By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
BC Voters delivered an unclear result on Saturday as the neck and neck race between David Eby’s NDP and John Rustad’s Conservatives saw vote tally differences as low as a couple dozen votes in some ridings and in the Boundary-Similkameen riding saw incumbent NDP candidate Roly Russell lose his seat to Conservative Party candidate Donegal Wilson.
The preliminary results as of last night and into this morning showed the NDP leading with 46 seats to the Conservative’s 45. With 93 seats in the offing Sonia Furstenau’s Green Party with two votes could become the “king maker” in a minority government as 47 seats are required for a majority government.
What was clear from the election results was a harsh defeat for Furstenau who lost her seat in the Victoria-Beacon Hill riding.
Closer to home, the NDP’s Roly Russell lost his seat in the Boundary-Similkameen riding to the BC Conservative Party’s Donegal Wilson according to preliminary results. Russell garnered 42.46 per cent of the vote with 10,273 votes while Wilson attracted 48.48 per cent with 11,729 votes.
Results for Boundary-Similkameen riding. BC Elections chart
Other candidates in the riding including Kevin Eastwood of the BC Green Party won 5.88 per cent of the vote with 1,422 votes and Independent Sean Taylor attracted 3.19 per cent with 771 votes.
These numbers could change slightly as Out-of-district ballots are still in progress. All five of five Advance ballots and 24 or 24 Final Voting Day ballot boxes have been processed according to Elections BC.
Meanwhile pundits have pointed to the similarity of this election to that of 2017 when Christy Clark’s BC Liberals one two more seats than the NDP but were denied power after the BC Green Party threw its two seats into a coalition government with the NDP.
Lieutenant Governor Janet Austin now must decide who to call on for the first chance to form the government but convention has it that the incumbent party is approached first. In order for the NDP to form the government they will need to pick up one more seat either through recounts or through some form of coalition with the Green Party.
Some ridings will likely be triggered by automatic recounts as any riding with a difference of 100 votes or less is automatically recounted. As at Sunday morning Surrey City Centre, Surrey-Guildford and Juan de Fuca-Malahat are all situations of having 100 votes or less separating the two main parties.
In fact, the Juan de Fuca-Malahat riding flip-flopped back and forth almost minute by minute between the NDP and Conservative candidates all night long on Saturday. Currently the two candidates are separated by only 23 votes.
The recounts will take place during the final count which is scheduled for Oct. 26-28.
Elections BC said in a statement last night just after midnight that 99.72 per cent of preliminary results have been reported and counting would continue for about one hour.
Any electoral districts that are unable to complete initial count will continue counting Sunday, Oct. 20 morning. “Due to election official availability and weather-related disruptions, we will not have complete preliminary results tonight for Cariboo-Chilcotin, Surrey-Newton and North Coast-Haida Gwaii,” Elections BC added.
Sixteen districts are continuing to count out-of-district ballots, with these ballots taking longer to count for several reasons, the Elections body explained.
“With B.C.’s vote anywhere model, some districts are reporting out-of-district results from dozens of other contests. Write-in ballots also take longer to count than ordinary ballots.”
Voter turnout registered 57 per cent but it’s unclear how much of an impact the atmospheric river had which hit Metro Vancouver and Vancouver Island on Saturday.
