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The BC Snap Election Is Uniquely Demoralizing

With all the defections and new parties, do voters know who stands for what?

In 2024, Dallas Brodie was a rookie politician in her early sixties, running as a member of the ascendant BC Conservative Party in the riding of Vancouver-Quilchena. She lucked out when her opponent—BC United leader Kevin Falcon, the incumbent in a formerly safe seat—dropped out of the race amid his party’s spectacular implosion, leaving a vacuum in the centre-right-leaning riding. Brodie, who previously garnered 6.6 percent of the vote in the riding’s 2022 by-election, won 51.6 percent of the vote.

Five months later, then BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad ejected her from the party over her comments about residential school survivors, saying Brodie used “a mocking, child-like voice to belittle testimony from former residential school students, saying things like ‘my grandmother’s truth’ and ‘my truth, your truth’ in a child-like ‘whining’ voice.”

Doubling down on the issue that ousted her, she and BC Conservative defector Tara Armstrong, member of the legislative assembly for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream, soon established OneBC, a party playing mainly to those who fear reconciliation or resent Indigenous people. Brodie has voted against affirming the BC Human Rights Code, produced a film promoting residential school denialism, called unmarked graves a “lie,” and introduced a bill to repeal the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, saying Canada has “nothing to reconcile for.” (She has also dabbled in other fringe views: advocating for doomed ostriches, denouncing “radical Islam,” claiming the province’s sex-ed curriculum is “grooming children,” and supporting Armstrong’s bill to create a statutory holiday honouring the Freedom Convoy.)

Brodie and Armstrong had a falling out last December, over a staffer who had a history of allegedly antisemitic comments, but Brodie wrested back control of the party and remains the only OneBC MLA. Her constituents continue to be represented by a party none of them voted for.

On October 24, just two years after their last trip to the polls, which led to the New Democratic Party securing a one-seat majority over the BC Conservatives by just twenty-two votes, some British Columbians may elect another unknown outsider who promises change and delivers it—just not the kind of change they expect.

Last month, buoyed by a recent boost to his sagging popularity after pushing back against United States president Donald Trump’s trade war, Premier David Eby seized on the chaos and mass exodus from the BC Conservative Party to call a snap election. His stated justification was the existential and economic threats posed by Trump, articulated torturously through the overuse of a wildfire analogy that repeatedly exhorted British Columbians to “build a fire break” by re-electing him, but no one seems convinced. Municipal governments, who are holding their elections one week earlier on October 17, are especially frustrated, with the president of the Union of BC Municipalities criticizing overlapping election periods as “a disservice to our citizens.”

Almost immediately, the election call seemed like a bad idea. Between the rumours of the snap election and its call, the scandal-plagued, short-lived BC Conservative leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay resigned........

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