B.C. Lt.-Gov. Janet Austin has asked NDP Leader David Eby to form the next government after his party emerged with the most seats following weekend recounts and an absentee ballot count on Monday. A key question remains whether it will be a minority or majority government.
“Every one of our BC NDP MLAs were elected to deliver results for people, like strengthening healthcare and lowering costs. We are determined to listen and get to work on today’s tough challenges—there isn’t a moment to waste,” Eby said on X.
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad said in a statement that he accepts the results of the election. He noted that his party has made history, pointing to how the Conservatives emerged from the fringes to come very close to winning the election, and is now forming the Official Opposition.
Election Results
To secure a majority, the NDP needs 47 seats, which is how many it was elected or leading in as of Monday afternoon, according to Elections BC.The count remains too close to call in two ridings, with the NDP leading in one and the B.C. Conservatives in the other.
After the Oct. 19 election, the NDP had won or was leading in 46 ridings, the BC Conservative Party had won or was leading in 45 ridings, and the Green Party had won two ridings. The paper-thin margin between the NDP and Conservatives meant the overall result would only be known after counting the mail-in and absentee ballots over the weekend.
However, counting over 43,000 mail-in ballots still hadn’t produced a clear winner Sunday in the tightest ridings, with the final result depending on the counting of 22,000 absentee and special ballots on Monday.
Another extremely tight race is in Kelowna Centre, where the Conservative candidate continued to lead, by 35 votes.
If the NDP holds on to Surrey-Guildford and the Conservatives to Kelowna Centre, the final results will be 47 seats for the NDP, 44 seats for the Conservatives, and two seats for the Greens.
According to provincial legislation, ridings in which the margin between the first and second candidates is less than 1/500th of all votes cast in the riding are subject to a judicial recount overseen by a B.C. Supreme Court justice. The margins in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre mean those ridings will be subject to recount.
The Election’s Major Story
Despite the loss, Rustad’s Conservatives were a major story of this election.
The party had been in power in the early part of the 20th century, but for decades had been without representation in the provincial legislature.
The party received a boost when filmmaker Aaron Gunn was blocked by the B.C. Liberals from running for the leadership of the party, and instead decided to revive the B.C. Conservatives.
Gunn later decided to leave provincial politics to join the federal Conservatives as a candidate, following which the B.C. Conservatives voted to have Rustad as their leader in March 2023.
Rustad, a former provincial cabinet minister in the Liberal government of Christy Clark, was himself kicked out of the B.C. Liberal Party (since renamed BC United) in 2022 by leader Kevin Falcon for sharing a social media post that challenged the idea that carbon dioxide is the “control knob of global temperature” when it comes to climate change.
The revived B.C. Conservative Party started rising in the polls shortly after Rustad’s leadership began, and eventually overtook the Official Opposition BC United in popularity. In August, Falcon ended his party’s campaign in favour of the Conservatives.
The B.C. NDP is forming its third consecutive government, having first taken over power from the B.C. Liberals in 2017. They were re-elected in 2022 under the leadership of John Horgan, who retired in 2022, paving the way for Eby, a former provincial attorney general, to become party leader and premier.
Before the Oct. 19 election, the NDP had 55 seats in the legislature, followed by the BC United with 20 seats, the BC Conservatives with eight seats, and the Greens with two seats.
