B.C. Conservatives win majority government — and David Eby is stepping down as NDP leader

British Columbia has a new government. CTV News declared a majority for the B.C. Conservative Party on Saturday night, after interim leader Lorne Doerkson's party surged to a commanding lead in the province's snap election.

When Doerkson took the stage for his victory speech, his party was leading or elected in 62 of the province's 93 ridings, according to CTV News, which called the result first. "We are going to super-charge British Columbia," Doerkson told a roaring crowd.

The count kept moving in the Conservatives' favour overnight. According to bcballot.ca's live results, the Conservatives were ahead in 64 ridings in the 1:49 a.m. PT count, against 27 for the B.C. NDP and two for the Greens, on 48.1 per cent of the popular vote so far. Forty-seven seats make a majority.

Reuters reported that the Conservatives won 64 of 93 seats, their first victory since 1928, and that Doerkson has pledged to double natural-gas production by 2032 and more than triple it by 2035, end emissions limits and replace the carbon-tax framework.

Eby steps down

NDP Leader David Eby announced he would step down as party leader, CTV News reported, after a gamble that backfired: Eby called the election more than two years early, while his party held a majority, and watched voters hand power to a party that has not governed B.C. in nearly a century.

Eby himself was still leading his own Vancouver-Point Grey seat, ahead by 538 votes in the overnight count, according to bcballot.ca.

The Conservative wave ran through the province's biggest battlegrounds. The party won all 10 Surrey ridings and all six Delta and Richmond ridings, according to Vancouver Sun results reporting, took five seats on Vancouver Island, and broke through in Burnaby, where the NDP lost two seats it had held for 50 years.

What the result ends — and what it doesn't settle yet

The result ends nine years of NDP government in B.C. and returns the Conservatives to power for the first time in nearly 100 years.

One caution still applies: the overnight numbers are the initial count — advance, district-office and election-day ballots. Elections BC's final count, from November 6 to 10, will add mail-in ballots and ballots cast away from voters' assigned polling places. In 2024, about 66,000 ballots were added after election night, and Surrey-Guildford flipped to the NDP nine days later. The Conservative lead is far wider this time, but no result is final until Elections BC declares it.

For the rest of Canada, the result resets the politics of the country's third-largest province — and the federal-provincial debates over energy, housing and the cost of living that run through it. Doerkson's first test will be turning a campaign promise to get B.C. "back on track" into a governing program, starting with the transition to a new cabinet.

On Sunday, premier-elect Lorne Doerkson named Kim Henderson, a former deputy minister to the premier and head of the B.C. public service, to chair the government's transition team, the Conservative Party of B.C. announced. Henderson, who has advised Trans Mountain Corporation since 2022, will serve as transition chair on a volunteer basis while on unpaid leave from the company.