JOHNSON – How the B.C. election numbers are looking pre-recounts

SOO… IT’S NOT OFTEN in BC that an election is so close we have to wait for results to determine a winner.  Not since 1952 have British Columbians gone to the polls and then entered an extended state of not knowing who even won the damn thing.

After tallying all remaining mail-in, assisted telephone ballots and absentee ballots, Elections B.C. declared NDP candidates elected in 47 of the province’s 93 ridings, enough for a bare majority.

Conservative candidates were elected in 44 ridings, and Green candidates in two.

David Eby has already met with Lt. Gov. Janet Austin, and she asked him to form government.  What this government will look like, we don’t yet know as there are two judicial recounts to do, the result of which will inform the NDP how to proceed.

Rumour has it that this time it’s unlikely that they will use an opposition MLA as Speaker of the Ledge as happened in 2017, nor do we yet know the potential future involvement of the two Green MLA elects.

Today, the discussion is on the two judicial recounts and what they mean, and just where we might be with the seat count when we get the final answer.

One riding presently held by the NDP, the other by the Conservatives – are close enough numerically to trigger automatic judicial recounts.  These two riding are:

– Surrey Guilford
– Kelowna Centre

These two ridings are included in the 47 to 44 riding count, so if they remain the same after the recount, then the numbers of total riding count stay the same as well.

The recounts can’t change the reality that NDP will form some form of government … but the results could ultimately determine whether Eby leads a majority or minority government.  If both ridings go Conservative after the recounts, then the NDP will have a final total of 46 to the Conservatives 45, therefore a minority government.

The two recounts are going to take some time; judicial recounts are overseen by a B.C. Supreme Court justice, and the earliest they might start is Nov. 4.  Recounts must take place if the difference between the top two candidates is less than 1/500th of the total ballots considered.

In Surrey-Guildford, that threshold for judicial recount was just 38 votes.

This riding ended up a bit weird as it flipped after election night.  On election night, the Conservative (Honveer Singh Randhawa) was ahead of the NDP incumbent (Garry Begg) by 103 votes.

That’s not close enough for a recount.

After adding mail-in and assisted phone ballots over the weekend, the Conservative was still ahead by 12 votes, and after adding absentee ballots on Monday the NDP flipped the riding with a count of 27 votes more than the Conservative, triggering the recount.

In Kelowna Centre, the threshold for a judicial recount is 49 votes. The difference between the leading Conservative candidate Kristina Loewen and NDP’s Loyal Wooldridge was 148 votes on election night, before that gap shrunk during the tallying of mail-in and telephone ballots and absentees to a final difference of 38 votes, triggering a recount.

In both counts, the mail-in, phone and absentee ballot vote after count favoured Eby’s NDP over John Rustad’s Conservatives overall. That fostered some conspiratorial concerns online about the integrity of the province’s electoral process.

The President of the B.C. Conservative Party Aisha Estey, possibly seeing this, assured that she had not witnessed or heard of anything unusual while watching the vote count.

“I spent the last two days in a warehouse watching the transcription and counting of mail in ballots. Elections BC staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work.” She added, “Would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to Election Day? Sure. But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”

Considering how American republican and trump supporters cried foul over the 2020 election down there, it was a good idea to get ahead of this idea immediately, before this kind of grumbling took root.

Rustad himself said he accepted the results of the count, and that he is “ready to begin the important work of leading B.C.’s official opposition.”

And that’s more or less in alignment with what the pre-election coffee table was talking about.

There was a lot of concern regarding how quickly the Conservative party came into being, then suddenly found itself launched into a head-to-head battle to form government.

This unease is for a couple of reasons; it’s not that long ago it was a true fledgling party and the goal was a couple of seats if lucky and less than 10% popular vote.  The activity focus for the party was very likely to get a warm body into every single riding in the province.

It’s what you do if you’re a new party.  Setting up for the long game.

It became very clear early on that a number of these Conservative candidates were of the pseudo-conservative populous attraction. The 5G tower behavioural reprogramming, anti-vax, conspiratorial type.  Some of them have come out against abortion, against LGBTQ+ rights and for defending the 2022 Freedom Convoy.

At that time the party idea was likely to keep it all low key, as these individuals were very unlikely to win a seat this time … then over the next years, vet out any problems and trouble makers that were left, and work in the Ledge and on the street as BC’s third party, towards a future election.

What no one expected was that this new party would find itself alone in the race against the NDP. We do know that after the United announcement, the Conservative Party managed to replace a few of the more vocal tinfoil crowd with experienced and well-known United incumbents.

The general feeling by many is that this Conservative party needs to get some earned experience sitting opposite to government in the legislature, while putting effort into cleaning up their own miscreant house, before taking a real shot to form government in the next election four years from now.

We all see the tendency these days of western societies bending towards being more conservative, throughout the world.  Perhaps this populous style of Trumpian/ Pollievre, Lepine type of populous conservatism has reached B.C.’s shores … or maybe it’s a more B.C. grown thing where people simply had enough of the NDP, and would have voted Liberal or United to get rid of them, but only had this upstart Conservative party … but for some this particular version still was a bit too much to support unilaterally.

And this was the result:  Too much stuff even conservatives weren’t comfortable with, and risking power to a party that still has people as candidates that shouldn’t be, so we get another thin majority NDP government to kick around the block for a few years.

One thing for certain – 47 to 44 means we won’t be going back to the polls too quickly – might have just squeaked out enough to keep that from happening.

Gotta finds the positives.

David Johnson is a Kamloops resident, community volunteer and self described maven of all things Canadian.