David Eby hopes 'heartbreaking' decriminalization reversal can win voters' trust

Chilliwack podcaster Aaron Pete, a frequent collaborator with the Current, has interviewed the leaders of all four political parties. His Kevin Falcon interview was published last week, a day before Falcon bowed out of the race. Interviews with Conservative leader John Rustad and Green leader Sonia Furstenau will be published in the coming weeks and highlighted in the Current.

Premier David Eby said his government was taken by surprise by some of the negative repercussions of its decisions to decriminalize the possession of some drugs.

But he says that admitting that his government made a mistake is a sign of strength—and that other politicians should admit when they mess up.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Chilliwack podcaster Aaron Pete, Eby talked about how his background as a prosecutor set the stage for his government’s controversial decriminalization decisions, and explained why the NDP reversed course after concerns from police chiefs and the public.

When asked by Pete if there was a decision he would change if given a second chance, Eby talked about the rationale behind decriminalizing hard drugs in many places—and suggested that changing direction can show strength and build trust from residents.

“I have been a drug prosecutor,” he said. “I prosecuted a young Indigenous woman. It was one of the most traumatic experiences in my life; I wasn't even on the stand, I was the prosecutor, and I saw that this wouldn't change her life at all, and that this whole courthouse had been arrayed against her, that I was getting paid, her lawyer was getting paid. The judge was getting paid. The sheriff was getting paid. Everyone was looked after except for her.”

Eby said the woman was released with no legal consequences, but that she “left worse off, less trustful of the system.”

That experience, he said, made him sympathize with calls to try to stop using the criminal justice system to deal with the use of illegal drugs, and instead focus on providing services and treatment for the people using them. And so, last year, the NDP decriminalized the possession of some hard drugs.

But the move didn’t just change the way drug possession was prosecuted. It also changed how people behaved, and how problematic behaviour was dealt with. Police felt less able to stop the use of drugs in public places, and critics and residents said the result was increased public disorder.

“The outcome was in many ways heartbreaking for me because as [someone with] such a firm understanding that the criminal justice system is not suited to address addiction—and I still strongly believe that—to see people struggling so hardcore with addiction that in the absence of criminalization that they're using on the bus, that they're using at the Tim Hortons … and the police saying, because you removed our ability to arrest and move people and seize drugs and so on through decriminalization, we don't have a tool to address this anymore.

In April, the province moved to recriminalize the use of drugs in public places, although use in private spaces is still decriminalized.

“Having to take that step back say, ‘OK, that was not the result, that was never the intention that we wanted. We have to take a different approach here to recriminalize public drug use,’ [was] really difficult and necessary,” Eby said.

Earlier, Pete—himself a Chawathil First Nation councillor and trained lawyer—had asked about processing failures and miscues as a politician. Eby suggested that today’s politicians might be too obsessed with avoiding public reversals and the perception that they come with a degree of humiliation.

“There is a culture and a sort of understanding of politics right now that's like, you never apologize,” he said. “You never admit that you were going in the wrong direction … You always insist that it was the right thing to do.”

BC United (while it fucntioned) and the BC Conservatives have hammered the NDP for its decriminalization moves. And the government’s reversal suggests that Eby acknowledges some criticism was deserved. But Eby told Pete that he hoped reversal will be seen as a sign that his government can be trusted to ditch policies that don’t work.

“Hopefully, [the recriminalization of public drug use is] a measure and a step to increase trust in the public. Like, ‘OK, we do understand where you're trying to go. We'll give you the rope to be able to try different things. But we want to know that if it's not working out the way that you wanted, that you're going to fix it and you're going to go in a different direction.’”

You can watch the segment on drug use policies here, or the full conversation below.