Yesterday, BC premier David Eby went to Government House to request a dissolution in one of the most cynical moves I have ever witnessed politically, and now BC is dealing with simultaneous provincial and municipal elections. No, seriously. Municipalities vote on the 17th, and then provincial polls are on the 24th, which is suicidally stupid for any political operatives because your volunteers are now split between different campaigns. Eby made a big song and dance about how this is “necessary” because of the Trump threat—because apparently the thought to try and take a card from Doug Ford, who called his own unnecessary early election because he was worried that if Pierre Poilievre won the election federally then Ontario voters would turf him because of the silly notion that in Ontario, there is often a pattern of having opposite parties in charge federally and provincially (which is not a hard and fast rule in any way).
Of course, the real reason is that the opposition in BC is in complete disarray, and Eby wanted to take full advantage of that fact. The BC Conservatives just had their leader resign, and there are two other contenders on the right side of the spectrum—the centre-right CentreBC, which took in a lot of those Conservative defectors and was standing up a new party and had some big-name organisers attached, and the far-right OneBC. And then things got weird. A bunch of CentreBC MLAs, including the leader, headed back to the Conservatives now that Kerry-Lynne Findlay is gone, leaving just one CentreBC MLA in place, who automatically became the leader, and she’s not going back to the Conservatives, having been burned by them too badly. And then Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s husband left the Conservatives to join OneBC, which also gives you an idea about where the pair of them should have been all along. (Leader profiles here).
I don’t for a minute believe that the BC Conservatives’ problems were solve by Findlay’s departure, and that the party still has no existential ideology, and that they only exist to try and find advantageous voter math, which didn’t work for them the last time, and is unlikely to continue to work for them. (Timeline of the drama here). Parties need to have a reason to exist other than “We’re not the NDP,” and “uniting the right” keeps leading to all kinds of problems because there are whole segments on the right that you DO NOT want to “unite” with, and lo, both the UCP in Alberta and the BC Conservatives have found this out the hard way, and yet neither party seems to have learned this lesson. We’ve let mainstream centre-right parties radicalise and slide towards fascism in order to appease these worst possible elements (the alternative is that these worst possible elements simply don’t vote, and they want those votes), and nobody seems to have woken up to the fact that this is a very bad thing that we do not want in a Liberal democracy. And yet, nobody seems willing to stop them. Just the worst possible outcome, and it’s playing out in real-time in BC as this cynical exercise gets underway.
Ukraine Dispatch:
Russia killed eight in attacks on three cities in Ukraine’s industrial heartland, hitting industries like steelmaking. President Zelenskyy is warning of a new major attack on the way. Ukraine is asking the UN to help with Russia’s forced starvation in occupied Oleshky.
Noteworthy:
- Carney is demonstrating the problem of Liberal arrogance in saying that he has a “mandate to build faster” as he guts environmental protections.
- The AFN national chief is warning the government that their major projects legislation requires consultation, and that economic growth can’t be at their expense.
- Matt Gurney games out a possible future war scenario with Russia looking to escalate to de-escalate while America waffles as a reliable ally.
Carney's arrogance is showing.And this whole argument is bullshit. We stopped building because big companies decided to focus on share buybacks and maximizing dividends rather than new capital investments. Justin Trudeau didn't cause that to happen.www.thestar.com/politics/mar…
— Dale Smith (@journodale.bsky.social) 2026-09-23T03:57:01.470Z
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