The province of British Columbia is to Canada what California is to the US of A. The Sunset Coast is where you'll find retirees from TROC, aged-out hippies (particularly on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, as Walt learned last month), an enclave of "Khalistan" still known by its colonial name, Surrey, and small but whiny minorities of Coast
Indians First Nations.
Coastal BC is, like coastal California (as opposed to the interior), the sort of place where loony liberal ideas originate and spread eastward, and where conservatives are few on the ground. In Canadian federal elections, BC voters can be counted on to send Liberal and NDP members to Parliament, and even one tired and emotional Green Party nut, the inevitable Elizabeth May.
Provincial elections are much the same, with Liberals and socialist Knee-Dippers vying for powers and Conservatives gnashing their teeth far from the Speaker's throne. In the mid-20th century there was a party called Social Credit, which was a populist conservative group not unlike the Tea Party or the MAGA movement in the US of A, which held power in the `50s and `60s but vanished in the early manifestations of liberal wokeism.
Late this summer, the crypto-socialist NDP, led by Premier David Eby, were in power provincially with a slim majority in the Legislature. In the name of "reconciliation", they had caved to First Nations demands for the return of "unceded territory" and (of course) money (and lots of it) as reparations for the evils of colonialism, residential schools, yada yada yada. Moreover, faithful to their anti-business, anti-oil credo, the lefties had declared that they would block any attempt to build new oil/gas pipelines through BC to the tidewaters.
The Conservative opposition was in disarray. Their latest leader, an inexperienced Karen type named Kerry-Lynne Findlay [Why are so many middle-aged female politicians the angry blonde wokester type? Ed.] had done more to divide her party than to unite it, and was on her way out the door, propelled by the feet of half a dozen Conservative MLAs.
What better time, Premier Eby must have thought, to call a snap election and consolidate his grip on power. That's what he did, and when Walt got to BC in late September the campaign was in full swing and Mr Eby's pretext for going to the well before time was being called "suicidal", which was just how it turned out.
To the surprise of no-one (except perhaps Mr Eby), the British Columbia Conservatives, led perforce by their interim leader Lorne Doerkson, toppled the incumbents to win what can fairly be called a landslide majority. At 0150 PDT, the Conservatives were elected or leading in 64 of the Legislature's 93 ridings. The NDP had 27 and the BC Green Party 2. The Conservatives will not form the provincial government for the first time since 1928!
The Conservative victory will be talked more than most because of what it portends for the politics of Canuckistan as a hole. As mentioned above, Kerry-Lynne Findlay's resignation left the BC Conservatives in disarray. Some of the MLAs elected under their banner had fled to the fledgling CentreBC party. Lorne Doerkson was vacationing in Africa.
Today, Mr Doerkson is the incoming premier, and the New Democrats will have their smallest caucus since the election of 2001.
The decision by the Conservatives to quickly coalesce around Mr Doerkson and pivot their message to focus on the economy and protection of existing land rights will be studied and debated for years.
But the bigger focus will be on David Eby’s decision to follow through with a snap election even after Ms Findlay’s resignation.
The Canadian right badly needed this win. After the 2025 federal election, many Conservatives remain haunted by their unexpected defeat at the hands of the Natural Governing Liberal Party of Canada, led by the Rt.Hon. Marx Carnage. This came after they had already been denied the chance to deliver Justin Trudeau a well-deserved reckoning after he stepped down before facing voters a fourth time.
At provincial, as well as federal levels, Conservative activists, staffers and volunteers must have wondered whether their efforts would ever be rewarded. There was always another week of knocking on doors, manufacturing hope for a favourable poll and coming up with explanations to cope with the latest setbacks. People can only take so many defeats before it all becomes too much. Not this time, however.
Experienced organizers -- some of them disgruntled Liberals -- and frustrated federal Tories converged on BC. Former federal Conservative staffers and local veterans helped unite the right. By the end of the campaign, the NDP seemed determined to make enemies wherever they could, rather than campaigning on their record. It paid off in spades for the Conservatives, including a generation that came of age in the post-Stephen Harper decade, an especially bleak period for the right.
Now, conservatives can walk with true swagger, having decisively defeated a powerful "progressive" government outside the traditional conservative heartland in the prairie provinces. They have learned which quarrels can wait, how a coalition recovers and what happens when the desire to govern finally outranks the desire to police each other. One hopes this campaign and its excellent result have set an example for true conservatives across Canada... and perhaps even south of the border.
