Source: The Conversation – Canada
British Columbia Premier David Eby’s decision to call a provincial election a full two years before the next scheduled vote is a strategic gamble.
In short, Eby has bet the future of his NDP government, gambling that it will be easier to win re-election in the current climate than it would be in 2028. Looking at the history of B.C.’s party system, it’s easy to see how Eby came to this conclusion. Whether the gamble will pay off on Oct. 24 is still an open question.
The recurrent theme in B.C. politics is polarization between the left and the right.
Since the 1930s, the left has been primarily represented first by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, known as the CCF, and then by the New Democratic Party.
The right has gone through several iterations over the decades, from a coalition of Liberals and Conservatives in the 1940s to Social Credit until the 1990s and the Liberals in the 2000s, with the Conservatives becoming the right’s standard-bearer in the 2020s.
By my own calculations, British Columbians have been governed by the various parties of the right for about six decades in the post-Second World War war period, while the NDP has been in power for just about 22 years.
The CCF/NDP have won the most votes in the province on only five occasions since the Second World War (1952, 1972, 1991, 2020 and 2024).
Taking the historic weakness of the NDP into account, Eby’s snap election seems like an unnecessary risk. But the recent tumult on the right explains why a snap election now might be worth his gamble.
Benefitting from divisions in the right
The NDP’s best chance of winning power involves a schism in the forces of the right. As Canadian political scientist Dennis Pilon writes: “The B.C. NDP seems to come to power only when the centre-right vote spreads across more than one party.”
In 1972 and 1991, elections put the NDP in power because the centre-right won over 52 per cent of the vote but was split across multiple parties, giving the New Democrats a majority of seats.
By contrast, the NDP won in 2020 and 2024 despite facing a unified right-wing opposition. The 2020 victory occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis — a time when voters typically rewarded incumbents — while the 2024 election resulted in an extremely narrow victory.
If the lesson of history is that infighting on the right is the path to power for New Democrats, the fall of 2026 has offered just such a path. B.C. Conservatives have been divided since 2024, but particularly after Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s election as leader in May of this year. She resigned on Sept. 20, replaced by interim Leader Lorne Doerkson.
Infighting and dissatisfaction with the party’s leadership resulted in roughly a third of the Conservative caucus leaving, with CentreBC and OneBC both gaining erstwhile Tory MLAs.
The division on the right presented a choice to Eby and the NDP: call an election now in attempt to take advantage of that division and win four more years in power, or wait in the hope that the current infighting continues until 2028.
For a premier’s office beleaguered by bad polling and unity problems, going to voters now while the division is firmly entrenched was more tempting than waiting and hoping for two more years.
The road to power
What are the pathways to power for the two leading parties in B.C., the NDP and the Conservatives?
For the Conservatives, the answer is simple: unite the right. At the level of MLAs and candidates, this has largely been accomplished; many of the expellees or rebels have now returned home to the Conservatives in the wake of Findlay’s resignation and the threat of an imminent election.
In fact, by calling the snap election, Eby may have inadvertently caused this reunification of the right. The task for the Conservatives will be ensuring voters pick them on Election Day, instead of splitting off to either CentreBC or OneBC.
For the NDP, the path to staying in power is somewhat out of their hands, dependent on the Conservatives failing to fully unite right-leaning voters behind them. New Democrats will need to ensure they can mobilize left-of-centre voters to choose them on Election Day, not a sure thing after nearly a decade in power and with a more explicitly left-wing Green party on offer.
Will Eby’s gamble pay off? With less than two weeks until the election, recent polls show the Conservatives leading, having bounced back from their lows during the peak of their infighting in September.
A divide on the right is the best path for the NDP to win power in British Columbia, yet calling this snap election appears to have had the opposite effect — uniting the right behind the Conservatives.
Matthew Taylor has received funding from the federal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/13/david-ebys-big-gamble-why-calling-an-early-b-c-election-could-backfire/