James Moore is a former federal cabinet minister from B.C. under prime minister Stephen Harper and is a contributing columnist for CTVNews.ca.
VANCOUVER — British Columbians elected David Eby as their premier on Oct. 19, 2024. They elected New Democrat MLAs in 47 of 93 seats, giving his party a third term in government and a second consecutive majority government on that day.
He was given a majority mandate to govern until 2028 if he wanted to.
Speaking on election night, a freshly re-elected David Eby said to the assembled crowd: “The campaign is over, but the work has just begun, hasn’t it? I recommit myself. I know we all recommit ourselves to working for British Columbians every single day. That will be our sole focus: getting things done for British Columbians.”
He further added: “I know that British Columbians, our whole province, deserve a premier that is going to bring us together, not drive us apart. And I promise to be that premier, to bring British Columbians together.”
Less than two years into that four-year mandate, these two fundamental values asserted by the premier of British Columbia on election night would be shattered in a cynical snap election call by a desperate premier trying to take advantage of two perceived political opportunities: the B.C. Conservative Party, then in disarray, and the red-hot unpopularity of U.S. President Donald Trump and his vile presidency.
Where Premier Eby ultimately failed is that he presumed the voters were stupid. He presumed the voters would not see the obvious cynicism of his attempt to take advantage of the disarray of the Conservative Party. He presumed voters wouldn’t find that cynicism odious and unworthy of someone who held the office of the premier of the province of British Columbia.
He arrogantly assumed that British Columbians didn’t know that his government had a functioning majority government that had just passed the provincial budget and was cruising through the rest of the calendar year with a wafer-thin legislative agenda that would withstand any confidence vote for at least another six months, if not more.
He further assumed that voters were too dumb to understand that bilateral relations with the United States are largely led by the Government of Canada, not the premier of Canada’s third-largest province. And British Columbians, polls show, prefer the approach taken by Prime Minister Mark Carney to any evidence of an effort that has been proposed by Premier Eby.
The public is smart about these things because the stakes are incredibly high, and we have been dealing with President Trump for a long time now. We know when there is a serious effort to protect Canadians and when people are just putting on a skit.
Premier Eby treated the public as though they were dullards who didn’t understand how our government works. He presumed that the public wouldn’t recognize crass politics when they saw it and that he could get away with a cheap electoral stunt to refresh his mandate and escape the coming collapse of his support within his own party.
Voters are smart, and they have an instinct for nonsense and insincerity when they see it. And they take great pleasure in holding accountable and punishing those who abuse the awesome privilege of serving in public office, to simply serve themselves in such a transparently dishonourable way.
Enter Lorne Doerkson
In the end, this whole exercise was doomed from the beginning, in part, because waiting for him on the debate stage was the new Conservative Leader, Lorne Doerkson. I imagine that at NDP headquarters, they have a hard drive somewhere with a dossier assembled on each of the 25 most probable B.C. Conservative leaders in the province, ready to go just in case one of those 25 people were to emerge as a leader for the party anytime soon.
I also imagine that the name Lorne Doerkson is not affixed to any of those 25 dossiers. Why? Because he is a leader, not like the others who we have seen in recent leadership campaigns.
He is a deviation, in a good way, from what politics has too frequently become. He isn’t a braggart. He isn’t a camera-hungry creature of the media. He isn’t somebody with a massive social media presence who obsesses about clicks and likes and thumbs up and subscribers and chatter. He isn’t a bomb-throwing partisan who lives off making people angry and stirring up irrational passions toward imaginary problems with unworkable solutions that entrench conflicts forever.
He’s a normal two-term MLA who was born in New Westminster, raised in Salmon Arm and lives in Williams Lake (population 11,000). He was a Rotary president and a rodeo announcer who was voted Williams Lake Stampede volunteer of the year in 2019. He spent 20 years working in local media at community newspapers in central and northern British Columbia, where he later became a financial planner before running for office in 2020.
He’s a humble, high-integrity, highly decent, hardworking, good guy who cares more about getting things done than being loved by pure ideologues or hated by those he disagrees with. In contemporary politics, he is an anti-hero of sorts to the overly righteous, overly loud crankiness of the noisy political norm.
In the face of David Eby’s cynical election call and divisive campaign of class warfare — which included a trashy and cheap attack on one of the greatest British Columbians we have ever known in the person of philanthropist Jimmy Pattison — Lorne Doerkson stood out as a refreshing new beginning for a province and a political culture in need of normalcy.
Turning the page
British Columbia has deep challenges, and the solutions won’t come easily for our new premier-elect. His new team, new caucus, new cabinet, and officials will wrestle with some of the biggest challenges that we have seen in our province in a generation. But the voters have sent a clear message that they want to turn the page on David Eby and the NDP and they offered Mr. Doerkson a massive mandate with seats across urban, suburban, and rural British Columbia to work together and get things done.
Premier Eby bet that British Columbians wouldn’t notice what he was doing with this election call. They noticed and fired him. For Lorne Doerkson, the work has just begun. If he governs as he campaigned, as a humble and thoughtful fixer of the myriad problems that the province faces, it will be a welcome fresh start for a province that so desperately needs one.
