Conservative Leader John Rustad leaves after a campaign stop in Surrey, B.C., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. It's the last week of the British Columbia election campaign after a busy long weekend of promises for the B.C. Conservatives, including a new Children's Hospital for Surrey. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
SURREY, B.C. – New Democrat Leader David Eby is making a late appeal to voters to support the party even if they never have before, as the British Columbia election campaign enters it final days.
Eby said Tuesday there hasn’t been an election as significant “for a generation,” on the day John Rustad’s rival B.C. Conservative Party is poised to release its costed platform and just four days before election day on Saturday.
“This is an incredibly close election,” Eby said at a news conference at a housing construction project in Surrey. “Every vote is going to count, right cross the province.”
Elections BC says about 597,000 people have already voted in four days of advance polling.
Eby stood at the constuction site with a sign in the background parodying anti-NDP political billboards put up outside the home of Vancouver billionaire Chip Wilson during the campaign.
“John Rustad will give tax breaks to billionaires and speculators, that’s why they are making signs,” said the NDP billboard.
Eby’s Surrey stop focused on the NDP’s two major themes during the campaign – housing and attacking Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives, especially what it has depicted as conspiratorial views of the leader himself and several of his candidates.
Eby focused Tuesday on Surrey-South B.C. Conservative candidate Brent Chapman, whose social media posts about Palestinians, residential schools and mass shootings at a Quebec mosque and the Sandy Hook school in the U.S. have surfaced during the campaign.
“Just when I thought we had hit the bottom in terms of the conduct of Conservative candidates, the open racism, the hate for women, the hate for Indigenous people, Muslims, people who are gay, I could go on,” he said. “Brent Chapman, the Conservative candidate for Surrey-South, takes it a step further.”
In a 2017 post by Chapman about mass shootings he said: “I’m sorry but all the recent ‘mass shooting events’ have some other things in common: they all happened in the last eight years, they all have sketchy stories that change drastically.”
He mentioned the “Aurora, Sandy Hook and Quebec City” shootings and says “I really hope no one was actually killed at any of these events.”
Chapman explained his post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday by saying that what he had been “trying to say is the whirlwind of US media and commentary makes everything chaotic and confusing.”
Rustad has refused calls to drop Chapman as a candidate.
Eby asked voters “how would you feel” to wake up on Oct. 20 to a B.C. Conservative government that included “hateful” candidates and policies that he says will be “driving up your costs in every possible way.”
“For people who share the values of strong public services, of growing the economy while protecting the environment, of prioritizing and valuing science, whether it’s vaccine science or climate science, and that our kids get access to those materials in our classrooms as they learn about our world, I’m asking people to stick together and to think very carefully about where they place their X on that ballot,” he said.
Rustad has said he would eliminate the provincial carbon tax and exempt up to $3,000 a month in rent or mortgage payments from income taxes, while eliminating the provincial deficit within two terms of government.
The NDP and the Green Party have already released costed platforms that both forecast adding about $2.9 billion to the deficit in their first years.
The Greens say their platform would increase the province’s deficit by about $1.5 billion in its third year, while the NDP has said theirs would do so by an almost identical amount by 2026-2027.
B.C. budget deficit is projected to be a record $9 billion this year.
Green Leader Sonia Furstenau said Tuesday that Rustad and his Conservatives are “not serious enough to govern” and they “do not deserve the kind of support they’re getting right now.”
Furstenau said it’s “laughable” the Conservatives have taken so long to release their costed election platform.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 15, 2024.
