The News Rundown

B.C. election results: Mail-in ballots favouring NDP as recounts begin in 2 ridings

What a week it's been for British Columbians. It all started last Friday with an atmospheric river bringing in torrential rains and flooding, and culminated in a very wet Election Day on Saturday, in which hundreds of thousands of people came out to vote.
Despite new electronic tabulators being used in this election, which were touted by Elections BC as being able to very quickly count votes and give us a very clear picture almost immediately after voting closed at 8pm, over a week later, we still don't know who won the election. How did this happen?
Part of it is because of BC's very accessible voting rules, which allow people to vote in a number of different ways, including at any voting place in BC regardless of which part of BC you live in, mail in ballots with a very generous deadline of up to 8pm on election night, and of course several advance voting days from the 10th to 16th, not including Thanksgiving Monday.
This means that all those mail-ins and accessible votes across the province had to make their way to the polling station. And because of the way the votes turned out, those 'extra votes' that weren't counted on election night by the electronic machines are actually influencing how some very close races have turned out.
Elections BC was still counting mail in ballots this weekend, with the final count of absentee ballots in all electoral districts supposed to be completed by Monday morning, including the recount of the closest riding, Juan de Fuca-Malahat on Vancouver Island.
Yes, the people who live in BC who say their vote doesn't matter are clearly wrong, as on election night, the NDP were leading the Conservatives by just 23 in JdFM. After mail in ballots were accounted for, that lead increased to 106. As we speak, recounts are still underway for Juan de Fuca-Malahat, Surrey City Centre, and Kelowna Centre which as of recording began just a few hours ago.
At this point you're probably wondering, well these are just a few ridings, why not talk about the province as a whole? Well, as it stands right now, the NDP are elected or leading, pending in 46 ridings, the Conservatives in 45, and the Greens in 2. That includes roughly 910k votes for the NDP, 888k for the Conservatives, and 167k for the Greens. As you can see, it's the closest election we've ever had in BC, where no one has a majority, surpassing the 2017 election total which led to a NDP minority government supported by 3 Green MLAs in a confidence and supply deal.
So as it stands the province is in limbo, with everyone waiting with baited breath for Elections BC to tell us who won, likely tomorrow morning.
After the initial count, the NDP’s lead in Juan de Fuca Malahat was just 23 votes. However, Saturday’s count of mail-in ballots for the riding show that Dana Lajeunesse extended his lead over Conservative candidate Marina Sapozhnikov to 106 votes. In Surrey City Centre, it was a similar story for NDP candidate Amna Shah, who extended her lead over the Conservatives' Zeeshan Wahla from 95 votes to 178 votes.
The closest race in the province, as of Elections BC's 4 p.m. update on Saturday was in Surrey-Guildford, where Conservative candidate Honveer Singh Randhawa led NDP incumbent Garry Begg by just 12 votes. In the initial count after election night, Randhawa's lead was 103 votes.
Three other races were within one percentage point on Saturday afternoon. Those were Courtenay-Comox, Kelowna Centre and Maple Ridge East. All three were led by Conservatives on election night, and all three have seen the leads narrow on Saturday.
Notably, hundreds of ballots remain to be counted in each of these close ridings. Elections BC said it would count mail-in ballots in the closest ridings first, and the agency's records indicate the mail-ballot count is complete in all five ridings mentioned. However, hundreds of absentee ballots, which are slated to be counted on Monday, remain outstanding in each district.
The final count of ballots began Saturday, with more than 66,000 mail-in and absentee votes potentially yet to be counted across the province's 93 electoral districts. Counting is expected to continue through the weekend and into Monday. The addition of these 66,000-plus votes has the potential to change the results of the nail-bitingly close election.
Forty-seven seats are required for a majority, so a gain of one seat for the NDP or two seats for the Conservatives in the final count could give that party the ability to form a government without help from another party's MLAs.
If the riding tally ends up unchanged, the Greens will hold the balance of power in a minority legislature, with either NDP Leader David Eby or Conservative Leader John Rustad needing support from Green MLAs to become premier.
Elections BC says the tally of more than 22,000 absentee and special votes will be updated hourly on its website from 9 a.m. Monday. While the makeup of the 93-riding legislature could finally become clear on Monday, judicial recounts could still take place after that if the margin in a riding is less than 1/500th of all votes cast.
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One of the most notable outcomes of the B.C. election is that if it had been up to immigrants, the B.C. Conservatives would have won easily. Throughout the campaign, polls showed that the B.C. Conservatives’ strong showing against the NDP was owed predominantly to outsized support among B.C.’s non-white, predominantly immigrant communities.
For more than six months, Mainstreet Research has tracked a noticeable gap in B.C. Conservative support between white and non-white British Columbians. As far back as May, Mainstreet found 50.1 per cent of Indo-Canadian respondents saying they would vote for the B.C. Conservatives, against just 11.7 per cent intending to vote B.C. NDP.
