Kirk LaPointe: You’re in charge now, David Eby. What’s the plan?

When David Eby was sworn in as British Columbia premier two weeks ago with a reed-thin majority, he implied he’d absorbed the rebuke from voters and promised to “hit the ground running.”

Presumably, though, he did not mean in the other direction.

Little suggests his relative absence from the scene since election day is due to attending rehabilitation sessions to shed the Dave-knows-best leadership habits known by friends and foes alike. But rid them he must, particularly his pathological treatment of the economy as a nuisance to be averted except when raiding the coffers. The premier has much to do as he learns.

Early indications are not promising. He has delayed the resumption of the legislature until February, meaning MLAs will have taken a break of five months by the time there is a speech from the throne and eight months since a question period.

His most perceptible early effort has focused on job creation—for his caucus. All told, he has found gigs with 48 salary boosts for 47 caucus members as ministers, parliamentary secretaries, speaker, and a raft of legislative roles, some of them double duties. These are convenient golden handcuffs to prevent any defections to the Conservative Party of B.C. to enable it to form government, so tenuous is his 48-seat position in a 93-seat legislature.

He has a cabinet of 27, but they do not have mandate letters. He bafflingly wants to talk to the Green Party before writing them, even though he doesn’t numerically need their two MLAs, at least for the time being. Ministers instead have bland marching orders and best wishes for the holiday season until something more definitive is crafted.

Mind you, that didn’t stop the rookie culture minister and newly appointed finance minister (the only minister with any tangible business experience) from hitting the ground running to Hollywood 72 hours into their jobs. They scampered on short notice to promise more to an industry that shrewdly shops until some government out there drops. Little has emerged about the trip, but it is presumed they followed through on an election campaign promise to increase the Production Services Tax Credit for film and television creators to 36 percent from 28 percent. Which fits the province’s approach to the economy of spending, supporting, and subsidizing, as opposed to investing, innovating, and invigorating.

In his early days, Eby joined the anxious national lament on Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs and responded by pledging to seek further diversification of B.C.’s already diverse trading partnerships. Geography and demography tilt comparably more of our trade (more than one-third) to Asia, although it has declined somewhat post-pandemic. On tariffs, Eby will be a sideline spectator in watching Justin Trudeau, and most likely in the cheap seats with binoculars on Pierre Poilievre, as they do all the heavy lifting. He will participate with other premiers in the so-called “Left-Right” Canadian strategy to lobby American officials. Left-Right sounds like a deft boxing manoeuvre but is really closer to a dance step—no stepping on toes, and meet with the most like-minded Democrats—even if the last Democrats that Trump listened to date back his own days as one. On trade, even with all the levers of power, results would be years away, and it has not helped that the previous John Horgan government shuttered some Asian trade posts, or that the BC NDP has only appointed junior ministers of state to the trade role.

There are, meantime, some consequential, drawn-out economic headwinds Eby largely ignored in taking the reins in 2022 and squandering the surplus left by Horgan. The post-pandemic period has been one of spending beyond the province’s means: B.C. now is deficit-ridden ($8.9 billion through the first quarter of 2024-25) and has the worst as a percentage of its GDP in Canada (2.1 percent, up from 1.8 percent in the COVID emergency) after a decade as the country’s economic leader. Operational debt was eliminated in 2018-19 as the BC NDP took power; now it stands at $63 billion and growing.^{1The Business Council of British Columbia notes that taxpayer-supported debt will be 22 percent of GDP in 2024-25 and 28.8 percent by 2026-27.}

In broad outline: money is either heading out of the door or not coming in any longer.

There is nothing in the hopper to offset a promised tax change, which has come on top of changes earlier this year to increase the Climate Action Tax Credit and the B.C. Family Benefit Bonus and raise the threshold for exemption under the Property Transfer Tax.^{2The tax change would see households earning less than $200,000 or individuals earning less than $125,000 increase their threshold of tax-free income to $22,580 from the current $10,000.}

One promise that appears conveniently shelved was Eby’s desperate concession to commit to eliminating the consumer portion of the carbon tax. “People need support right now,” he said as the campaign started in September. He needed Ottawa’s approval to remove the legal backstop. Eby now merely says he’ll get around to it, either with this federal government or the next one, and that his government is focused on dealing with Ottawa on the tariff threat. Of course, the election was confirmed more than a month ago; the tariff threat is a week old. The tax rises again on April 1.^{3Another promised $1,000 for households or $500 for individuals “each and every year”—viewed as some sort of grocery rebate—was useful in the campaign to suggest his government acknowledged affordability problems and could put money in the pockets of British Columbians as winter help. But the lawyer and longtime minister didn’t realize, or didn’t say, that the measure can’t be delivered by cabinet order; it’s a legislative matter, so we’re looking at February at the earliest to follow through on that $1.8 billion expense.}

Little wonder that even former NDP premier Glen Clark, in the private sector for two decades now but still a party member, said the government has to focus on wealth creation instead of wealth redistribution. That is rather like asking Marianne Faithfull to sing like Adele.

The recent campaign did nothing to illuminate any prospect of a prosperity plan. The LNG megaproject, massive Site C hydroelectric dam, and major TransMountain Pipeline twinning are largely onstream already, and there are no megaprojects in the wings to prop up the economy in the meantime.

Revenue jumped during the two years of the pandemic, in part through federal assistance, but has fallen back and now resembles the typical small progression. Spending, though, jumped and has kept rising. For every private sector job we’ve added in the last five years in the province, we’ve seen three in the public sector. Alarm bells are ringing about debt servicing costs.^{4The Business Council of British Columbia observes that debt servicing now is “roughly equivalent to the child welfare budget or about half the K-12 school education budget. It is more than is spent on protection of persons and property.” S & P Global warns that “with operating deficits of more than 5 percent of operating revenues and after-capital deficits of about 20 percent of total revenues, B.C.’s budgetary performance will be the weakest of its peers, both domestically and internationally.”}

Even Invest Alberta, the successful Crown corporation in attracting business to the province, has set up shingle in Vancouver with plans to poach. After all, an Angus Reid Institute poll earlier this year found roughly one in three British Columbians—and one in two young people—seriously looking to leave. Why not businesses, too? Corporate tax here is 12 percent; one block east, it’s 8 percent.

Even though unaffordability is the chief concern of British Columbians—high taxes, super-high housing costs, comparably low incomes—the opposition Conservative Party of BC (with its own caucus fighting already underway) regrettably did little to make the economy a campaign centrepiece. It was a lost opportunity, because there was a meal to make of it, and it is reasonable to surmise that the failure to do so cost the Conservatives an opportunity to govern.

Problem is, the people who got the opportunity to govern from that campaign aren’t making the economy a centrepiece, either. Four more years on this trajectory ought to make the rest of the country pity us.