Provincial party leaders square off in ‘civil’ and lone TV debate

'Foot traffic in [downtown] Victoria is down 60%. People don’t want to go downtown because they don’t feel safe. That’s not normal.' — John Rustad On-the-fence voters hoping a TV leaders’ debate might sway them into one camp or another may or may not be closer to a resolution if they watched last night’s 90-minute political presentation, which is kinda par for the course, considering how tight this race is.

Ten days before BC’s provincial election not this Sat., but next, it’s looking like it could be a photo-finish with the winner coming out on top by a snout.

Hate to break it to you, but it’s not going to be Sonia Furstenau.

The Greens don’t have enough, er… horses in the race to cover all ridings to mathematically win, so Furstenau—the longest-serving leader of this class—admittedly is in this to play spoiler and to build for the future.

“By electing Greens, we make sure that neither the Conservatives nor the NDP get all of the power,” she told reporters after the debate.

“We were able to lay out many, many points,” Conservative Party Leader John Rustad said after he left the stage. He set a bit of a grim tone when he got on that stage by describing an overdose death he said he saw on the streets of Vancouver en route to the CBC studios.

The only televised debate slated for this campaign produced your typical Canadian civility, eh, sprinkled with a bit of tension between Rustad and the NDP’s David Eby, who often turned his body directly toward the Conservative capo in what his handlers likely told him would be perceived by viewers as a sign of strength. Up to the viewers whether they saw it that way.

‍ Rustad says today's crime is 'not normal'

Without getting into specifics, Rustad focused on crime and overt public drug use. The tragedy he mentioned he had witnessed earlier in the evening “is not normal,” he said.

“This is not the British Columbia that I grew up in,” he told reporters after the debate, pointing to Victoria as the textbook example of a central business district with a dire dilemma.

“Foot traffic in [downtown] Victoria is down 60% Rustad said. “People don’t want to go downtown because they don’t feel safe. That’s not normal.”

Rustad and Eby spent much of the evening playing not so nicely with each other, which was in contrast to the bouquets the NDP leader had for Furstenau: several times, Eby politely declared “Sonia’s right” before correcting Rustad on this or that, or calling him an “anti-vaxxer.”

Rustad, who previously had said he regretted getting vaccinated against COVID-19, responded to that one by saying “I'm not anti-vax, I'm anti-mandate.”

Bleak, thy name sometimes is politics

There was some Debbie-Downerness to this debate with Rustad talking about how supposedly rotten we’ve all got it here—so rotten that one in two young people he said, wants to leave BC for greener pastures—which prompted Furstenau to say she feels like she lives “in a different place from John Rustad—his vision of BC is one that is dark and gloomy,” she said.

“If we want young people to stay here, we have to give them a reason to stay,” she said.

Hoping to give the TV and streaming viewers a reason to stay, Furstenau was clear and hopeful in her presentation, while the boys to her right duked it out, although, in her opinion, in a yesterday’s way of doing things, she said.

“What these two are offering is either more of the same or back to the past.”

Furstenau said Rustad, who has talked about repealing BC legislation that adopts the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), has a “colonial” way of looking at First Nations’ rights and that overall, “Rustad’s vision for the province is one rooted somewhere in 1957.”

Eby spent much of the night confronting Rustad

Looking confident and comfortable behind his dais, Eby went after Rustad, calling him a climate-change denier and accusing him of presenting a platform made of “pixie dust” because it had not been publicly costed.

Eby reminded viewers Rustad has been part of a BC Liberal government that had years to solve some of today’s major concerns—housing, homelessness, and drug deaths—in their infancies yet made little progress, he said.

That allowed Rustad to zing back, “I’ll ask you this: in seven years of NDP has anything been better? Has housing improved?”

Eby painted Rustad as a conspiracy theorist just looking for an axe to cut government spending while implementing the Tory high-level tax break strategy.

Rustad tried to woo viewers with promises of a $3K tax exemption in the provincial tax system by 2029, while Eby spoke of a $1K tax cut.

Eby who has cut, or at least walked a tad back the NDP stance on drug decriminalization, said his pivot is a sign his party can rethink policy when presented with new evidence.

“We’re going to have to try different things,” he told the audience.

The debate was broadcast on all the major TV networks and also streamed live. It was moderated by Shachi Kurl of the Angus Reid Institute, who asked individual questions that the candidates did not see beforehand and followed by overseeing pockets of debate.

Watch the BC leaders debate here on CPAC.