By Si Thu Naing

October 26, 2026

It’s a bit of a partisan misnomer to say that on October 24th, British Columbians elected a Conservative government for the first time since 1928, when small-“c” conservative governments were elected via the Social Credit Party for all but three years between 1952 and 1991.

To frame this as a strictly ideological pendulum swing from David Eby’s New Democrats to the Conservatives under Lorne Doerkson also understates the character issues at play in a campaign most observers agreed Eby only called for cynical reasons that voters had clear opinions about.

In the end, the Conservatives, after decades in the province’s political wilderness, won 63 of 93 seats, reducing Eby’s New Democrats to 28 (a loss of 19) and ending nine years of NDP government.

While a casual postmortem might conclude that the province has undergone a profound ideological realignment to the right, B.C.’s new governing party is less a solid block of blue than a blueberry: blue on the surface, purple inside. A closer examination of the incoming government’s internal anatomy shows why.

Just six years ago, the BC Conservatives were a marginal entity, capturing less than two per cent of the popular vote. The party that won the election yesterday is not an ideological monolith. Instead, it represents an intricate ecosystem constructed from former BC Liberals, centrist expatriates, and various factions of traditional fiscal and social conservatives. This merger of convenience may turn out to be its greatest asset.

In B.C., provincial elections traditionally offer a stark, binary choice. The winner governs, the loser opposes, and the two sides rarely talk except to score points. The exception is a minority legislature. When no party can govern alone, rivals are forced to negotiate, as the NDP and the Greens did in their 2017 confidence-and-supply agreement. Minority environments are unstable, but they compel governments listen to people who did not vote for them.

The new BC Conservative majority mimics this dynamic, but without the legislative instability. Because the party holds an absolute majority, the traditional legislative and policy brokerage has been internalized. The negotiations of governance will play out within the confines of the government caucus room.

The personnel at the apex of this structure embody this internal duality. Interim leader Lorne Doerkson was first elected in 2020 under the BC Liberal banner. John Rustad, the architect of the party’s rapid institutional ascent, served as a prominent Liberal cabinet minister before his expulsion in 2022. Peter Milobar, a former Liberal, has sat in caucus under three distinct organizational banners within the span of a single legislative cycle: the short-lived British Columbia Party, CentreBC, and the Conservatives.

For a quarter-century since the collapse of the Social Credit Party in the 1990s, the B.C. Liberals functioned as the province’s primary free-enterprise coalition, successfully balancing federal Liberal and federal Conservative voters.

When B.C. United — the successor to the Liberal Party — dissolved its campaign on the eve of the election, critics claimed that the centrist element of B.C. politics had been effectively erased. The election suggests otherwise. The political centre in B.C. has not disappeared; it changed parties without changing its mind.

The mechanics of this were demonstrated during this past summer’s leadership volatility. When Kerry-Lynne Findlay secured the leadership with a razor-thin 51% on the fourth ballot, it exposed a Conservative Party fractured cleanly down the middle.

The result of this election is a classic brokerage coalition: a party that looks uniformly blue on the outside but is functionally purple on the inside.

The subsequent exit and expulsion of 14 MLAs – eight of whom briefly established CentreBC – threatened to derail the conservative movement entirely. By stepping in as interim leader and opting for institutional expansion rather than ideological purification, Doerkson successfully repatriated those breakaway legislators.

Voters then delivered their verdict on the splinters. Running on their own, CentreBC and OneBC each drew less than two percent of the vote and won no seats. British Columbians who wanted a change of government wanted one vehicle, not three. The result of this election is a classic brokerage coalition: a party that looks uniformly blue on the outside but is functionally purple on the inside.

This internalized purple introduces distinct institutional vulnerabilities that a traditional binary majority avoids.

The first vulnerability is democratic transparency. In a formal minority parliament, political horse-trading is conducted in public through signed accords and recorded legislative votes. In this internalized framework, policy compromises are poised to occur behind the veil of caucus confidentiality. The public will witness the policy outputs, but the specific concessions made to satisfy competing factions will remain obscured.

The second is that the decisive contest moves from the ballot box to the party membership. The Conservative constitution bars an interim leader from seeking the permanent job, and the board has promised to find the “appropriate means” to keep Doerkson. However that is resolved, a few thousand members will eventually decide which faction leads. A contest that again divides the party down the middle would reopen everything the election closed.

The first real test will be the government’s top promise.

Asked on September 22nd what his priority would be, Doerkson answered plainly: he would repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), which the BC Liberals let pass unanimously in 2019. Much of the Conservative Party’s base sees the act as a drag on investment and land use.

But repeal would not erase constitutionally protected rights, and the Crown’s duty to consult would remain. Even Iain Black, a former BC Liberal cabinet minister who backed repeal during the leadership race, warned it could bring protests, blockades and stalled local economies. The fight inside caucus will not be over whether to repeal, but how fast and what will replace it.

Furthermore, the scale of a 64-seat majority can easily erode the precise discipline required to maintain a brokerage coalition. Executive leadership may grow arrogant, realizing they can mathematically afford to alienate a handful of moderate backbenchers. The constructive “minority instinct” within the caucus will only survive if the Premier’s Office treats internal dissent as critical policy feedback rather than factional disloyalty.

History provides a serious warning for this specific brand of coalition government. Simon Fraser Tolmie’s Conservatives secured a commanding 35-seat majority in 1928. By 1933, under the economic strain of the Great Depression, the party had fractured so completely that its provincial association failed to run a single candidate. Tolmie lost his own seat, and the B.C. Conservatives vanished from government for nearly a century.

The modern incarnation of the party will be tested immediately by the hard realities of fiscal management, shifting federal trade policies, and the mundane friction of administration. Its primary institutional advantage is that it already contains the ideological friction a healthy legislative assembly requires. Its enduring challenge will be managing that friction constructively.

British Columbians did not simply elect a blue party. They elected a blueberry: blue on the outside, but squeeze it, and it runs purple. Governing will do the squeezing, and it starts now.

Si Thu Naing is a public servant in the federal government and an MBA candidate in Sustainable Innovation at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business. He has served as a shop steward for the Union of National Defence Employees. The views expressed are his own.