In many respects the province of BC rivals Quebec as a distinct society, and never more so than in terms of electoral politics. On the one hand, more than 70% of Quebecers are opposed to separation and do not even want a referendum on the issue. Yet nearly half of them voted for the Parti Quebecois, (a separatist political party that is committed to a referendum on independence), to form their next government. On the other hand, British Columbians have just delivered a massive, even historic, majority to a political party that was in total disarray less than five weeks ago. The Conservatives were leaderless, with no coherent platform and half of their caucus having fled the sinking ship. Only in BC eh?
It gets better. The so-called Conservative Party has had no role in BC politics for longer than anyone can remember. The NDP and the Socreds, and then the NDP and the Liberals, have dominated the provincial scene for nearly 75 years. This Conservative Party did not exist until 2020. It had no elected MLAs, and only became an officially recognized party in 2023 when two sitting MLAs representing other right-wing fringe parties in the legislature decided to leave those parties and sit as Conservatives. The first was John Rustad, who then became Conservative leader until he was ousted by his party members at a virulent annual meeting in late 2025. The second was Lorne Doerksen, who is now premier by accident after the abrupt departure of the next duly elected leader, Kerry-Lynne Findlay. Findlay was forced to resign on September 20, after only 4 months in the job, and after nearly half of her small caucus left to sit as Independents in protest over her leadership. Note that despite their meagre numbers the Conservatives, by this point, actually constituted the Official Opposition, while the other right-wing fringe parties and the Liberals had all but disappeared from the electoral map, with several more of their MLAs migrating to the new Conservatives.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, at least for those not familiar with Canadian electoral history, NDP premier Dave Eby promptly called an election two days after Findlay’s departure. Obviously he was hoping to take advantage of the chaos in the Conservative Party. In desperation, Doerksen was appointed interim party leader for the election, being considered by many to be the most seemingly normal and sane person in his party’s small caucus. That calculus proved inspired.
The rest is history. Eby will now be remembered as the definitive example of this type of opportunistic hubris backfiring. He has outdone even David Peterson of Ontario in 1990 and Jean Chretien in 1997. The moral of the story, if it needed repeating, is that no one should call an election when they already have a majority and are only halfway through their term of office. Voters do not like it. This truism applies in spades if your government is not popular and you are not perceived to be doing a good job. And so it is that the Conservatives have exceeded even the expectations of pollsters, who were predicting a majority little more than two weeks into the campaign.
But this is hardly the end of the lessons to be learned from the Eby debacle. Another important takeaway is that progressive British Columbians continue to refuse to vote strategically. Whatever else the NDP and Green Party supporters might consider to be important differences between their two parties, in other provinces many of them would have united in their determination to stave off the perceived common threat, the Conservatives. This would be especially likely if the bizarre situation in this particular election had prevailed elsewhere. Although the BC Conservative Party had to choose an interim leader and cobble together a “platform” in a hurry, the position of its leader and many of its candidates on a variety of issues was already well-known. To begin with, this was first and foremost the party of big business and anti-environmental deregulatory policies, and one staunchly opposed to measures the NDP government had taken to support indigenous communities. Worse still, these Conservatives were already well known as the party of assorted wing nuts, racists, homophobic extremists and conspiracy-theory promoters. And voters knew well in advance that they were in danger of winning.
Yet, in this election, Green supporters stubbornly refused to consider supporting the NDP to prevent the progressive vote-splitting that would allow the Conservatives to come up the middle and win. David Eby made this plea for strategic voting repeatedly during the campaign but the youthful new Green leader, Emily Lowan, emphatically rejected it. Indeed, Green voters redoubled their efforts. The Greens were the only party to increase their vote count in this election, by nearly 3% over 2024, even though the party’s well-known lack of vote efficiency meant they once again delivered only 2 seats.
Based on the preliminary results reported by Elections BC, (subject to a final determination on November 6), there were at least 12-13 ridings in which the combined Green/NDP vote would have defeated the Conservative candidate who now sits as an MLA. This alone would have meant a reduction in Conservative seats from 63 to 50, and an increase in the NDP count from 28 to 41.
This leads us to the third important takeaway from this election, namely the huge importance of voter turnout. Despite what many would have considered to be the singular importance of this campaign, voter turnout stood at only 48%, lower than in any election since 1949. And who did this absentee voter phenomenon hurt? Needless to say, the overwhelming number of missing voters were previous NDP supporters. The party’s total vote count fell precipitously, from slightly over 950,000 in 2024 to roughly 670,000 this time, for a decline of nearly a third. Evidently NDP supporters were frustrated with Eby – either because of his waffling on earlier campaign commitments, or because they were furious with his patently opportunistic motive for calling this latest vote – and simply decided to stay home and sit out the election. ( Note that, unlike the Greens, they had no other viable option for casting their ballot.) It is not possible at this point to determine how many seats this may have affected, but it is clearly a significant factor.
That said, it is true, given the overwhelming victory of the Conservatives, that the NDP might not have been able to win even if these two phenomena – resistance to strategic voting and low voter turnout — had not been present. At a minimum, however, the NDP would very likely have held the Conservatives to a minority.
In this context it is also important to note that this electoral fiasco does not, in any way, reinforce the validity of the calls of frustrated progressive voters for a change in the actual electoral system, from first-past-the-post to some type of proportional representation. This result is not the fault of the system. (Nor would proportional representation have proven the remedy its supporters hope for, as countless studies have proven, including a 2018 “people’s commission” and referendum in BC which overwhelmingly rejected the idea.) It is the fault of former premier Eby for calling it prematurely in the first place. Hopefully this lesson will now be permanently etched on the minds of politicians in BC and elsewhere in the country.
