Bob Mackin
Mark Carney’s Liberals will stay in power as a minority government, but British Columbia helped Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to the party’s strongest popular vote in history.
Liberals won the 2025 election over the Conservatives and Bloc Quebecois. NDP lost official party status.
Conservatives were leading or elected in 20 B.C. ridings, one more than the Liberals at midnight. But that flipped the other way, in favour of the Liberals, before 8 a.m.
The NDP (3) and Greens (1) were leading or elected in the remaining ridings.
Compare with the 2021 pandemic snap election, when the Justin Trudeau-led Liberals won 15 seats in B.C. with nearly 609,000 votes, Erin O’Toole’s Conservatives 13 seats and more than 750,000 votes and Jagmeet Singh’s NDP with 13 with 664,000.
B.C. turnout was more than 67%.
Orange Crushed
The NDP’s leader finished third in his riding.
In his Burnaby Central concession speech, leader Singh announced he would resign upon the naming of a new leader. Liberal Wade Chang was the winner.
Peter Julian, the deputy leader, lost New Westminster-Burnaby-Maillardville to Liberal Jake Sawatzky. Conservative Indy Panchi had been leading at midnight.
Who will take over?
One possibility, at least as a caretaker, is Jenny Kwan. She kept her Vancouver East seat after a challenge from Mark Wiens, the Mandarin-speaking, Richmond real estate agent.
Kwan has experience with a party in distress. In 2001, she was in a caucus of two with the B.C. NDP after BC Liberal Gordon Campbell’s 77-seat landslide.
In Saanich-Gulf Islands, Green co-leader Elizabeth May won for the fifth time, fending off challenges from Liberal David Beckham, Conservative Cathie Ounsted and NDPer Colin Plant. The other Green co-leader, Jonathan Pedneault, was last place in Outremont, Que.
Further up island, Conservative Aaron Gunn beat the NDP’s Tanille Johnston in North Island-Powell River.
“Unqualified to be an MP”
Voters in Abbotsford-South Langley agreed with the Conservative Party, that former BC Liberal cabinet minister Mike de Jong is “unqualified to be an MP.”
De Jong, rejected in March by the party, ran as an independent. He finished a distant third behind winner Sukhman Gill of the Conservatives and Liberal Kevin Gillies.
The Conservatives won back one of the Richmond ridings lost in 2021.
Coun. Chak Au beat Liberal incumbent Wilson Miao in Richmond Centre-Marpole, likely triggering a civic by-election.
Conservative Zach Seagal was more than 1,000 votes behind Liberal incumbent Parm Bains in Richmond East-Steveston, with one poll to count.
Star candidate with baggage
Mark Carney’s star candidate is destined for a cabinet seat. He made the environment his priority during his 10 years at Vancouver city hall. He also made big affordable housing promises coming into office in 2008, even vowing to end street homelessness by 2015.
Didn’t happen.
Instead, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside became an even bigger ghetto and the city became a magnet for luxury real estate investors in Mainland China.
Robertson is a resident of a Vancouver Centre penthouse. His MP is Liberal Hedy Fry, who won for an 11th time.
Avi Lewis was a distant third. The longtime, far left NDPer ran on an anti-Israel platform.
Results slowdown
The Elections Canada website crashed, just in time for polls to close on the West Coast.
Spokesperson James Hale said the cause is under investigation. “We know that it was not a cyberattack.”
It took until 9:15 p.m. for a contingency measure to allow voters to access the website. But the online voter information service remained offline.
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