Eby’s campaign is a train wreck. I’ve seen this before...

The last time I watched a governing party stumble through an election this badly was Paul Martin’s disastrous 2005-06 campaign.

David Eby is running the worst election campaign that I’ve watched since Paul Martin’s disastrous 2005-06 election.

That would be the one that Martin lost to Stephen Harper.

It’s been well established that Eby didn’t need to call the election when he did. The man still had two years left on his mandate, three if he wanted to ignore the fixed election date and just go by the Constitution, which requires an election within five years of the last one.

Instead, Eby called an early vote.

He was the one in charge. He was the only one who knew for sure that this was coming, and still he had no plan.

When the campaign started, he tried claiming he needed to call the vote to protect British Columbians from Donald Trump. Voters saw past that and realized it was all about him taking advantage of his opposition being in disarray.

Since then, he’s tried to claim the opposition is unfit to win the election because they only have an interim leader, a problem created by Eby calling the election about 48 hours after B.C. Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned. He’s also complained about long wait times for surgeries, if only he knew someone who could fix that, and recently took a beating over his use of the failing $10-a-day childcare system.

Winning campaigns generally have a solid plan and a narrative. Losing campaigns have neither.

Eby’s campaign is in the latter category.

Good campaigns and bad campaigns…

A good campaign has a plan, it has strategy, it has implementation.

Think Stephen Harper in 2005-06 and 2011. Think Doug Ford in 2022 and 2025, or Justin Trudeau in 2015.

Though luck and voter emotions can often have a lot to do with it.

Speak to anyone on Trudeau’s 2015 campaign. They certainly didn’t set out thinking they would win. They were hoping for a solid third place and maybe, if they were lucky, Official Opposition.

Still, they started out the campaign with a set of policy ideas, with a plan to put them before the public, and a narrative they hoped they could sell. Like Trudeau and his 2015 campaign or not, it had elements of success, just like Harper’s winning campaign and Ford’s winning campaigns.

Eby has none of that in this election and looks lost and desperate.

This is why I compare him to Paul Martin circa 2005-06.

Martin, the juggernaut that wasn’t….

When I arrived on Parliament Hill full-time in 2005, it was less than a year after Martin had won his minority government in 2004. That was the election where he was supposed to win the biggest majority ever and failed to do so.

That didn’t deter Martin’s cheerleaders in the Parliamentary Press Gallery and, when I arrived there in March 2005, I listened to all the members of the smart set, the folks I read in the newspaper and watched on TV, as they told me Harper would never be PM and Martin would sweep the election after engineering his own defeat.

That’s what they were still saying when the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP united to defeat the Martin government in November 2005. These were folks weaned on all the latest leaks from the geniuses in Martin’s PMO and his then-unofficial PMO, the lobbying firm Earnscliffe.

As the election was called, the one we’d been reassured by the smart set that Martin and his team were ready for, the Liberals held a fancy kick-off in a bar in Ottawa’s ByWard Market and then loaded us on the campaign buses and headed for Montreal. We then spent several days with not much to do as Martin spent time on friendly territory in Montreal, a place he shouldn’t have had to campaign in.

The problem was, Martin’s team had no plan.

As journalists cooled their heels at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, his staff was reaching out looking for locations for events. They scrambled to put together news conferences and rallies that made it look like they had a plan when they didn’t.

After a time, we headed out from Montreal to Toronto and suddenly had a pit stop in Cornwall.

There was a rally, a completely inappropriate one in a Catholic high school where students, egged on by their teachers, cheered on the Liberal PM. I spotted an old colleague who was in charge of PR for the board and walked over and asked him when this event was arranged.

He told me they had called earlier that day to ask if they could stage an event.

The campaign had no plan. It had no narrative. It was pure bedlam.

I may be watching from afar, but that is how Eby’s campaign in B.C. feels at the moment.