The Forecast Handing BC’s Fractured Conservatives a Majority Admits Exactly What It Guessed
The model states its assumptions out loud: the 11.7-point premium, OneBC's unmapped third and the incumbent who withdrew, while October delivered two different turnouts.
Vote-Scope’s British Columbia forecast puts the Conservatives at 57 of 93 seats, with a greater-than-99-percent chance of a majority. Past the seat table, the page says in its own words what the model had to assume to get that number, including one assumption that events have already broken.
The forecasters start with the parties that did not exist in 2024. OneBC gets no baseline of its own. Its support is spread across ridings by affinity to the 2024 Conservative vote, with a third of it deliberately left flat “because nobody knows where the party is strong.” CentreBC keeps the share the polls give it, spread by the 2020 Liberal vote. Those polls predate the September day on which seven of its eight MLAs walked back to the Conservatives. An incumbent stripped of a major label gets an 11.7-point personal-vote premium, measured on five 2024 cases, five incumbents who chose to run while fifteen others stood down. The page calls that number “an order of magnitude, not a settled calibration.”
One of the page’s own watch-list items is already out of date. The model, the page says, “currently assumes every incumbent runs again under their current label.” On September 22 it built Brent Chapman’s personal vote into OneBC’s Surrey South projection. On October 3 Chapman, the Surrey South MLA who crossed to OneBC on dissolution day and Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s husband, announced he isn’t standing. “The probabilities shown are conditional on these assumptions,” the page says.
The fracture underneath the forecast was real. Twenty of the 44 MLAs elected as Conservatives in 2024 left the caucus at least once, and several came back. Kerry-Lynne Findlay, elected leader on May 30, resigned on September 20, two days after eight former Conservatives led by Peter Milobar took over CentreBC. The Conservative seat count touched 28 at dissolution. Interim leader Lorne Doerkson readmitted five MLAs on September 21, and seven CentreBC MLAs plus independent Brennan Day returned on September 22. The party now holds 36 seats to the NDP’s 47, with Elenore Sturko remaining as CentreBC’s leader.
Vote-Scope is frank about where its numbers are softest: ridings the floor-crossers touched “stay the least certain.” Its three tightest races, Burnaby North, Mid Island-Pacific Rim and Port Moody-Burquitlam, are all NDP-held seats where the Conservatives trail by about two points. Sturko defends Surrey-Cloverdale as CentreBC leader with an incumbent’s personal vote credited to her, and the Conservatives are still projected 11.4 points clear there. Chapman’s exit leaves OneBC defending Surrey South with a new candidate, while Milobar is back in Conservative colours in Kamloops Centre. OneBC leader Dallas Brodie is on the ballot in Vancouver-Quilchena, one of the few ridings where advance turnout rose. SFU political scientist Edana Beauvais told The Bull Post she will be watching Surrey and Richmond closely on election night, where she says the outcome could decide who forms government.
Eby’s writ did more than start a campaign. It swallowed one. The Abbotsford-Mission byelection set for September 26, called so Findlay could take Reann Gasper’s vacated seat, was cancelled four days before voting day, and the advance ballots already cast were discarded. Nominations for the general election closed October 3 with 355 candidates, up from 322 in 2024. Advance voting ran October 16 to 21, which put the provincial advance polls open a day before the municipal general vote on October 17. The final count, with mail-in and absentee ballots, runs November 6 to 10.
Eby framed the early call around the U.S. trade war, which he called an “existential moment” for the province. Fifty-seven percent of Leger’s respondents disapproved of going two years early. Ken Sim, Vancouver’s mayor when the writ dropped, said “British Columbia has separate election cycles for a reason. That principle shouldn’t be set aside because the timing looks politically convenient.”
The municipal vote drew a crowd. Provincial advance voting sagged. Vancouver hit 43 percent turnout, its highest since 2002 apart from 2014, and replaced Sim with Green candidate Pete Fry. Richmond jumped to 40.6 percent from 24.5. Burnaby set an all-time record. Saanich rose to 42.7 from 31.2. Against that, 891,348 provincial advance ballots over October 16 to 21 came to about 24 percent of registered voters, down from 1,001,331 and about 28 percent in 2024. Michael MacKenzie, the Jarislowsky chair in trust and political leadership at Vancouver Island University, told The Canadian Press the real test was “the work that needs to be done to cast an informed vote.” He warned the more visible provincial campaign could siphon attention from municipal races, whose turnout he called “abysmal.” Royal Roads political scientist David Black called the advance numbers “all so darn speculative,” noting that with a large undecided block in the polls, “it makes sense that we would see less advance vote turnout.”
Seventy-three percent of Conservative voters told Angus Reid they were “very certain” of their choice, against 54 percent of NDP voters. The Conservatives are holding 89 percent of their 2024 voters. The NDP is holding 74. Eby has made the seat-math argument himself, telling Green voters their party’s vote elected Conservatives over New Democrats in 11 ridings in 2024. Fair Vote Canada answered that the projections show the Conservatives “likely to form a false majority government with as little as 42% of the popular vote,” adding that “keeping first-past-the-post was a risk David Eby was willing to take.” In 2024, thirteen ridings were decided by fewer than 500 votes. Surrey-Guildford went by 22, where about 18,500 registered voters stayed home.
Poliwave’s model is less sure: 51 Conservative seats, with a 42-to-63 range that reaches below the 47 needed for a majority. Vote-Scope’s final pre-election projection, updated October 22, gives the Conservatives 57 seats, inside a 53-to-64 range.
