlap. Their campaigns had barely officially begun when he went ahead anyway.

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Now, municipal parties and candidates must compete with provincial parties and candidates for volunteers, donations, event venues, advertising space, and even places to put their signs.

Above all, they must compete for public attention, since civic election turnout has historically been far lower than turnout in provincial general elections.

Importantly, newsrooms already stretched by years of budget and labour cuts must find a way to cover both campaigns properly. Many things will get less attention, and municipal races have plenty to lose.

Those civic elections determine what happens on our streets and in our neighbourhoods. They deserve adequate attention and scrutiny.

Even a provincial election already underway was swept aside: the Abbotsford-Mission by-election on Sept. 26, previously triggered by the Conservative Party of B.C. to create a path for Kerry-Lynne Findlay to sit in the legislature, was cancelled, and people who had already cast advance ballots must vote again next month.

Eby had the legal right to seek an early election, but whether this was a responsible use of that power is another matter.

Then there is also the convenient timing of the Conservative turmoil. Eby called the election two days after Findlay resigned as the Conservative party’s leader amid months of internal party turmoil, with Lorne Doerksen freshly installed as interim leader.

Days later, the BC NDP was warning voters that the Conservatives could not guarantee who would become premier. It takes some nerve to choose that moment for an election and then campaign against the uncertainty surrounding an opponent’s leadership.

The Conservatives made their own mess, but Eby chose to have the election in the middle of it.

His Sept. 22 speech announcing the snap election made the intended campaign narrative clear enough. Trump was the recurring villain, with voters invited to join Eby in “saying hell no to Trump and to his politics for British Columbia.”

Yes, Trump’s tariffs are doing real damage. Responding to them is part of the premier’s job. But a majority government does not need a fresh election every time that job gets harder.

The parallel to Mark Carney’s Spring 2025 federal general election campaign is hard to miss, though the circumstances were quite different. Carney had just won the Liberal leadership and taken over Justin Trudeau’s minority government, so he had never faced voters as party leader. With Canada confronting Trump’s then-new trade war, there was a strong case for seeking a mandate of his own.

Eby had already led his party to a majority in the October 2024 provincial election. He was neither a newly installed premier in need of a mandate nor the head of a minority government facing defeat. He had the votes to keep governing, and he chose to call another election.

Doug Ford’s situation was closer to Eby’s. In early 2025, the Ontario premier, who already led a majority government, called a snap provincial general election more than a year ahead of schedule, saying he needed a fresh mandate to confront the then-new U.S. tariff threats. Critics called that vote unnecessary, but voters did not appear keen to punish him for it. His Progressive Conservatives won a third consecutive majority, but short of the larger mandate Ford sought.

But there are other variables in play that are unique to B.C.

There is plenty about the BC NDP-led provincial government’s record that deserves attention. September 2026’s fiscal update projects a $13.8-billion deficit this year, followed by $12.7 billion in 2027/2028 and $12 billion in 2028/2029. There is still no balanced budget anywhere in that forecast — or at the very least, a meaningful year-over-year decrease in the size of the annual deficits toward the end of the decade — while total provincial debt is expected to reach $180.9 billion by the end of this fiscal year and almost $236 billion before the end of this decade.

By comparison, Ontario’s provincial government projects a $13.8-billion deficit for the 2026/2027 fiscal year, essentially matching B.C.’s projected shortfall despite having nearly three times its population and an economy almost three times as large.

While there are major headwinds caused by the United States, the underlying fundamental problems in B.C. are plainly structural and homegrown.

Voters deserve answers about how their provincial government intends to get its finances under control.

They also deserve clarity on the policies Eby says will attract private investment and improve economic confidence — a real approach that generates a net gain of wealth, not merely even more taxation on the limited pool of existing wealth.

Asked at the snap election press conference about his provincial government’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) and the continued private land ownership concerns relating to Aboriginal title claims, he referred to an appeal and defending private property, then somehow returned to Trump. He offered no legislative solution or timetable in that answer, despite initially promising to amend DRIPA during the Spring 2026 legislative session, a commitment he walked back on.

Investors looking for certainty and clear, fair rules in B.C. need more than another warning about Washington, D.C. Yet under the BC NDP, the provincial government’s heavy-handed approach to reconciliation has been anything but transparent, and it has strayed from consensus and the democratic norms expected in our Western society.

Some might also argue that Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and ABC Vancouver’s public safety plebiscite doubles as a municipal-level vote on Eby and the BC NDP. That approach has more validity given that the provincial government has been downloading costs onto the City of Vancouver, and the municipal government is bearing real major costs from the BC NDP’s flawed approach to homelessness, mental health, and addictions issues. Those pressures fall hardest on a city at the centre of the country’s crisis for such issues, and they force the municipal government to divert significant financial resources away from traditional municipal responsibilities.

In late 2022, then-incoming Premier David Eby said the Downtown Eastside’s problems had become too big for Vancouver’s municipal government to manage, and that his provincial government would take over coordinating the response. In Spring 2023, the City led the effort to clear the prolonged Hastings Street encampment, where dense clusters of tents and structures were blocking sidewalks and building entrances, and numerous propane tanks posed serious safety risks. The clearing drew sharp criticism from activists, and police arrested some individuals who were trying to physically prevent the work.

One of the two public safety plebiscite questions would lay the groundwork for the City’s next step to reduce public disorder: strengthening laws that forbid open-air hard drug use in public spaces. That move is likely to draw similar criticism from the same voices, but a favourable result would give the municipal government the political mandate and authority to take meaningful action and declare that enough is enough — that such antisocial behaviour cannot be the norm in public spaces.

The BC NDP’s new promise to tax unsold newly-built strata market ownership condominium homes raises a similar concern. Eby wants investment in housing, but proposes another major cost for completed units left empty for more than a year — starting at two per cent and increasing each year the longer they remain unsold.

Getting those condominiums occupied is a worthwhile goal. The question is what happens to future housing projects when a developer already struggling to sell the last one faces another bill — on top of high construction costs (including new design standards and regulations imposed by both the provincial and municipal governments), high borrowing costs, high municipal development fees, and high holding costs for unsold/vacant newly-built supply (insurance, property taxes, strata fees, etc.).

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has described the private sector as providing roughly 95 per cent of new housing supply across the country and stressed the importance of financing and investor confidence. Before adding another holding cost, Eby owes voters an explanation of how it will affect a builder’s ability and willingness to start the next project.

Investors and lenders have plenty of other places to put their money. Capital has no shortage of alternatives.

A very short-term policy that helps move newly-built housing supply but weakens the next round of construction will leave future buyers — and renters, given that unsecured investor condominiums represent a massive proportion of overall rental housing supply — worse off over the long-term.

A housing project can take years to reach completion. Developers must finish the design and planning process, secure municipal approvals, arrange financing, and then build. That means projects proposed today will shape housing affordability and supply five, 10, and 15 years from now. But with another major tax added to an already long list of headwinds, it is even harder to see more projects getting underway.

Part of the reason rents have recently eased in Metro Vancouver is the wave of newly-built supply that began reaching completion in 2025 and is expected to continue well into 2027. Planning for many of those projects began before or just after the pandemic.

We are now approaching a full 10 years of a provincial government led by the BC NDP. British Columbians are entitled to judge what Victoria has done with the powers it already holds.

Eby is asking for a new mandate, but he owes British Columbians a convincing explanation for cutting short the one he already had.

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