BC Conservative Leader John Rustad, left, and BC NDP Leader David Eby, centre, shake hands as BC Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau looks on before the televised leaders' debate, in Vancouver, on Oct. 8.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
A fresh poll arrived in B.C. just hours ahead of the one-and-only televised leaders’ debate of the province’s Oct. 19 election campaign.
It showed the New Democratic Party with a five-point lead over their chief challenger, the BC Conservatives. According to the Leger survey, the NDP was the choice of 47 per cent of eligible voters, to 42 per cent for the Conservatives.
This was a noticeable shift from earlier polls, which consistently showed the two parties in pretty much a neck-and-neck tie.
Of course, this meant Conservative Leader John Rustad needed a strong debate performance Tuesday to reverse NDP momentum and convince those who might be feeling more comfortable with the devil they knew that, no, in fact, it was the devil they didn’t know that well that was, in fact, the better choice.
The debate was also a chance for Mr. Rustad to introduce himself to a wider audience. Most of his political career he toiled in the background of the BC Liberal Party, even while in cabinet. After getting booted out of the caucus under new leadership in 2022, he jumped to the aimless and moribund Conservatives the following year. Quite miraculously, he gave them new life, largely feeding off the momentum created by their federal Conservative party cousins.
But Mr. Rustad is a staid, quiet and somewhat colourless fellow, certainly by political standards. It’s not generally a template for a great debate performance and on that front he delivered as expected.
The fact is, his opponents, NDP Leader David Eby and Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau, simply had too much ammunition with which to work, starting with the fact the Conservatives have failed to present voters with a fully costed campaign platform.
Imagine, a Conservative Party that had at its disposal a political foe in the NDP that is racking up debt at almost a record level, but undermining that gift by not telling voters how much their own pledges would cost. What an inexcusable blunder.
And you knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Eby began referencing some of the more extremist and disturbing comments linked to Mr. Rustad and some of his candidates. One of them, for instance, suggested a link between COVID vaccines and AIDS.
The NDP Leader landed blows around Mr. Rustad’s skepticism of climate change – just as another massive climate-change related hurricane is closing in on Florida. And then there was the podcast Mr. Rustad appeared on in which he indicated support for a Nuremburg-like trial for those responsible for introducing vaccine mandates in Canada – a comment he later walked back.
While none of this was particularly new fodder, it likely had more than a few undecided voters questioning whether Mr. Rustad and his party were a bridge too far for them.
This is not to say that Mr. Rustad’s performance was completely without merit. After seven years of NDP rule, housing is still uber expensive, health care is a mess, emergency rooms are closing for days at a time for lack of staff, young people are fleeing for more affordable environs. And, of course, people are overdosing on the streets and living in growing homeless encampments.
If you want to know where a lot of Conservative support has come from, just zero in on those two issues: drug use and crime and public disorder. Many are fed up with the NDP’s liberalized approach to these matters that have failed on multiple fronts. Some people are angry enough to give someone else a shot at solving these issues, even if they don’t know much about the party or their leader.
At the same time, people know nonsense when they hear it, and Mr. Rustad’s pronouncement that his party, if elected, will get rid of all homeless encampments immediately and put people in homes and in proper care facilities was just that. While wonderful in theory, there isn’t nearly the infrastructure needed to fulfill that promise. Not even close. It’s a pipedream, wrapped inside a fairy tale, sprinkled with pixie dust.
Third parties like the Greens often fare the best in debate settings like Tuesday’s – they have nothing to lose. Ms. Furstenau was the best performer of the three leaders. Sure, her policies are far too left for many, but she called out the two men on stage with her for the political bafflegab and cheap sloganeering in which they were indulging. Some of her ideas around health care deserve a more serious hearing.
British Columbians go to the polls in 10 days. After this debate, it could well be a status quo election, in terms of who forms government.