Vaughn Palmer: Former B.C. Conservative leadership contender running in safe seat

VICTORIA — Caroline Elliott, who finished a close second in the B.C. Conservative leadership race, has secured the nomination in one of the party’s safest seats, West Vancouver-Capilano.

Making way for Elliott is Lynne Block, the incumbent Conservative MLA for the West Van seat. Block os relocating to neighbouring North Vancouver-Seymour where she’ll go up against Susie Chant, who has twice won the riding for the NDP.

Elliott cited Block’s willingness to make the switch as “a crucial consideration” for why she decided to run.

“The ability to come home to the riding I live in, and make my kids part of the local constituency life in my own neighbourhood, is invaluable to me,” said Elliott, mother of two young children.

Elliott thanked Block in a social media posting for “stepping up to take on an NDP-held riding. … I will work endlessly with Lynne to ensure we turn (North Vancouver-Seymour) blue and when we do, Lynne and I will serve together as a team.”

Chant, a registered nurse, won the North Vancouver seat with 47 per cent of the votes in 2020, defeating the incumbent B.C. Liberal ,Jane Thornthwaite. In 2024, Chant improved to 53 per cent in an election where the New Democrats lost electoral ground and seats in other parts of Metro Vancouver.

West Vancouver-Capilano is a much safer prospect for a candidate from the centre right. B.C. Liberal MLA Ralph Sultan held it continuously for almost 20 years. He was followed as Liberal MLA in 2020 by Karin Kirkpatrick.

Kirkpatrick was sidelined when the B.C. United (successor to the B.C. Liberals) took itself out of the running. She then ran as an Independent, taking 21 per cent of the vote against Block, who won with 47 per cent.

Elliott was a footnote in 2024, running briefly for B.C. United before the party’s last-minute withdrawal in favour of the Conservatives. She was part of the negotiations that led party leader Kevin Falcon, Elliott’s brother-in-law, to put United on the shelf, where it remains to this day.

Elliott, a pundit and policy analyst, returned to the arena this year with a bid for the Conservative leadership that almost succeeded. She finished 60 votes behind Kerry-Lynne Findlay out of 22,000 votes cast in the final round.

Despite Elliott’s links to the Liberals and United, she disagrees with calls for a party grounded exclusively in the free-enterprise politics of its right-of-centre predecessors.

She emerged during the leadership as a strong critic of the NDP government’s Indigenous reconciliation policies, the handovers of public land, and the faltering defence of private property against encroachments of Aboriginal title.

She has lately called for Conservatives to take on the Eby government in culture wars.

“We can no longer pretend that the great questions facing this province can be settled entirely in dollars and cents, and that the right combination of tax cuts and deregulation is a sufficient answer to what ails our province,” Elliott wrote in Without Diminishment, an online site she co-founded.