Black, East Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern and South Asian respondents similarly expressed a preference for the B.C. Conservatives over the NDP. The province’s most immigrant-heavy ridings, meanwhile, represented many of the B.C. Conservatives’ most decisive upsets, including in Surrey, where seven of the city’s 10 ridings went for the B.C. Conservatives on Saturday. This represented an almost complete flip from 2020, when seven of nine Surrey ridings had gone NDP.
The B.C. ridings with some of the fewest immigrants, meanwhile, overwhelmingly backed the NDP. Victoria, the province’s capital, lags behind the B.C. average for both immigrant population and ethnic diversity. According to 2021 census data, just 16.7 per cent of Victorians were members of a visible minority, against 34.4 per cent province-wide. Its immigrant population is 18.6 per cent — one of the lowest of any major Canadian city. As per the most recent count, six of seven Victoria ridings went for the NDP, with the seventh going to the Greens.
Regardless, currently the balance of power lies with BC Green Leader Sonia Furstenau, who is staying on as leader despite not being elected after switching ridings from Cowichan Valley to one of Victoria's biggest NDP strongholds. Furstenau says her goal until all the votes are in is to help her two rookie candidates get settled into the legislature.
And in doing so, it appears that she has already showed her cards in the preliminary negotiations, reducing her power. Furstenau says the starting place to supporting whichever party comes to power in British Columbia is her party’s platform, which is even further left wing and radical than the NDP, including policies like the carbon tax and drug decriminalization that the NDP walked back on before the election.
Furstenau also says she has taken a call from NDP Leader David Eby, but didn’t answer the phone when B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad called, adding she didn’t recognize the number.
Furstenau added that she didn't like some comments made by some Conservative candidates who won their ridings calling them "truly disturbing, including racist, dehumanizing, homophobic and conspiratorial statements". She says she has yet to see a satisfactory response from Rustad over what his candidates have said, noting that elected representatives have a serious burden to hold themselves to a high standard.
A satisfactory response to candidates being elected? After a democratic election, the usual response by winners and losers alike is “the voters have spoken.” Not Furstenau.
Not likely, said Rustad. His party picked up 888,630 votes, 43.6 per cent of the popular vote and 45 seats in preliminary results. That’s five times as many votes as the Greens, five times the popular vote and 22 times the seats. Plus, Rustad won his own riding, something Furstenau failed to do in Victoria-Beacon Hill.
Rustad said: “Sonia is not obviously a big fan of democracy. The people of various ridings have spoken as to who should be elected and who shouldn’t be elected.” The two leaders did connect briefly by phone this week. Rustad probably wouldn't apologize for the verdict of the voters, nor is it likely the two found any common ground on which to work together.
The platform plank with the greatest implications for the future of the Greens is the call for a switch to proportional representation. The party would win more seats that way and would be more securely entrenched in the legislature.
B.C. voters have twice rejected a switch to proportional representation in the past 15 years, both times by a decisive margin of 61 per cent. This time the Greens want to switch to proportional representation now and hold the referendum after the fact, a decade or so down the road.
The Greens also proposed to skip the referendum in their power-sharing negotiations with the NDP in 2017 too. NDP leader John Horgan ruled it out. I doubt Premier David Eby would agree to it now.
As previous Green leader Andrew Weaver pointed out, Furstenau has handed all the leverage to the NDP by ruling out the Conservatives. Weaver said: “She just undercut any negotiating ability the B.C. Greens have with the B.C. NDP. It’s 2017 all over again,” Weaver continued, referring to that year’s negotiations on the NDP-Green power sharing agreement with him as party leader and Furstenau as an MLA.
Regarding 2017, Weaver said: “I had to deal with Furstenau undermining my negotiating ability by telling folks she ‘threw up’ after we met with the B.C. Liberal negotiating team. Negotiations are like a game of chess. Furstenau just blew it. If I were Eby I’d just call the Greens’ bluff!”
Weaver supported Conservatives and other candidates this election. He has already called for Furstenau to “pass the torch” to a new generation after “British Columbians resoundingly rejected her far-left eco-socialist vision.”
But he is on the mark in his recollection of how her intransigence undermined his bargaining strategy on the power-sharing agreement back in 2017. Weaver would have preferred to play off the Liberals and NDP against each other, getting them to one-up each other’s offers. Furstenau’s refusal to consider an arrangement with the Liberals simplified the negotiations for Horgan and the New Democrats.
When Horgan realized that the Greens would only dance with one partner, he knew he didn’t have to offer a lot of concessions, and he didn’t. The power-sharing agreement mostly reflected positions the NDP had already taken in its election platform, with minor tweaks of a face-saving nature to the Greens. With this week’s blast of righteousness against the Conservatives, Furstenau has once again reduced her own party’s bargaining leverage in dealing with the NDP.
It's certainly feeling a lot like 2017 again, and not in a good way. And how our province is governed for the next few years may come down to the actions of an unelected leader whose party only got 2 seats.
Supplementals:

