BC Election 2026 - some preliminary thoughts on preliminary results

British Columbians woke up to a very different province today. Some are excited but many are frightened, and not abstractly. We’ve heard how many of the members of the incoming Conservative have taken concerning actions or made concerning statements about human rights and wonder what that means for us and our loved ones, and thinking about people who are already living close to the edge and we are doing the math on what less access to housing, health care and support will mean for people they love, or for themselves. And against the backdrop of a global march towards more fascist government even the word fear about feels inadequate for those most vulnerable right now.

That’s a reasonable response to the moment, and nothing I say below is meant to talk anyone out of what they are feeling. The antidote for that isn’t statistical or even political analysis: it’s getting off social media and connecting with your community which is what I did last night and will be doing again later today.

But it’s worth being clear about what actually happened, because the story we tell ourselves now shapes what comes next.

Two explanations are already circulating: the Greens split the vote, and NDP voters stayed home. Neither holds up, at least not in the preliminary election night vote count.

If every Green voter had voted NDP, the Conservatives would still have a majority. 47 of their 64 elected MLAs won with > 50% of the vote. It you add in conservative + One BC that number rises to 52 seats.

More importantly, that sort of NDP+Green math presumes the Greens aren’t their own movement with their own supporters which is the kind of hubris the NDP were being held accountable for last night. The Greens deserve respect and if the NDP won’t provide it, the Greens will continue to find other ways of getting it and the people - including traditional NDP voters - to get it from.

Turnout did drop, but by about 5 percentage points once you compare election night 2024 to election night 2026 and not the more startling 10 percentage points drop it looks like. It’s possible the final count confirms the big drop but let’s wait until the final count (November 6-10) to make that determination.

In case you're wondering what the difference could be: I couldn't find the 2024 election night totals as the results pages keeps updating as new counts come in but I do have the final report from the chief election officer that lists the things that are counted on election night vs those counted afterwards in the final count so I am estimating from that.

2024 election night counts include: In-district advance voting, final voting and district electoral office (DEO) voting. Final count adds in vote by mail and out-of-district advance voting, final voting, DEO voting and special voting as well as all assisted telephone voting. I'm not sure when the in-district special voting count happens but it was relatively small in 2024 at 25,457.

Anyway - based on that, the additional votes between election night 2024 and the final count was about 215,200 so the turn out numbers rose in 2024 from roughly 52% on election night to 58% in the final count.

Back to last night, the election night counts show that the NDP lost more votes than the total drop in turnout. Conservatives stayed about even and Greens gained. So the preliminary results indicate people didn’t stay home as much as they moved their vote.

To those who supported David Eby without reservation and are reading this election result as spiteful: I understand why it feels that way. When you’ve watched someone carry a government through hard years, a loss like this can look ungrateful, even vindictive. But spite is personal. What I see in these numbers is something more ordinary and as a result more important to directly name.

We expect people with power to be accountable for it. Relative to Horgan, and widely commented on by media, pundits and people who tried to navigate his government, Eby wielded an enormous amount of power over people and institutions and the people who had the power to hold him more accountable didn’t appear to have the willingness to use that power to hold him accountable.

Power that goes unchecked for long enough creates two inevitabilities: hubris in the person holding it and it also eventually gets checked by the only people left who can do it.

That isn’t a punishment. It’s accountability, through the bluntest tool available to us as voters, because earlier tools weren’t used by the people who had the power to use them.

Which raises the harder question for the NDP. Eby was acclaimed as leader after the only other candidate was disqualified. That was a mistake and the NDP have enough information now not to repeat it. Taking time to digest, reflect and rebuild is an important power literacy move if they want to hold power again anytime soon.

Over the years that followed Eby’s coronation as leader, plenty of people inside the party had the power to ask harder questions about his approach to leadership, and mostly didn’t at least in the venues that it would have mattered for him to either share power better or be held to higher account for the level he had. If the party treats this as one person’s loss rather than a structural issue owned by cabinet, caucus, and party leadership both macro and micro, the NDP will be living with the fallout of this election implicitly for a longtime. This was not about an aberration but a series of non-actions by many people that created an inevitability.

The Conservatives now face their own power and accountability problems. They put serious internal power questions on hold to fight this election, and those questions are coming into government with them. It may seem expedient to resolve those by continuing with an appointed leader but per the NDP’s experience with that outlined above there are consequences to expediency in leader selection.

It also may not be reflected in the results for MLA count but the division of vote shows a province that is even more deeply divided. Parties left of centre took 48.3% between them; parties to the right, 49.6%, with CentreBC holding most of the rest. That is a tough challenge for anyone to govern but it’s going to be made a lot harder if the election results are interpreted as a yes rather than a no. Governments that mistake transition elections founded on a no for a yes tend not to last more than one term, and the people who pay for that mistake in the meantime are rarely the ones who made it.

So for anyone bewildered, angry or scared today: the ground did shift, and you’re not wrong to feel it. But this wasn’t about a tectonic shift in values, it didn’t start when David Eby called the election on September 22 and it wasn’t only about one person.

Grieve, rage, celebrate, do whatever you need to do but as the dust settles consider that at the end of the day this was about how power was held, by whom, and who was willing to hold it accountable. That’s what power literacy is for and to help us both see and inoculate against the power illiteracy that lets down the people and communities who most depend on progressive power to be held well.