A person walks to a polling station to vote on election day in Vancouver, on Oct. 19.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
The British Columbia election last month was about as closely fought as such things can be. A swing of just 399 votes, out of 2.1 million cast, in three ridings would have delivered the BC Conservatives a majority government.
Instead, the initial count left the incumbent BC NDP with 46 seats, just one more than the Conservatives, with the remaining two seats going to the Greens. After – almost – all the ballots were counted, the NDP ended up with 47 seats, just enough to form a majority government.
And then something remarkably unremarkable happened: BC Conservative Leader John Rustad clearly and graciously conceded the election, despite some rumblings from the Conservatives’ grassroots.
“I accept the results of this election,” he wrote on a post on X. “I thank our Elections BC workers for their hard and dedicated work. While there are still judicial recounts to be completed, it’s now clear that our party will not win enough seats to form government in B.C.”
In one sense, Mr. Rustad’s concession was nothing unusual. Canadian politicians at all levels of government routinely acknowledge the will of voters, even in the narrowest of defeats. But the fact that respect for democracy is engrained in Canada so deeply as to almost go unnoticed does not make it any less important.
A week later, that respect was put to the test when Elections BC said that a ballot box containing 861 votes was not counted in the riding of Prince George-Mackenzie, and that 14 votes had not been counted in Surrey-Guildford (where the NDP had just a 27-vote lead in the initial count).
British Columbia passed that test, easily and impressively. It helped, of course, that, as expected, none of the additional ballots changed the outcome in any riding. But a key part of that success was due to Elections BC, which promptly disclosed the issue. By contrast, Canadians only learned months after the fact from Elections Canada that 1,589 special ballots in the Mississauga-Streetsville riding went uncounted in the 2021 federal election, because they were left in a commercial mailroom.
It would have been easy enough for Elections BC to trot out a footnote in a report months hence. It is to the agency’s credit that it chose transparency when transparency mattered most, and that its priority was to count all legally cast ballots.
Mr. Rustad also deserves a measure of credit for his response, where he again said that he was not disputing the results of the election. “Obviously I’m not happy with a number of things that have gone on with Elections BC, but I have to accept the results,” he told The Globe and Mail. It was his responsibility to say so, and he fulfilled that duty.
The Conservative Leader did express his displeasure with the missteps of Elections BC, calling them “an unprecedented failure” that undermined trust in the electoral process. That is clearly an overstatement: one need look no further than Elections Canada’s uncounted votes in Mississauga-Streetsville to see that mistakes can happen.
But Mr. Rustad was on firm ground in warning that an independent review is needed to understand what went wrong, and that confidence in the electoral system cannot be taken for granted. The toxicity of U.S. elections should be a cautionary tale for all democracies.
Elections BC will, of course, conduct its own review. But an arms-length inquiry will give an added layer of scrutiny. The NDP has floated the idea of an all-party committee rather than an external review, seemingly concerned that a broader inquiry might undermine British Columbians’ faith in the electoral system.
There are a couple of problems with the NDP proposal. For one, it’s not a resounding show of faith in voters’ intelligence to suppose that they would somehow be unable to cope with facts. More important, the integrity of elections is not the exclusive purview of political parties.
The NDP should emulate the example of Elections BC: opt for maximum transparency and back the Conservatives’ call for an independent review. The person heading that review should be acceptable to all three parties with representation in the legislature. The timeline should be tight, and the mandate narrow. And the entire review needs to be made public.
Elections BC made some mistakes in the most recent election but it got one big thing right: transparency is the light that allows trust to grow.