Vaughn Palmer: First few days of B.C. campaign a disaster for David Eby

This week NDP MLA Niki Sharma, left, and Premier David Eby kept reminding people that the Conservatives have an interim leader. Yet, it was the NDP that decided the election timing. Photo by Felipe Fittipaldi /Government of British Columbia

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VICTORIA — The New Democrats set a new low for shamelessness this week when they complained that the B.C. Conservatives were being led in the election by a mere interim leader, not a permanent one.

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NDP Leader David Eby had called the snap election Tuesday, a mere 48 hours after Kerry Lynne Findlay resigned the Conservative party leadership.

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The Conservatives had no time to do anything other than pick an interim leader, which they did in the person of MLA Lorne Doerkson.

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Yet there was Eby this week, complaining that voters won’t know what they are getting because Doerkson is merely interim.

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“Isn’t that a bit rich?” the CBC’s Katie DeRosa asked Eby. “They have interim leader because you called the snap election, which many people say is catching them with one hand behind their back? So how can you lob that attack when it was your choice on the timing?”

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Eby didn’t back down.

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“They want a blank cheque about who actually their leader will be and the signatory on that cheque will be the same party members that sent Kerry-Lynne Findlay in as leader. That’s just the reality. That’s not an attack line, that is just a fact.”

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To accept the premier’s blank cheque claim as a “fact” you’d have to believe that if Doerkson leads the Conservatives to their first majority government under their own name in 100 years, the party would then turn on him and pick someone else as leader.

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Not surprisingly, Eby’s complaint failed to connect. So MLA Niki Sharma picked up the theme on Friday morning, with an even more preposterous complaint.

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The Conservatives had forced out their own leader and because — get this — “they knew an election was coming,” said Sharma.

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So you see it was a Conservative plot, not a rushed election call by the New Democrats, that set the stage for Doerkson’s leadership.

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Sharma’s news conference veered sideways when a reporter drew a comparison to the undemocratic way Eby had assumed the B.C. NDP leadership four years ago.

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His campaign team conspired with the NDP brass to disallow the candidacy of party activist Anjali Appadurai, with the result that Eby was acclaimed leader without a vote of any kind.

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At least Doerkson was chosen by a vote — of the Conservative caucus, later reaffirmed by a vote of the party board.

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If the New Democrats were sincerely concerned about his status as an interim leader, they should not have called the snap election.

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“There is no precedent for this in Canadian history,” as Andrew Coyne wrote in the Globe and Mail Friday. “No prime minister or premier in possession of a majority has ever called an election while his chief rival was without a permanent leader.”

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But, as with the decision to trample the campaign dynamic of this year’s civic election, Eby has no more regard for electoral fairness than he does for balanced budgets.