Vaughn Palmer: Conservatives flip another seat in final Elections B.C. tally

VICTORIA — Elections B.C. completed the final count for the 2026 election Sunday, adding one seat for the B.C. Conservatives and sending two close calls to judicial recounts.

The switch was in Burnaby South-Metrotown, where the count overturned an election night win for NDP incumbent Paul Choi and awarded the seat to Conservative newcomer David Xie.

The result boosted the Conservatives by one seat to 64 and reduced the NDP to 27 seats from 28. The Greens were unchanged at two.

The final tally of mostly mail-in ballots was close enough to trigger the automatic threshold for judicial recounts in Ladysmith-Oceanside, where NDP incumbent Stephanie Higginson finished 50 votes ahead, and in Kelowna Centre, where the margin was 43 votes for Conservative Kristina Loewen.

Loewen has the rare distinction of enduring a judicial recount for the second election in a row. Her 2024 win also fell within the Election Act provision that triggers a recount by a B.C. Supreme Court judge when the margin is less than 1/500th of all ballots considered in the electoral district.

Judicial recounts have not overturned the final count in any recent B.C. election, even where the margin was as close in the two seats above.

The final count of more than 150,000 ballots boosted the Conservatives to 928,019 votes overall, almost 17,000 more than they won in 2024. It gave the party 47.7 per cent of the popular vote, the same share as recorded by New Democrat John Horgan in his big win in the 2020 election.

This time the Conservatives clawed back most of the seats added by Horgan’s New Democrats in what appeared to be a breakthrough election in 2020. Langley, Maple Ridge, Chilliwack are securely returned to the right of centre along with all of Surrey and Richmond, and a majority of the seats in Burnaby and the Tri-Cities.

The final count gave the Greens 216,808 votes, a gain of 43,000 over 2024. The party’s share of the popular vote was 11.2 per cent, up from 8.2 per cent last time.

The New Democrats were the only party to lose both votes and vote share in this election. Their 37.6 per cent was their lowest share of the popular vote since the crushing defeat in 2001. The party finished with 730,939 votes, 213,640 fewer than in its narrow win in the 2024 election.

The final count of 150,000 votes boosted the turnout in election 2026 to 52 per cent of registered voters from a preliminary estimate of 48 per cent.

It’s still the lowest turnout in modern times, less even than the 53 per cent in the 2020 election, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After past elections, Elections B.C. has surveyed the voters on the factors affecting turnout. Such a survey could be quite revealing about the role of the snap election call this time around.

The New Democrats have promised their own post-mortem on this year’s result. Amid recriminations, they will surely try to learn from the one bright spot in the outcome.