What happens when a political leader spends 20 months fiercely defending a policy, accuses anyone opposed to it as living “in a baloney factory,” describes critics as unprincipled climate change deniers, and then, on the eve of a provincial election, out of nowhere, with their party getting challenged in the polls, flip-flops on the entire thing?

BC NDP Leader David Eby is about to find out after executing one of the biggest policy pivots of his premiership on Thursday, hurling the provincial carbon tax straight under the wheels of his campaign re-election bus.

Will it neutralize an “axe the tax” campaign the BC Conservatives intended to run in the election? Or will it morph into an issue of trust, leadership and character for a leader breaking his word?

“Our commitment is that if the federal government decides to remove the legal backstop requiring us to have a consumer carbon tax in British Columbia, we will end the consumer carbon tax in British Columbia,” Eby said Thursday.

The move was surprising on several levels — not the least of which is it’s a 180-degree reversal of everything Eby has said for years on the subject.

“For over a decade in this province a price on carbon pollution has been central to transitioning away from fossil fuels,” Eby said at the BC NDP convention last November, in a speech in which he accused BC United Leader Kevin Falcon of wanting to “rip up B.C.’s climate plan” because he opposed carbon tax increases.

“Let me be........

© BIV