It is mid-afternoon on an overcast Monday (Aug. 19) and tourists from around the world are squeezing themselves through Fan Tan Alley in Victoria's Chinatown.
Less than a metre separates the shops on either side of the walkway. B.C. Premier David Eby B次元官网网址� who has played in two Indie bands himself B次元官网网址� has just ducked underneath a low ceiling beam to browse records in the vintage vinyl shop Turntable, while talking about his leadership style.
A man wearing a Montreal Expos baseball cap and his daughter approach.
"Where are you guys from?" Eby asks. "Quebec," they reply "Welcome to British Columbia," Eby responds. "I hope you enjoy your visit. The hat should have been a giveaway."
"Unfortunately, the team is not there anymore," the father responds. "No, it is unfortunate," Eby adds.
The pair then poses with Eby for a picture before parting.
"I tell Mr. (Fran莽ois) Legault (the premier of Quebec) that I ran into you," he says, drawing laughs.
The store, plastered with posters, raises the obvious question: If Eby is the voice and face of the provincial government, which band leader mirrors his style the most?
"So Nick Simons (MLA for Powell River-Sunshine Coast), who has his own gold record, describes political parties as a choir of soloists, because everybody kind of comes in with their own work," Eby says. "The best to think about me is more as a choir conductor, may be like a Polyphonic Spree (led by Tim DeLaughter), like a very large band with a lot of voices and trying to ensure that everybody is able to sing together, but also have their voices heard."
Politics is not a like a four-piece rock band, he adds.
But politics, like popular music, has its own sound, symbols and signs. British Columbians are about a month away from the start of an election campaign whose eventual winner will help shape the province for the next four years. The campaign to come out ahead on Oct. 19 is already underway B次元官网网址� maybe not officially, but certainly in practice.
"We are in the pre-election period, there is no question about it," Eby says, adding that the "day job" of governing does not stop, pointing to issues such as wildfires, health care and housing. "But it's just extra work to make sure that we are getting the message out, so that people know what the choices (are) in October."
Eby had spoken those words earlier in the afternoon after he and local B.C. NDP candidate Diane Gibson had canvassed the main shopping street of Oak Bay in the riding of Oak Bay-Gordon Head.
The riding is open after incumbent MLA Murray Rankin, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, announced his retirement. It has had a history of electing MLAs from across the political spectrum, and the B.C. NDP would like to keep it as it looks to maintain dominance on Vancouver Island.
But elections in British parliamentary systems have long stopped being the aggregate of local races. Instead, they have increasingly focused on party leaders. If the polls are correct, provincial New Democrats have an advantage with Eby, whose own favourability ratings are better than those of his party.
If New Democrats are banking on Eby's leadership, several questions emerge, starting with how he would define his own leadership style.
"I think I'm at my best when I'm able to bring people together that have different perspectives and try to find a path forward that is going to work...and that's combined with just an unwillingness to accept that we can't go ahead with a solution to a problem," he says at the record store.
The immediate problem confronting Eby's government is winning the election in the fall against a backdrop of multiple issues. Some might be particular to British Columbia, like wildfires, droughts). Others B次元官网网址� like housing, health care and affordability B次元官网网址� are not, but are perhaps more pronounced.
Leadership ultimately involves the acquisition and exercise of power B次元官网网址� the ability to get things done against resistance B次元官网网址� and Eby has been exercising his power since November 2022 when he became premier with almost two years left in the mandate won by his predecessor John Horgan.
While Eby could have chosen to call an early election, he instead chose to govern with the promise to demonstrably improve the lives of British Columbians.
Some 21 months later, the B.C. Conservatives under John Rustad have come from nowhere to within three points of the B.C. NDP according to a Research Co. poll released July 30. The Conservatives' rise from the fringes to becoming the main alternative in this year's election raises the question of whether Eby now regrets his decision not to call an early election.
"I don't regret it all," he says. "I introduce myself best to people when I'm doing the work that I do, as opposed to trying to tell them about what they should let me do. By demonstrating how I work and where we're going is the best way to for me and it's not unique to politics. It has been the case for my entire life."
Eby says many people approached him with various requests back in 2022, but nobody said they wanted an early election.
"(The) only reason I have ever wanted to be involved in this job is to actually get things done, to make life better for people, especially around housing," he says. "To go to an election that pretty clearly nobody wanted and felt more about politics than about making life better for people (made) the choice really obvious."
Eby adds the ability to "put certain pieces in place, to respond to the big issues that people are seeing" and show them how to resolve pressing health care and housing needs was a "once-in-a-life-time" opportunity.
Voters will judge in October what Eby and his government have made of this opportunity. So why should British Columbians give the B.C. NDP B次元官网网址� in power since 2017 B次元官网网址� another shot?
Eby says B.C.'s various challenges require a strong "coordinated, unified response" from the province.
"So just to be really specific, I don't think we are going to solve the health care crisis by cutting money out of the health care system," Eby says. "I don't think we are going to solve the housing crisis by turning people back over to the market and speculators and companies like AirBnB. I think that we're only going to be able to solve these problems if we work together. And that means believing that government can be a force to bring people together to address these serious issues, which I believe are actually solvable."
British Columbians have to decide which party offers the best solutions going forward, based in part on the policies Eby has already implemented.
"This is a crucially important election," Gibson writes on her website. "The (government) has taken concrete steps to address key issues: affordability, climate change and environment, healthcare, housing and homelessness, good jobs, and much more. We need to protect the (government's) ongoing work, and continue and expand it."
Eby confirms this framing.
"So because we are leading in housing starts nationally...we're going to be able to address the housing crisis," he says. "But abandoning the work that we are doing, for example, on housing at a time when we are adding more people to the province than we have in the last 30 years, it means that things are going to get worse. It's going to get harder to find a place to rent. It's going to get more expensive to find a place to buy."
Looming behind the specific issues are constraints of the future, such as a growing but aging society with fewer workers, and choices of the past. Eby acknowledges both aspects.
"The shortage of skilled workers to be able to deliver programs in the way that we want to be able to deliver them has been really a challenge to the agenda we've put forward," he says before pointing to various solutions such as recruiting and training more health care workers.
Eby also describes his government's policies to the situation in health care and housing as "multi-year solutions" to problems that "were created over more than a decade through a series and a succession of choices by governments before us."
Including Horgan's government?
"John's time was really defined by the pandemic and the pandemic response, which we were very successful in, but also put a hold on a lot of other priorities that we had coming into government that we wanted to address, including housing, certainly from my perspective, " Eby says. "So these big challenges are multi-year in development and they are going to be multi-year in the solution."
Eby, in other words, is asking for more time.
British Columbians will answer his plea one way or another in October.
