Last night, the BC snap election called by NDP leader David Eby, when his opponents the BC Conservatives were in disarray, backfired.
David Eby admitted as much in his concession speech last night: “sad to say that I’ll be offering my resignation as premier, obviously” — because he grossly miscalculated. He read the room wrong.
He saw blood and pounced, but the wounded Conservatives miraculously recovered.
This is the first Conservative government in BC in nearly a century. The preliminary count gave the Conservatives 64 of 93 ridings, compared with 27 for the BC NDP and 2 for the Greens. And it’s the first time that a party led by an interim leader won an election in Canadian history.
The person most shocked, however, is not David Eby. It’s the new Premier of British Columbia, Lorne Doerkson, who was on holidays in Africa a month ago when he heard he had been appointed as the interim leader of the Conservatives after Kerry-Lynne Findlay stepped down amid a mutiny from within her own party.
“I didn’t expect this, I certainly didn’t seek this, and I certainly did not plan two years ago to somehow put all of these stars into alignment,” Doerkson said in a campaign interview.
Eby called the election two days after Doerkson took over, and that same day seven Conservative MLAs who had defected to the CentreBC party went back. He fired the gun just as the party glued itself back together.
Doerkson, during his late-night acceptance speech, after confessing he had had a lot of coffee, delivered the hammer: “We will welcome capital back to our province… I believe in cutting red tape. I believe in energy. We will double, yes, we will cut red tape like it’s never been cut before. We will double natural gas production by 2032 and triple it by 2035.”
Capitalism is back.
The strange and twisted tale of the current rendition of the BC Conservative Party started with John Rustad’s eviction from the BC Liberal party in August 2022, soon followed by floor crossers Bruce Banman, Lorne Doerkson, Elenore Sturko and Teresa Wat, giving credence to the idea that the Cons could be called the “BC Floor Crossers”, a pattern that continued with a series of upheavals and rearrangements.
Rustad was removed from the Liberal party’s caucus after he refused to undo his retweet of a comment casting doubt on the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
Rustad cited “irreconcilable differences” with Liberal leader Kevin Falcon when explaining his decision to join the Conservatives.
Rustad, with the only Conservative seat in the legislature, became the leader and the party rapidly gained momentum, fuelled in part by the anti-vaccine freedom movement, drawing the alt-right into its ranks.
Speaking of irreconcilable differences.
Kerry-Lynne Findlay was forced to resign a month ago due to a caucus revolt, purges and a bombshell revelation that the party had hired a private investigator to look into Findlay’s critics. But it was her four-and-a-half-hour dinner on August 7 at the exclusive Arbutus Club with OneBC MLA Dallas Brodie, who campaigned on opposing what she called “land back giveaways” and “the greed and corruption of the reconciliation industry.”
This dinner sank Findlay’s leaky ship, in this author’s humble opinion. A week later, Peter Milobar quit the caucus.
A mutiny of MLAs soon followed, and the Party dropped from 44 seats at the 2024 election to 24 by the time Findlay quit.
Proving what? you ask.
Proving that the majority of B.C. voters and politicians will not accept the alt-right. On election night, OneBC took less than two per cent of the vote.
From mid-August to early September 2026, nine BC Conservative MLAs left the party in a three-week period: Peter Milobar, Ian Paton, Rosalyn Bird, Teresa Wat, Brennan Day, Bruce Banman, Á’a:líya Warbus, Donegal Wilson and Scott McInnis.
Seven of the defectors ended up joining CentreBC on September 18, with Milobar becoming party leader. After Findlay stepped down, they all re-defected (undefected?) and jumped back on the Conservative bandwagon, leaving Elenore Sturko the sole survivor of CentreBC.
Brodie, who insists the “fake conservatives” are a “re-hash” of the former B.C. Liberals, and “not a conservative party at all”, lost her seat in the uber-wealthy Vancouver-Quilchena constituency. Proving that rich people won’t vote alt-right either, even though the same riding elected her as a Conservative in 2024. They voted for the brand, not the believer. Her opponent, Conservative Carson Binda, a former B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation who has railed against MLA pay, won in a landslide, capturing 10,913 votes while Brodie received 803 votes.
David Eby will retain his seat in the Vancouver-Point Grey riding, because he would be a fool to give up a $122,042.91 yearly salary for an MLA. This is, however, a drastic drop in pay from the $231,881.53 he was receiving as premier.
The Green Party retained two seats, with 26-year-old leader Emily Lowan winning a seat in the Saanich North and the Islands riding north of Victoria. Her acceptance speech was less congratulatory than cautionary, claiming the snap election brought out the worst wolves of the Conservative Party:
“I’m scared for what’s to come. The Conservative agenda is one of cuts to the programs that we rely on the most. It’s one of culture wars and needless attacks on human rights and the basic tenets of a dignified life. It stands against everything that brought this movement together. The belief that everyone deserves safety and care.”
After the televised debate between the three leaders, the right-wing Western Standard ran a detailed synopsis and analysis, and ironically picked Emily Lowan as the winner:
“The BC Green Party leader stayed clear of the culture-war exchanges that pulled Eby and Doerkson off policy, and she delivered the night’s cleanest lines. She called the NDP a party of ‘broken promises and recycled ideas,’ told Eby that a tax starting at $190,000 is a ‘tax on workers,’ and closed with the line that ‘this year’s election bribes are next year’s broken promises.’”
The newly-glued BC Conservatives step into office with a mountain of debt, incurred mostly under the NDP. When Eby took office in 2022, total provincial debt stood at approximately $89.4 billion. Total provincial debt is forecast to hit $180.9 billion this year and $234.6 billion by 2028–29, with the taxpayer-supported portion alone reaching $189 billion.
The Greens’ platform includes taxing the ultra-wealthy, something the Conservatives and even the NDP are horrified by.
You can’t tax the billionaires. That’s like taxing capitalism.
And you can’t tax capitalism because capitalism is sacred.
According to the EU Tax Observatory’s Global Tax Evasion Report 2024, global billionaires pay an effective tax rate of just 0% to 0.5% of their total wealth. Tax structures allow the ultra-wealthy to park money in shell corporations and holding companies, where it grows without being taxed as income.
The Greens’ plan would raise, by the party’s own estimate, approximately $22.2B through a one-time levy of 5 to 20 per cent on fortunes over $50 million and then $5.4B every year thereafter from an annual tax of 2 to 5 per cent. The plan is targeting the top 0.1% of households (fewer than 2,500 families in B.C. with a net worth over $50 million).
Doerkson has welcomed capitalism back into the province but he doesn’t say who will be paying for it.