B.C. Election: Lieutenant governor asks David Eby to form government

Experts say the outcome is far from settled, however, with Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre subject to a judicial recount in the coming days

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Published Oct 28, 2024  •  Last updated 6 hours ago  •  7 minute read

B.C. Premier and NDP leader David Eby walks through the crowd after delivering remarks at NDP party headquarters in Vancouver on election night Photo by RICHARD LAM /PNG

The NDP have won a single-seat majority in B.C.’s 2024 provincial election after Surrey-Guildford flipped during the counting of absentee, telephone-assisted and mail-in ballots on Monday.

This leaves the NDP with 47 seats, while the Conservatives have slipped to 44 and the Greens are still in the same position with two seats.

As a result, Lt.-Gov. Janet Austin has asked NDP Premier David Eby to form the next government, Eby’s office announced late Monday.

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Eby said he met Austin on Monday, nine days after the vote, and that he will “work hard every day to earn the trust” British Columbians have placed in the party.

Experts say the final outcome is far from settled, however, with Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre subject to judicial recounts in the coming days.

In Surrey-Guildford, Garry Begg of the NDP led by 27 votes with the count coming to a close on Monday evening. He was originally down by 103 votes to Conservative candidate Honveer Singh Randhawa on election night.

In Kelowna Centre, the Conservatives are only up by 38 votes — below the 1/500th threshold needed to avoid such a review.

But, if Monday’s results hold, the NDP would be able to remain in government and survive any confidence votes even without the support of the Greens. This is because the tiebreaking vote would rest with the Speaker and convention states the Speaker should never be the one to bring down the government.

Passing legislation without Green support will be trickier, as convention states the Speaker should preserve the status quo, but whether serving as the tiebreaking vote on an ordinary bill goes against the status quo is up for debate.

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David Black, a Royal Roads political communications professor, believes that in most instances the speaker will still side with the government.

The problem, said Black, is that the Speaker then becomes almost like an ordinary MLA in the sense they are regularly siding with their own party and their position as an impartial figure becomes compromised.

“That’s why it’s constitutionally very stressful. It’s one of the weaknesses in the system,” he said.

“It is a difficult thing to ask a Speaker to vote all the time. It just begins to erode their status, their function, their authority, their ability to to ensure that the House maintains decorum.”

Philippe Lagasse, a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa who studies the Westminster parliamentary system, said that the Speaker will move legislation along and not act in a way that impedes the work of the legislature.

At the same time, he pointed to standing orders that state the Speaker “should avoid using the casting vote in such a way as to amount to a final determination of the matter.”

A review of ballots cast in Surrey City Centre and Juan de Fuca-Malahat this weekend confirmed victories for David Eby’s NDP in those ridings. In both cases, absentee ballots and other late ballots raised the margins between the NDP and the Conservatives to well over 100 votes.

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Among those late mail-in and telephone-assisted ballots counted as of Sunday night, over 54 per cent provincewide went to the NDP with just over 32 per cent for the Conservatives and 10 per cent for the Greens, according to data compiled by a Kwantlen Polytechnic data journalism professor, Chad Skelton.

Skelton said he wasn’t surprised to see that ballots counted after election day favoured the NDP, as that has historically been the case. He said that students and union workers are generally more likely to vote through mail or over the telephone, and both are segments of the population that generally skew towards left-leaning parties.

“The stereotypical absentee voter is someone who is a university student, someone that lives in Victoria or Kelowna and is going to UBC in Vancouver, SFU in Burnaby, and on election day, they’re not in their home riding,” said Skelton.

“I’ve heard also that unionized workers in fields like nursing, that work crazy shifts, might more often find themselves not in their home riding to vote.”

Andrew Watson, Elections B.C.’s communications director, said the process the independent office has taken to count these ballots is dictated by provincial law and that the time frame has actually been shortened compared to past elections.

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He said that the time between election day and the start of final count in 2017 was 13 days. This election it was a week.

“We’re also counting far fewer ballots as part of the final count process than we have previously, thanks to recommendations that were made in 2018, which were adopted in the Election Amendment Act 2019,” said Watson.

“If you look at 2017, we were counting around 170,000 to 180,000 ballots during the final count process. This election, we’re counting around 66,000 ballots as part of final count.”

Despite the shortened time, Watson and Elections B.C. have been subject to a wave of conspiracy theories on social media that allege the election process has been mishandled or even rigged in favour of the NDP.

Scrutineers from both the NDP and Conservatives have called the claims false and expressed their confidence in the election process and those doing the work to carry it out.

Ryan Painter, who served as the campaign manager for Conservative candidate Chris Sankey in North Coast-Haida Gwaii, told Postmedia he spent most of Sunday as a scrutineer for the party during the recount for Juan de Fuca-Malahat.

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He said it is a role he has carried out for several parties across several elections and believes the 2024 election was one of the most secure he has witnessed.

“This time was the very first time I’ve been at one of these things where the district electoral officer spent a good 15-20 minutes going over everything, the entire process, what we would be doing, actually asked all of the staff in the warehouse to stand up, say their name, what is their position,” said Painter.

He explained the boxes filled with ballots were all laid out on one side of the room and were inspected by electoral officers and scrutineers to ensure they were sealed.

An Elections B.C. official would then open a box up and put all the ballots on the table for people to look at, before picking up each ballot and reading aloud the candidate the vote is for.

Another official records the votes on a sheet and, at 25, stops and allows the scrutineers to look at the ballots to ensure they are happy with how they are marked and that 25 have been counted.

“It’s very diligent. It’s maybe a little bit slow for someone who’s looking for a faster process, but I actually think it’s entirely appropriate,” said Painter, explaining that scrutineers can object to a ballot they believe has been improperly marked, with a final decision made by the district electoral officer.

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“Votes in Canada, in my personal opinion, are probably some of the safest votes around and I would put us probably up against most countries in the developed world. You just have to give people some time to be educated on things, and I don’t want to cancel people for having questions. I just want people to have an opportunity to learn.”

John Luton, a former Victoria city councillor, said he served as a scrutineer for the NDP at the Victoria warehouse where all mail-in, telephone-assisted and absentee ballots were counted.

He said it becomes apparent quickly how professional and serious everyone involved in the process is, from the elections officials to the scrutineers to the volunteers.

“You recognize how much attention is paid to every single vote,” said Luton. “The idea that there’s monkey business going on has zero credibility.”

READ MORE: If the NDP forms another government with the Greens, can a shaky minority address voters’ concerns about housing prices and health care?

Here are some of the key numbers about the election, based of estimates provided by Elections B.C.:

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Eligible voters: 3,550,017

Total votes cast: 2,105,534

Estimated turnout: 59.3 per cent

NDP vote share: 44.9 per cent

B.C. Conservative vote share: 43.3 per cent

Green Party vote share: 8.2 per cent

Advance votes: 1,001,331 (46 per cent of total)

Votes in initial Oct. 20 count: 2,039,460 (97 per cent of total)

Mail-in and assisted telephone votes counted on weekend: 43,538 (two per cent of total)

Absentee and special ballots being counted Monday: 22,536 (one per cent of total)

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With files from the Canadian Press

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