(Bloomberg) -- Voters in British Columbia elected the New Democratic Party by a wafer-thin majority, giving the progressive party that has ruled the Canadian province since 2017 a chance to cling to power with a diminished mandate.
More than a week after polls closed in the provincial election, results published Monday showed the NDP secured 47 seats, the Conservative Party of BC won 44 and the Green Party took two. It’s one of the closest results in the history of the West Coast province.
The NDP’s majority hinged on one seat in Surrey, a rapidly-growing city southeast of Vancouver. The Conservatives led the district of Surrey-Guildford on election night, but the counting of absentee ballots flipped it to the New Democrats by final margin of just 27 votes, giving the NDP just over half of the 93 seats in the provincial legislature.
In an election with 2.1 million ballots cast, multiple races came down to a few hundred votes or less. The very narrow margins in two seats trigger automatic judicial recounts.
In a statement, NDP Leader and Premier David Eby said he will form the next government, while acknowledging the potential for recounts.
“We are listening to the message voters sent with this close election, and will be getting to work on today’s tough challenges right away,” Eby said.
One elected lawmaker needs to become speaker of the legislature, a neutral player who votes only to break ties. The speaker can come from any party, but it’s most likely to come from the NDP. If necessary, Eby may look to the Greens to pass laws. The two parties did it before, in a confidence-and-supply agreement, or informal coalition, between 2017 and 2020. The NDP then won a big majority in the election of 2020.
Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau said in an emailed statement that, pending recounts, “it appears as though” lawmakers from different parties will have to work together.
Conservative Resurgence
Eby will remain one of the few relatively friendly premiers for Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who’s far behind in national opinion polls and faces opposition on some policies from conservative-leaning governments in Canada’s other large provinces — Ontario, Quebec and Alberta.
The Conservative Party of BC — which isn’t affiliated with the national Conservative Party — saw a huge, unexpected jump in support this election. It hadn’t won an election for 96 years but has surged to replace the BC United Party as the standard-bearer of the right and main opposition party.
John Rustad, its leader, built an economic growth plan based partly on repealing the province’s main climate targets, making it unlikely the Conservatives form any kind of pact with the Greens.
“Just 18 months ago, the Conservative Party of BC was at 2% in the polls, had no members, no money, no team,” Rustad said on the social media site X. “I am immensely proud to lead a party that went from zero seats to 44 and almost government in just a year.”
Facing a strengthened conservative opposition, Eby and the NDP pivoted to the center in recent months, withdrawing support for a consumer carbon tax and its controversial drug decriminalization pilot.
Eby’s party ran heavily on blunting the cost of living and building more homes. Health care, the cost of living, housing affordability, public safety and the environment were the top issues for voters, according to a poll by Angus Reid published five days before the election.
(Updates with final vote count from Elections BC and Green Party and Conservative Party statements, beginning in the third paragraph.)
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