B.C. election produces another Big Bang political moment

Open this photo in gallery:

While technically still clinging to power, the B.C. NDP must feel like Saturday’s provincial election was a harsh repudiation by voters.

The New Democrats and their leader, David Eby, finished the night with a 46-45 lead over the B.C. Conservatives, with two Greens holding the balance of power. It’s the 2017 election all over again.

There are at least two ridings so close that there will be recounts. We may not have the official results for a couple of weeks. But given what the political landscape looked like in the province just over a year ago, this result is shocking.

Explainer: Five take-aways from the B.C. election

British Columbians are quite capable of causing these cataclysmic political events that completely demolish the status quo. They are Big Bang moments in which parties rise from the ashes of a previous existence. And some once-prominent parties fade out of the picture altogether.

The Social Credit party ruled for all but three years between 1952 and 1991. Then the NDP took over. Before the decade was up, Social Credit was a completely spent political force, destined to live out its best days in history books.

The NDP ruled until 2001, when voters had enough of their left-wing incompetence and voted in the B.C. Liberals, a party that hardly existed 10 years earlier. A clever election debate quip by their then-leader Gordon Wilson was enough to ignite something, giving the moribund party a spark that caught fire. The Liberals were taken over by Vancouver mayor Gordon Campbell, who would later give way to one of his former cabinet ministers, Christy Clark. Altogether they governed B.C. for 16 years.

Then 2017 happened, and the Liberals came up one seat short of a majority. That allowed the NDP to form a governing partnership with the three-seat Green Party and the Liberals slowly began to recede from political relevance. The NDP under John Horgan won a healthy majority in 2020 before handing the leadership over to Mr. Eby in 2022.

Which brings us to Saturday’s election result. The Conservatives currently have 45 seats. That is mind-boggling. Just over a year ago, they were a party that was barely breathing. That changed when Mr. Rustad, who was kicked out of the Liberal Party caucus in 2022 for refusing to delete a tweet that, well, made him look like the climate denier that he is, joined the Conservatives in February, 2023.

He began to build the party up from scratch, eventually persuading several Liberals – then B.C. United members as the party went through an ill-advised name change – to cross the floor. The Conservatives then began to ride a wave of voter discontent that led to Saturday’s election result.

It’s another example of these Big Bang events in B.C. politics that completely change the landscape – the players, the names, the policies.

So now what?

Barring a change from the current results, the NDP holds a one-seat advantage over the Conservatives. To form a majority it needed 47 seats, so the party will need the help of the two B.C. Green Party MLAs to make a legislative agenda work. The NDP would almost assuredly have to sacrifice one MLA to the position of Speaker, which would make its hold on power even more tenuous.

It’s hard to imagine the Greens ever agreeing to work with Mr. Rustad to give his party a shot at governing, given the Conservatives’ views on climate change and environmental matters more generally.

Mr. Rustad is a proud climate denier. While that seems astonishing in this day and age, I’m certain his skepticism around the science of climate change and COVID vaccines helped boost his popularity. There are many people in B.C., especially in rural parts of the province, that cheered Mr. Rustad on around these issues.

There are others who aren’t likely thrilled over those stands, or even cringe when they think of possibly being governed by a man who is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to climate change, but were willing to set those feelings aside to vote for change. There was definitely an anti-David Eby sentiment that was pervasive in this election.

Regardless of what happens in the near future, Mr. Eby will need to take a hard look at his progressive agenda over the past two years and ask: Was it too much, too fast?

If he is forced to govern under the precarious conditions that currently exist, he will have to do so cautiously. He may have to give further rethinks to his highly unpopular decriminalization program. Crime and public disorder will have to be given greater attention.

The next few weeks will be strange and uncertain ones. But British Columbians are used to that.