Political scientists had said this shouldn’t happen — parties don’t usually go to the polls against an opposition that can’t even field a permanent leader, and Findlay’s resignation was supposed to make a snap vote less likely still. Premier David Eby called one anyway, asking Lt.-Gov. Wendy Cocchia to dissolve the legislature Tuesday and setting a vote for Saturday, October 24.
The Conservatives have shed roughly half their seats since the 2024 election through mass defections, Findlay quit just two days before the election call, and interim leader Lorne Doerkson has had all of five weeks to introduce himself to voters.
Read: BC Conservative Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay Resigns After Caucus Revolt
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Splitting the right further, several of those departed MLAs now sit under Peter Milobar’s CentreBC banner rather than back with the Conservatives — a second party competing for the same voters Eby’s NDP needs to keep at bay. Facing that kind of opposition, waiting for a more conventional election window looks like the bigger gamble.
Eby isn’t running on the chaos directly, though — he’s built the campaign around Trump instead. He told reporters in Victoria that British Columbians face a choice between “a province that stands up for itself” and one that capitulates to Washington, leaning on a trade war that’s given his single-seat NDP majority a rallying point the Conservative implosion alone wouldn’t provide.
The vote falls a week after BC’s municipal elections on October 17, prompting Delta Mayor George Harvie to say plainly, “I stand besides my fellow mayors that are just pissed off.”
The Union of BC Municipalities had asked Eby directly not to overlap the campaigns. And the call quietly kills the Abbotsford-Mission by-election that was due to wrap up this Saturday — the seat Findlay had been trying to win before she resigned.
