YOUR PERSPECTIVE: Out of touch Eby approves international delegation turned staff holiday spree

As British Columbians battle an affordability crisis and work harder than ever to cover rising costs for housing, food, fuel, and other bills, David Eby and the NDP continue to demonstrate how wildly out of touch they are with the struggles of everyday people.

It was recently revealed that the NDP government sent a sizable delegation to a UN conference in Geneva, Switzerland for a presentation on how B.C. implemented UNDRIP into law. Attorney General Niki Sharma says there were also some meetings with officials from interested governments. So that’s six government officials sent abroad for a single presentation and a few meetings, on a trip the NDP government didn’t bother to promote publicly at all. There wasn’t a single photo or mention, until the AG was contacted by the media about the trip and she then posted a video from the conference online.

Also unusual is the fact that one of the political staffers who went on the trip works for Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Minister Murray Rankin, who didn’t even attend the conference. While these officials haven’t yet filed their full expenses for the trip, we’ve learned the base cost of flights and hotels was at least $33,000.

The optics are worse on another front, however. It turns out four of those six staffers comprising this unnecessarily large delegation leveraged this taxpayer-funded work trip for their own personal holidays abroad. It’s a bad look at a time when many ordinary British Columbians are cancelling their own vacation plans and cutting back on spending. People will be less than impressed with an NDP government sending twice as many people as needed to an international conference, and allowing most of those staffers to tack on personal vacations on top of it all.