Voter Apathy Won This Election

The 2026 B.C. election wasn’t decided by Conservative voters. The outcome was driven by NDP and Conservative voters who didn’t show up.

A striking aspect of this election is the turnout compared with the 2024 election. In that year, Elections BC says, turnout was 58.4 per cent, and the NDP received 944,579 votes — 48.8 per cent of all votes cast.

That same year, the Conservative Party of BC received 911,153 votes, or 43.3 per cent of the vote.

Figures for 2026 still aren’t official, but it appears that voter turnout this time was just 48 per cent. The NDP got 670,602 votes, or 37.4 per cent as of Saturday evening. That was a drop of 273,977 votes from 2024.

Meanwhile the Conservatives received 862,317 votes as of Sunday night. That was 48.1 per cent of the total vote, enough for a majority government, but it was 48,836 fewer votes than they had received under John Rustad in 2024.

Neither party got out its vote, but the Conservatives failed less badly than the New Democrats.

Analysts will spend a lot of time trying to understand the apathetic 52 per cent of B.C. voters who stayed home. But at the moment it looks as if the BC NDP in power disappointed more of its voters than the Conservatives did theirs, despite the uproar that nearly shattered the party.

What’s next for the NDP?

The New Democrats can now begin rebuilding their party and trying to reconnect with their alienated base.

Their choice of a new leader will tell us whether the BC NDP clings to the centre, where John Horgan and David Eby led it, or tries to regain the old Dave Barrett leftism of 50 years ago.

Or perhaps it strikes out in some entirely new direction.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, will predictably find B.C.’s finances in far worse shape than even they had thought. This will enable them to postpone some promises while cutting “red tape” and “seeking efficiencies.”

Red tape means “regulations to prevent consumers from being cheated or sickened” and efficiencies mean sacking enough bureaucrats to prevent agencies from doing their jobs. The result will be crippled government programs, proof that the private sector can always do the job better.

Public services such as health care and education will be asked to “do more with less,” just as they were in the 1980s restraint era of the Bill Bennett Socreds.

Bennett famously observed that the only “real jobs” were those created by the private sector. That ideology seems to have survived in the contemporary Conservatives, who, after all, are just the latest rebranding of the merchants and managers who have opposed the province’s working class for a century.

And like the Socreds, the B.C. Conservatives will find groups to “other”: youth of diverse genders, teachers, unions. They will look for someone to blame for anything that goes wrong.

We can also expect the Conservatives to maintain their deafening silence on climate change while cheering on the extraction and sale of fossil fuels. Climate disasters on their watch will be unfortunate acts of God, to be remediated, perhaps, but not prevented.

And while Indigenous Conservative MLAs may support the repeal of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, most Indigenous Peoples will dig in for a long war of litigation and protests.

Like the long BC Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark, Lorne Doerkson will find himself fighting many battles.

Unlike with the BC Liberals, they will often be internal ones. The far-right extremists are still in the party, and their 2025 platform is still in place.

They will push Doerkson hard to carry out that platform, or punish him if he doesn’t. The far-right members of the caucus will not be denied their eruptions.

The most difficult task for Doerkson will be to avoid disappointing too many of his supporters.

All of B.C.’s parties have now learned the terrifying power of the apathetic voter.