THE BC Liberals on Tuesday launched an all-out attack on NDP leadership hopeful David Eby.

They said in a statement that “as he gets set to announce his ambitions to be the next Premier of British Columbia later today, it’s clear the NDP’s soft-on-crime Attorney General and low-on-results Housing Minister David Eby cannot be trusted.”

MLA Todd Stone said: “As Housing Minister, David Eby has consistently failed to take action to make life more affordable for British Columbians. Since the NDP came to power in 2017, Eby has presided over the biggest decline in housing affordability in a generation. The NDP promised to build 114,000 units of new housing, but after five years they’ve only completed a shocking six per cent of their goal.”

He added: “With an astounding 74 per cent of British Columbians now giving up hope of ever owning a home, David Eby has only recently acknowledged the lack of housing supply is a major reason why B.C.’s housing market is the most expensive in North America — this despite villainizing housing developers for years. David Eby’s track record shows he is unable to get results, whether it’s on the housing crisis, tackling crime, or his staggering and unprecedented losing streak in the courts as Attorney General.”

According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), B.C. will need to build 570,000 additional homes by 2030 to deliver any sort of affordability to the housing market — far more than the NDP’s promise of 114,000 affordable homes which has only seen 7,219 units of housing opened since 2017.

The BC Liberals said that in usual fashion, instead of being accountable for decisions made under his watch, Eby recently fired most of the NDP-appointed board members of BC Housing after an Ernst and Young report found serious failures with the NDP’s housing programs. Meanwhile, a National Bank report says it now takes 38 years to save for a down payment on a home in Vancouver under the NDP, they noted.

The BC Liberals also pointed out that Eby also drew criticism for co-authoring a disgraced 2015 study that suggested Asian homebuyers were the root cause of the housing affordability crisis. In this study, Eby looked at a small sample of 172 homes to count the number of “non-Anglicized names” and blamed these individuals for skyrocketing Lower Mainland home prices. This deeply flawed study promoted racist tropes and likely contributed to a rise in anti-Asian hate in British Columbia with Vancouver named the anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America. Recently, the study’s claims were thoroughly repudiated by Associate Chief Justice Austin Cullen of the B.C. Supreme Court.

MLA Karin Kirkpatrick said: “Under David Eby and the NDP, crime severity is up, anti-Asian hate crimes have spiked, no-charge assessments have skyrocketed, and Vancouver now sees an average of four unprovoked stranger attacks a day. People feel more unsafe than ever. After years of inaction and incompetence, instead of finally addressing some of the top issues in our province that he is directly responsible for, David Eby thinks he deserves a promotion to Premier.”

The BC Liberals said that before becoming Attorney General, Eby authored a manual on “How to Sue the Police” and penned other radical activist materials critical of law enforcement.

MLA Trevor Halford said: “At a time when people are struggling to make ends meet with rising unaffordability and our healthcare system in crisis, British Columbians are looking for someone who puts forward common sense solutions and gets things done, not empty NDP promises and radical activism. Unfortunately, it’s easy to see how, as Premier, David Eby would revert to his radical roots once he is out of John Horgan’s shadow. His failure to address the crime running rampant in our cities is clear evidence of this.”

He added: “The NDP is all talk and no action — on affordability, on crime, and more. Lots of bold promises with no follow-through. While David Eby’s record is too radical and abysmal to be Premier, his candidacy epitomizes the NDP government’s record of flashy promises and no results.”