Inside the NDP's Epic Snap Election Defeat

As an interim leadership team takes over, the party looks for answers.
By Andrew MacLeod.
Former MLA Ravi Kahlon says his feelings about the BC NDP's big loss in Saturday's election have been flipping between sad and angry.
"I'm not one of those people that's going to play armchair quarterback and try to analyze everything," Kahlon said. "The premier made a decision. It didn't work out, clearly, and part of being a leader is making tough decisions and living by them when they work and dealing with the consequences when they don't, and that's unfortunate for him in this situation."
Kahlon, the MLA for Delta North since 2017, was a key cabinet minister in David Eby's government. In August, after several years in charge of jobs and economic growth and previously being responsible for housing and municipal affairs, Eby made him the health minister.
But when Eby called the snap election in September, Kahlon surprised many by choosing not to run again, saying he wanted to be more available for his family.
Kahlon didn't participate in the election, other than to support the NDP candidate in Delta North, firefighter Todd Schierling.
When the preliminary results came in, voters had replaced the NDP's slim majority with a Conservative government that will hold about two-thirds of the seats in the legislature.
"What I hear from people is we would have loved to have the additional two years of a government to be able to do some important things, and I think that's what people are frustrated by," Kahlon said this week.
Asked if he was among those frustrated, Kahlon said he "would have loved to continue to have been the minister of health."
"I quite frankly in the short time fell in love with the file and saw a lot of opportunities and things I think we could have done better.
"But it's not to be."
Eby has taken full responsibility for the decision to call the election early and the subsequent election defeat. But some observers have noted he appeared to be isolated, lacking people who could give him the straight advice he needed to make good decisions.
At the time of the election call, his chief of staff was Andrew Mercier, a labour lawyer and former MLA who ran in Langley-Willowbrook and lost to Conservative Jody Toor.
Mercier had taken over as Eby's chief of staff in July from Cheryl Oates, who had done the job on an interim basis since January while Eby's permanent chief of staff, Jim Rutkowski, was on medical leave.
Oates, who had previously been the chief communications adviser for former Alberta NDP premier Rachel Notley, served out the commitment she'd made but chose not to continue when Rutkowski's medical leave was extended.
Eby picked Oates to be the campaign director for the snap election.
While Eby may have been short on trusted advisers, others have argued it's simplistic to blame everything on one person and that the caucus and party could have done more to assert themselves.
Geoff Meggs, who was former premier John Horgan's chief of staff and co-authored a book on Dave Barrett's premiership, offered his views on Substack: "While some New Democrats will be tempted to blame everything on Eby, the larger question is how a government with a two-seat majority allowed what looks in retrospect to be an act of collective suicide, triggered by the decisions of a single man."
Or as Andrea Reimer, a former Vancouver city councillor, wrote on Facebook: "Eby wielded an enormous amount of power over people and institutions and the people who had the power to hold him more accountable didn't appear to have the willingness to use that power to hold him accountable."
Many people inside the party had opportunities to ask harder questions about Eby's approach to leadership and press for better, but mostly failed to do so, she wrote.
"If the party treats this as one person's loss rather than a structural issue owned by cabinet, caucus, and party leadership both macro and micro, the NDP will be living with the fallout of this election implici...