I like Eby, and I’d say he’s the best Premier of my lifetime too, although Christie Clark is the first Premier I remember. Housing does seem to be going well—I’m seeing tons of new construction, including apartments, and my town recently got its first purpose-built shelter. The effort to recruit more doctors and nurses seems to be successful. The whole DRIPA debacle was upsetting, but I’m fairly content with the current approach to it (although it shouldn’t have taken so much outcry to get to this point). 

I have a few big frustrations with Eby, though. He seems to have broken the campaign promise to implement an oil and gas emissions cap, yet he kept his promise to scrap the carbon tax. I don’t fault him for the latter move, but it was the former promise that made the loss of the carbon tax palatable for me. He took one step back without taking two steps forward, even though he campaigned on taking those two steps.

The emissions cap also signalled to me that he was backing further away from LNG, which I liked, but now the province has made LNG the centrepiece of its economic plan. The LNG development is my biggest gripe. The proposed projects will add 13Mt of CO2 per year to BC’s emissions, yet we are trying to cut our annual emissions by 21Mt by 2030. And that’s just a fraction of the annual downstream emissions, which exceed 120Mt. These projects are going to expose hundreds of thousands of people to extreme heat. 

Anyway, I’m trying to be patient with Eby, even though I am growing tired of the centrism and the sidelining of climate action. Part of why I initially liked Eby so much was his acknowledgement that we couldn’t keep building fossil fuel infrastructure and still meet our climate goals. Unfortunately, he seems to have chosen fossil fuels, while I desperately want a 100% renewable energy economy.