Over the course of the last two years, British Columbia's political world has been turned upside-down at least once, and the foundations are now being laid for it to happen again.
To give context, in 2024, British Columbia held its local legislative elections, choosing who would govern the province. The sitting BC New Democratic Party's (NDP) government had been performing moderately well in the leadup to that race, slated to receive somewhere around ~45% of the vote; in a first-past-the-post system, where whoever wins the most amount of votes in a riding, that is certainly a good number to receive, especially when your opposition is so divided.
What has been the case for BC politics since the 1990s has been that the Liberal Party of BC would typically win elections, itself being a big-tent coalition of liberals and conservatives, constantly trying to keep its more centrist and conservative wings at peace with each other. Eventually, that peace was broken when MLA John Rustad joined the BC Conservatives in February 2023, creating a new schism in the anti-NDP alliance. Also during this period, Liberal leader Kevin Falcon pushed through a rebrand of the BC Liberals, changing their name to "BC United" as the Trudeau government grew increasingly unpopular.
Flashing forward, BC United sat out the election and endorsed Rustad's Conservatives, with the NDP winning by the slimmest of possible margins, winning 47 (50.5%) of the seats with 45% of the vote. The Conservatives, meanwhile, found themselves with 44 (47.3%) of the seats and 43% of the vote. One would imagine that in the aftermath of that result, MLA Rustad's position in his party would be functionally solidified.
Not so, apparently, as Rustad has found out with shocking speed. Beginning on June 9th of this year, Conservative MLAs Dallas Brodie (Vancouver-Quilchena) and Tara Armstrong (Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream) formed the new political party "OneBC". Both MLAs left the Conservative Party earlier this year, after Brodie was removed from the Conservative caucus on March 7th for comments she had made about residential schools on a podcast, discussing survivor testimony in "a mocking voice". Later that day, MLA Armstrong left the party in solidarity with Brodie. Since then, OneBC has existed as a further right-wing alternative to the BC Conservatives, which stands to gain around 5% of the vote were an election to be held today according to some polls. However, this party may grow further in popularity depending on how Rustad's other problems shape out.
MLA Rustad's tenure has seen an increasing number of MLAs either leaving or being ejected from his party, though has otherwise maintained some degree of control of his caucus. This sense of control disappeared on October 22nd as his own appointees to the party management committee recommended that he step down from his position as leader. Since then, he has called for the committee members to step down instead, stating that he would never resign. Later, it was reported that he brought party MLAs into a meeting, instructing them to sign onto a letter demanding the committee resign, threatening their re-nominations to their seats in the next election; of course, a key issue with this threat being that the party leader does not control nominations, but the committee in question does.
Things are not looking better according to the polls: a recent poll indicates that half of voters who supported the BC Conservatives in 2024 want a new party leader, while only 20% support keeping Rustad onboard for the next election.
Naturally, this leaves BC politics in an odd position: there now exists a developing political dynamic which could generously be referred to as the "2-and-3-halves" system: alongside all of this drama, a former Liberal/BC United MLA, Karin Kirkpatrick, has formed another new party, "Centre BC." That party purportedly intends to represent the political center in BC, not represented by either the Conservatives or the NDP. Accordingly, one would expect the NDP and Conservatives to remain the two largest parties in the province, with the Centre Party present for fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters, while the Green Party and OneBC serve to exist for political outsiders, looking to overturn BC's status-quo and overtake the position of one of the two major parties.
Of course, all of that remains to be seen. British Columbia sits at an unprecedented political crossroads, and there is truly no telling where the future will take us. The Conservatives could collapse, with OneBC taking its place just as the Conservatives replaced BC United, advocating for a more conservative populism — or the Greens could regain their position as junior partners with the NDP, if not overtake them completely by some freak accident. A British-esque left-right-center system could emerge, were Centre BC to pick up the old Liberal Party's fiscally conservative supporters should they feel they have nowhere to go.
There is truly no way of knowing what may happen next, but what we do know is that BC may yet see its most fascinating political adventures. As a political sciences major, I can only hope.
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