The re-drawn landscape of BC politics won’t be known for roughly another week, however, there was no shortage of suspense during Saturday’s election.
Currently, the NDP is leading or elected in 46 ridings, while John Rustad’s Conservatives have one fewer with 45, both are shy of the 47 seats needed for a majority government in the 93-seat legislature.
UNBC Senior Political Science Lecturer, Jason Morris told Vista Radio while everyone isn’t happy to be waiting on a pair of recounts in Surrey City Centre and Juan de Fuca-Malahat – it’s the best course of action we have to determine a fair winner.
“I would rather us take pains with Elections BC to get it right than to have any complete uncertainty over the years ahead. We are talking about representing people through a legislature. We can bite our nails about this for a while longer but know that everyone is doing their best for us to have free and fair elections.”
The BC Greens secured the two seats needed to keep official party status and potentially hold the balance of power in Victoria, similar to what occurred in 2017 – however, Morris noted who the Greens will support isn’t the only issue that will need to be settled in the Legislature.
“The party is down from its popular vote in the previous election and it has two new MLA’s that are going to be pun intended very green and as well we need to sit someone in the role as speaker, which is elected by the legislature and takes one more MLA out of the equation.”
Morris stated while the rise of the BC Conservative party over the past year, leading to its best election result in over 100 years has taken the province by storm – resurgent parties aren’t anything new when looking back at the province’s election history.
“The NDP with a different name came from nowhere in the 1930’s Great Depression, and then we had the Social Credit come from nowhere in 1952 and jumping ahead we had the BC Liberals who were a fringe party in the 1970s form a large government in 2001.”
“Four years ago, the Conservatives were around 2% in the election and now they have almost half of the population of support – so it is a huge victory for the Conservatives. They also need to spend some time being in newer establishments learning the role and ropes of government and in terms of representing people.”
On the flip side, while the NDP is still in the driver’s seat to form government, providing neither re-count flips, you can make the case Saturday’s election was a flop for David Eby and company.
“I would agree the BC NDP a year ago that it was smooth sailing to a majority government and is now faced with a great amount of challenges just to continue to implement their agenda with such a divided parliament.”
About 57.4% of registered voters cast ballots in Saturday’s election, up from 53.9% in 2020.
The Final count, according to Elections BC, will be start Saturday (October 26th) and will include absentee and mail-in ballots that are not counted at initial count.
It’s estimated roughly 49,000 additional ballots will be considered as part of final count.
Locally, all three ridings went to Conservative Candidates Kiel Giddens (Prince George-Mackenzie), Sheldon Claire (Prince George-North Cariboo) and Rosalyn Bird (PG-Valemount). Nechako Lakes MLA John Rustad claimed his sixth term in Victoria.
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