It’s no great secret that David Eby and the BC NDP were the biggest losers in Saturday’s BC election, which saw Lorne Doerksen and the BC Conservatives swept into power. Eby’s name has now become a verb, and anyone associated with his decision to call a snap election should be sent to the political equivalent of the Night’s Watch. But if you’re a progressive looking for silver linings in the NDP defeat, you can take some solace in how badly the influencer class and their chosen candidate performed in that election — and what it could mean for their cancerous impact on Canada’s political climate.

It wasn’t that long ago — the Conservative Party of Canada leadership convention in January — where those same influencers, people like the “Pleb Reporter,” Mario Zelaya, Berta Proud Dad and Marc Nixon, looked like a force to be reckoned with in Canadian politics. They had already played a major role in Pierre Poilievre’s almost-rise to power, and he apparently thought enough of them to call them after the election to thank them for their support. At last January’s convention, these and other major Conservative influencers were given a special “content creator” pass, one that waived the $1,000 fee for party members (one has to assume most of them are) and offered them the same access as traditional journalists. Given Poilievre’s well-documented antipathy towards those traditional journalists, the influencers might have had far better access. 

There’s no question about Conservative influencers’ ability to generate pageviews and shape the online discourse around Canadian politics. As a 2025 report by the Media Ecosystem Observator noted,........

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