Colby Cosh: David Eby’s election call is perfectly legitimate

I’m not an expert on British Columbia. The map of B.C. in my imagination is not strong on detail; it could best be described as medieval, perhaps Tolkienesque. There are cute little drawings in appropriate places of street junkies, and Chinese dumplings, and retired Alberta truck dealers on skis. But I can summarize my views on Premier David Eby’s snap election call in British Columbia easily.

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Which is to say: I almost literally couldn’t believe he would go through with it. Last Tuesday I was careful, to the point of being slightly frantic, to make sure the premier had physically visited Government House to meet with the Lieutenant Governor and perform the niceties.

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“Is this really happening? Is everybody just assuming this is really happening? He can back out, right? Just turn around the limousine and … go back to being premier of British Columbia?”

It’s the reaction that has been, to me, fascinating and in some ways encouraging. It is very hard to find flat-out defenders of the early election call — that is, independent commentators who will defend it on an ethical basis. I say this as someone who gives politicians in our Westminsterian political system very wide leeway to “go to the country.” At one time every literate person would have understood what I meant by that phrase: this was the recognized terminology for it — “going to the country” to consult with the people electorally in an unfamiliar, uncertain or dangerous political situation. In his press conference following his Government House visit, Eby evoked this tradition, saying, “There is never a bad time to go to British Columbians to ask the right direction.”

Well, all right, buddy boy, but you had better be sure that the public mood supports such consultation in itself. If it appears to be a matter of pure opportunism, or of catching the opposition with its trousers down, you might lose the resulting contest of popular trust pretty easily. So is there a single independent commentator, pundit or informed observer who doesn’t interpret Eby’s snap election as opportunism? I can’t find one: on this issue the left-coast punditariat and its house journals appear to have checked out completely and entered a state of total alienation from the New Democratic Party.

(Granted, they have never identified with it completely, nor should they, and a lot of them are probably diehard Green voters. It has become slightly difficult in the 21st century, all across Canada, to find people who are New Democrats as a matter of core identity and pride.)

The Vancouver Sun’s Alec Lazenby was able to find a few NDP “strategists” and veterans who were willing to endorse Eby’s Trump-centric pretext for the election. Very well. Let’s give them credit! The strategy experts would be putting themselves in a risky position if their income actually depended on being right; if Eby loses the poor devils would, in a perfect world, be heavily obliged to find honest non-“strategy” work in the face of the disaster.

But we all know this won’t happen either way, because professional political strategists are fully and universally expected to be 10 per cent dumber about politics than a random cab driver. What’s more, Eby’s pretext is absurd on its face. If he loses the quickie election, will Canadians and British Columbians interpret that as a triumph for Trump? Or will they simply conclude that Eby is disliked and arrogant?

The B.C. election has flushed out another gang of lamebrains, namely, the pseudo-conservatives and historically illiterate centrists who believe a first minister should not have the power to go to the country at all without meeting some definitive list of conditions. They propose that this would happen by devising a self-enforcing “convention” that would bestow power to refuse an election on the lieutenant governor. Many Canadian governments have tried to adopt fixed election dates by statute, but these always have a constitutionally necessary escape hatch, because of the axiom that an LG should act on a first minister’s advice until that minister loses the confidence of the assembly.

And, as it turns out, the escape hatch always gets used sooner or later, because there are in fact times when a ministry needs to go to the country. (The U.K. itself passed a Fixed-Term Parliaments Act in 2011, quickly and foreseeably became incapable of being governed, and condemned the law to oblivion without regret.)

I do not see how anyone can complain that Eby’s tactic is possible, given that the B.C. electorate has the power to punish him and may very well use it. The real argument of the pseudo-conservatives, the people who want our system to be more American and who wish to give an appointed viceroy some of the powers of a president, is that those icewine-swilling dunderheads out west will be too stupid to see through Eby’s manoeuvre and deny him power.

I guess we’ll see! Like Eby’s supporters, they will have questions to answer if Eby’s gambit is disproven on the chessboard — an event which would suggest that democracy already offers a strong practical safeguard against snap elections pursued for naked partisan advantage.

National Post

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