David Eby @Dave_Eby and the BC NDP have governed through a thicket of high-paid insiders, secretive deals, policy experiments that poured taxpayer-funded drugs onto the street, and a habit of denying problems until leaked documents or opposition pressure made denial impossible. The record is not one of isolated mistakes. It is a pattern of rewarding loyalists, shielding institutions from independent scrutiny, and treating public money and public trust as tools of political management. Special advisors and consultants have multiplied around the premier’s office while the government dismantled the Merit Commissioner, the office that existed to police non-merit hiring. Doug White, Doug Caul, Penny Ballem, Larry Campbell, Nathan Allen, a comedian on a four-year contract worth hundreds of thousands, and others have collected six-figure sums or more, often without competition and sometimes without the public even being told until reporters asked. Michael Bryant was installed as a Downtown Eastside adviser on a contract that could reach three hundred thousand dollars plus expenses; the appointment was not announced, the mandate was vague, and the contract was cancelled only after it became a political liability. The Ombudsperson separately documented systemic mismanagement in which government appointees were improperly slotted into public-service jobs meant for career public servants. This is not expertise-seeking. It is a patronage apparatus operating in plain sight. On drugs the government funded and politically blessed approaches that later produced criminal convictions and a black-market flood. Vancouver Coastal Health, under an NDP-appointed board and provincial direction, channelled money to the Drug User Liberation Front. The group’s founders were subsequently convicted of trafficking. Eby’s line that funding stopped “as soon as we learned” of illegal activity sits uneasily beside years of high-profile activity and earlier warnings from opposition members, including a former RCMP officer. Internal Health Ministry slides that finally leaked showed “significant” diversion of prescribed safer-supply opioids, trafficking that reached provincial, national and international scale, and kickback schemes at more than sixty pharmacies. Ministers had spent years insisting diversion was not a major problem. Once the slides became public the government tightened rules and then directed an investigation into how the document escaped rather than into why the policy had been allowed to run so long. The leak itself, not the trafficking it documented, became the immediate official concern. Housing files show the same mixture of poor controls and later embarrassment. An Ernst & Young review ordered while Eby was housing minister found multimillion-dollar supportive-housing contracts awarded with little or no documented rationale. The BC Housing board was later dismissed. The Vivid “affordable ownership” project, praised at completion, ended with units sold to people who already owned property, contrary to the public pitch; the Crown corporation bought some back and sued others. In 2026 the province initiated a plan, later joined by Ottawa, to acquire thousands of unsold condos with public money and financing. The announcement came months after Eby’s office prepared a briefing for a meeting with Bob Rennie, the marketer who had just hosted a high dollar fundraiser for the prime minister attended by leading developers. Critics called it a bailout. The premier’s response was that developers would take losses and that the program could be dropped if people hated it an admission that a major housing intervention had been launched without a finished design or public buy-in. Independent regulators have been treated as obstacles. The chair of the BC Utilities Commission was removed before the end of his term. Subsequent decisions reversed earlier orders in ways that favoured BC Hydro. Former commissioners said the firing sent a message that commissioners serve at the pleasure of the government. Certain Indigenous agreements were finalized close to elections and their details emerged only afterward, leaving even newly elected NDP MLAs claiming they had not been told while campaigning. Kennedy Stewart, a former NDP MP and Vancouver mayor, publicly alleged that a provincial cabinet minister was the subject of an RCMP investigation into collaboration with China and that Eby’s circle was aware. Eby answered that neither the RCMP nor CSIS had ever flagged any member of his caucus and that he would remove anyone from cabinet if they did. The force itself will not confirm or deny subjects until charges are laid. The allegation therefore hangs, untested in public, over a government that already faces questions about foreign-linked money in earlier housing and casino files. Taken together the files show a government that spends freely on friends and consultants, keeps inconvenient agreements and contracts quiet until forced, downplays evidence that its signature social policies are being exploited by organized crime, and then investigates the messenger when the evidence leaks. The Cullen Commission found no personal corruption in the money-laundering file that Eby inherited and later publicized; that finding does not erase the later pattern of patronage, secrecy, and policy outcomes that enriched criminals and left ordinary British Columbians paying the bill. The NDP has not been convicted in court. It has been convicted, repeatedly, by its own documents, its own cancelled contracts, and the gap between what it said and what later surfaced.