Hi everyone, Mark Iype filling in for Wendy again this week.
Well, everyone has been counting down the days, but the 2024 British Columbia provincial election race has officially begun. And unsurprisingly, the focus immediately fell on the major issues voters will likely consider when casting their ballots: health care, affordability and public safety.
“If I earn the trust of British Columbians through the campaign, I will be laser-focused on reducing the costs they face everyday,” said New Democrat Leader David Eby at his first rally of the campaign on Saturday in Richmond.
Meanwhile, his main rival, BC Conservative Leader John Rustad kept his focus on Eby’s record over the last two years as premier.
“B.C. is at a crossroads,” he said from Vancouver’s Crab Park, near a long-running homeless encampment. “The question is, are we going to fight for our future, or continue to manage decline.”
With voters set to go to the polls on Oct. 19, there is a long road ahead for them to weigh the positions of the major parties.
As The Globe’s Justine Hunter reported on the weekend, B.C. voters “have not faced such stark political choices in at least a generation.”
As she wrote, some NDP policies have raised the ire of some powerful economic interests while the public, based on polling, appears to have “grown disaffected with the NDP on key issues – access to health care, the high cost of housing and the opioid crisis, to name a few.”
All of this has opened the door to Rustad, whose ascendance with the BC Conservatives was timed perfectly with the collapse of the BC Liberals, whose disastrous rebranding as BC United has left a hotly contested two-way race.
While the Greens are stuck chasing from far behind in third place according to the most recent polls, Leader Sonia Furstenau argues her party is the alternative to the “mud-slinging, fear and anger” coming from the NDP and Conservatives.
“The B.C. Greens have something else to offer, a vision of the province that can and should be the best place to live in the whole wide world,” she said from her first rally on the weekend in Victoria.
On Monday, the campaigns jumped right into the deep end, with Rustad promising a tax credit for renters and homeowners, while Eby promised to help more people get access to a family doctor, with several health care-related initiatives.
As pollster Shachi Kurl, president of the Angus Reid Institute, told The Globe, she expects the economy (affordability) and health care to be the top issues, but she also thinks the election will turn on leadership. But while her latest survey shows that Eby is viewed more favourably than Rustad, the NDP has some work to do when it comes to convincing voters the party should be given another turn to deal with the issues that matter to them.
This is the weekly British Columbia newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.