Pedestrians walk past the third provincial election-related sign to be put up outside the house of billionaire Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, in Vancouver, on Oct. 10.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
A few weeks ago, Lululemon co-founder Chip Wilson posted a sign outside his luxurious waterfront Vancouver mansion denouncing David Eby and his NDP government’s left-leaning ways.
“Eby will tell you the Conservatives are ‘Far Right’ but neglects saying that the NDP is ‘Communist,’ " the sign read, quotation errors included.
One can only conclude the sign was supposed to sway people to vote Conservative in Saturday’s provincial election. The sign was soon vandalized. So, Mr. Wilson put up another criticizing the NDP for giving away money it collected from citizens. It was soon defaced, too.
Recently, he put up a third sign, which criticizes the NDP for not being able to balance its budgets, saying that fact alone should preclude them from telling people what to do with their lives.
He “neglects saying” that the Conservative platform includes deficits over the next year or two that are even greater than the ones the NDP are proposing.
Those irritating facts.
Mr. Wilson doubled down in a Vancouver Sun column on Wednesday, accusing the NDP of targeting the “uber-successful one per cent” and saying that their desire to “redistribute wealth … breeds laziness.”
It must be terrible for Mr. Wilson to have to live in a home that has appreciated so little in value during the NDP’s seven-year reign. In 2023, it was assessed at $74-million. This year, it was only worth $81-million. Communist rule in B.C. is everything you’ve heard, and worse.
This week, another titan of the Vancouver business community voiced his displeasure with the NDP, and urged people to vote Conservative. Eric Carlson, the CEO of the developer Anthem Properties, penned an op-ed that ran in the Victoria Times Colonist.
It was, umm, interesting.
Some of what he had to say did feel connected in a real way to the concerns some have about the direction the province is heading. He talked about open drug use, for instance, a problem seemingly exacerbated by the NDP’s decriminalization experiment.
“City sidewalks are owned by mentally ill drug addicts, lying in their spit, vomit, and excrement, ably supported by now-legal drug pushers presiding over their demise,” he wrote.
His empathy knows no bounds.
Mr. Carlson blames high home prices and rents on the NDP, and overflowing emergency rooms, too. He suggests free speech has been stifled under Mr. Eby’s party and holds the NDP responsible for ballooning deficits and debt. He suggested an “exploding” rat problem was the NDP’s fault, too. His diatribe included a denunciation of the NDP’s efforts to meet its obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through changes to the Land Act and Water Act.
“[This election] is a defining moment,” Mr. Carlson writes. “Is humanity a community of individuals freely pursuing their lives or a collective herd being channelled by a man with a legislative whip?”
Who knew all that was on the ballot?
I can’t denounce Mr. Carlson for all his ramblings. He expresses the views of many who believe Mr. Eby has moved the NDP too far to the left. At the same time, he ignores moves that Mr. Eby has made that acknowledge the party’s mistakes. His climbdown on aspects of decriminalization is just one example. His plan to scrap the carbon tax if the federal carbon tax disappears is another.
Mr. Carlson suggests the NDP is scaring developers away through taxes and misguided policies, while ignoring the fact it was the first government in North America to effectively outlaw single-family zoning in a move to encourage densification and the massive development opportunities that flow from it.
Like Mr. Wilson, Mr. Carlson also prefers to look past the many problems with the Conservative Party he is endorsing, including candidates that hold racist and extremist views – not to mention a leader who is a climate-change denier and has said he regrets getting the “so-called vaccine” against COVID-19.
But that’s okay, apparently, because Conservative Leader John Rustad has promised to get rid of all those awful taxes that developers such as Mr. Carlson are upset about – even though many of them are levied by municipalities. The Conservatives will abolish homeless encampments, without articulating where these folks will go. It’s all better, apparently, than what the NDP has been trying to do under the advice and guidance of the province’s most experienced drug and addiction experts.
I have no issue with some of the wealthiest people in B.C. criticizing the NDP – they’re fair game. But they’d have much more credibility if they at least acknowledged the undeniable bias and self-interest in their comments.
The fact is, they are every bit the ideologues they accuse the government of being.