Reality bites B.C.’s Keystone Kops premier

By Lethbridge Herald on October 22, 2025.

Doug Firby
Troy Media

David Eby’s record as premier is unravelling under the weight of his own decisions—from ferry contracts with China to a ballooning deficit and rising job losses. Voters are noticing.

The British Columbia premier is now facing harsh political realities, many of them the result of his own decisions.

Let’s start with his attempt to pass the buck on BC Ferries’ decision to order new boats from China. BC Ferries is a Crown corporation, Eby argued, and therefore makes its own business decisions without political input. But such a rationale is paper-thin. Crown corporation or not, BC Ferries is an entity of the B.C. government, and Eby’s government has the authority to veto the decisions it makes.

It’s like Canada Post. If it were to decide not to deliver mail to parts of the country because it needs to cut costs, would the federal government stand idly by and say, “Not our responsibility”? Not a chance.

Delivering a big juicy ferry-building contract to a communist country that engages in unfair trade practices and is devastating prairie canola farmers through punitive tariffs is, both optically and practically, an indefensible decision. By allowing this deal to stand, Eby looks like he is not really a Team Canada player.

He is also substantially wrong about the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Let’s be honest: a lot of the jobs that temporary foreign workers take in Canada are for work Canadian youth simply won’t do at the wage rates small businesses can afford. As Harry Bains, B.C.’s minister of labour from 2017 to 2024, said: “We cannot blame the foreign worker, because we brought them in, because their employer made the case that we need them. We can’t find local people.”

Nor is the problem the current federal government’s fault, as Eby alleges. Since the federal government tightened access to the TFWP in September 2024, about 11,000 temporary foreign worker positions were approved in B.C. in the first three months of 2025, down about 37 per cent from the same period in 2024. The rest of Canada has seen a 20.5 per cent decline.

As if these battles weren’t enough, Eby also finds himself at war with the striking B.C. General Employees’ Union, who wonder why the election candidate who promised an era of labour peace has become such a turncoat.

But of the errors in the tragicomedy of Eby’s premiership, the one that may ultimately sink his boat is not the ferry fiasco nor his duplicity on the TFWP. It is his government’s economic incompetence.

British Columbia’s provincial government is drowning in debt. In its budget for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, the deficit is projected to hit $10.9 billion. The government’s apparent lack of concern over this sea of red ink has led two of the world’s largest credit rating agencies to downgrade the provincial government’s credit rating for a second year in a row.

Meanwhile, Statistics Canada reports that B.C. suffered one of the largest employment declines in Canada in August, down by 16,000 jobs, or 0.5 per cent. It is the second consecutive month of job losses in B.C., with the unemployment rate rising to 6.2 per cent.

Three decades ago, a progressive politician in the United States, Bill Clinton, rode to the presidency with a simple, yet compelling message: It’s the economy, stupid. You can celebrate all the ideals and pursue all the social programs you’d like. But if it becomes harder for people to put bread on the table, and as a consequence suffer real declines in their standard of living, the buck will stop with this premier when the next election rolls around.

Sometimes, it seems Eby is in a competition with neighbouring Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to commit the most errors in office. It’s almost as if they are saying, “Yeah, I made mistakes, but vote for me anyway because I’m your tribe.” In B.C., the tribe is progressive; in Alberta, well, you know.

We’ll see what happens in Alberta. But in B.C., it appears Eby is almost systematically marching to his own political defeat, one bad decision at a time.

Doug Firby is an award-winning editorial writer with over four decades of experience working for newspapers, magazines and online publications in Ontario and western Canada. Previously, he served as Editorial Page Editor at the Calgary Herald.

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