Massive oilsands carbon capture project gains 'hope' after Wilkinson, Freeland meet with Pathways Alliance

Economic and technological tools have been sought to manage emissions from the Canadian energy industry for years and one of those has been carbon capture and storage.
The first carbon capture and storage projects were floated by the Alberta government as far back as 2007 and there has always been some mystique around them and questions from the environmental lobby as to whether or not they would work.
Essentially what happens is through a series of machinery and new technology carbon is captured or scrubbed from emissions then stored underground. They’re projects that require investment and have been met with skepticism by those who like carbon taxes.
This week though in a big story, carbon capture and storage is back on in Alberta.
Carbon capture and storage or CCS is being spearheaded by the Pathways Alliance who aims to have a collection of oil and gas companies hit net-zero by 2050.
The Pathways Alliance has been talked about before on the podcast in that they have drawn criticism from the federal ministry of environment that their ad campaigns aren’t based in fact and as such were forced to suspend them due to potential litigation risks.
The Pathways Alliance includes big energy companies like Cenovus Energy, Imperial Oil, Canadian Natural Resources, Suncor, MEG Energy, and ConocoPhillips Canada.
But the Pathways Alliance is back in a big way this week as it looks like a $16.5b CCS network in Alberta will get the green light.
At this point you might be wondering what has changed: there’s an agreement between the federal ministry of energy and natural resources.
Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson with the aid of Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland met with the Pathways Alliance in Calgary.
Wilkinson is the one that believes this project could start moving by year’s end.
In a Post Media interview he said, “I’d probably be going out on a limb to say this year, but ideally it would be before the end of the year — but certainly, if not, early in the new year would be my hope.”
This has the potential to be a huge deal for Alberta and Canada. The emissions cap from Guilbeault’s ministry of environment calls for a 35-38% of 2019 levels by 2030.
The Pathways Alliance as a whole wants their group of companies to be net-zero by 2050 with CCS as a large component.
If we can avoid the pitfalls of a GDP collapse and exodus of energy money from Canada and hit net-zero by 2050 the question then becomes: why is the emissions cap necessary in the interim?
Is it ideological?
Will it green the air in Canada?
Will it stop forest fires?
This is a small fire that has been put out by Ottawa because the large energy companies need to be onboard with any environmental plan and should be at the forefront of it.
It also of course raises more questions about what the ministry of environment is doing and whether there’s a vendetta by some minister out there who currently occupies that portfolio.
Last week we brought forward Alberta’s Scrap the Cap plan and with this new development it’s a question as to why a cap is even needed.
The project, if it goes ahead, will see a 400km pipeline connecting more than 20 oil sands facilities to an underground storage hub near Cold Lake.
The Alberta government has created a program to offer a 12 per cent grant to carbon capture developments.
The federal government has established an investment tax credit for carbon capture, utilization and storage projects across Canada; it would cover up to half of a development’s capital expenses.
This is a big deal outside of the perceived hostility that emanates from the federal government from ministers like Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault.
This is also a huge step because it reduces the financial risk of new energy projects in western Canada.
The Pathways Alliance is also working with the Canada Growth Fund, a $15b independent public fund that was setup by the government with the goal of looking for technologies to reduce emissions.
It is feasible that the Pathways Alliance could find some funding from the Canada Growth Fund as well.
If everything happens as it looks like it may, we could be witnessing a remarkable shift from one ministry which would have the side effect of turning down the political temperature of Canada’s energy industry.

Trudeau says drastic immigration cuts are because 'we didn't get the balance quite right'

The balance wasn’t quite right.
Following the bluster of a caucus meeting Wednesday the Trudeau government announced a 21% cut in immigration over the next 2 years.
The government had planned to keep bringing in north of 500,000 new arrivals each year.
Now the target for next year will be 395,000 which will drop to 380,000 in 2026, and 365,000 in 2027.
Even these numbers are a far cry from the Harper-era immigration numbers that hovered between 240,000 and 260,000 a year.
The temporary resident number will also drop, the number that includes temporary foreign workers and international students, to 5% of the population down from 7.2%.
This means that the non-permanent resident population will decrease by 445,901 in 2025, 445,662 in 2026 and will increase by 17,439 in 2027.
The reductions in temporary residents will help with labour issues, issues related to housing, and service issues as well.
For the permanent residents in the coming years the government intends to move people who have been here as temporary residents into the permanent resident stream to lower the number of raw new people coming into Canada.
Put simply, if the people are already here, it’s not a new person actually entering Canada.
And in addition to pressures on housing, healthcare, and services the labour market should also benefit.
The Bank of Canada’s business outlook survey found labour shortages are now below historical averages.
Justin Trudeau once in a long time admitted that they didn’t get the balance right. He said, “Our immigration system has always been responsible and it has always been flexible. We are acting today because of the tumultuous times as we emerged from the pandemic, between addressing labor needs and maintaining population growth, we didn’t get the balance quite right.”
In responding to the policy change on immigration, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said, “Trudeau has suddenly admitted that radical uncontrolled immigration and policies related to it are partly to blame for joblessness, housing and healthcare crises. He destroyed the best immigration system in the world, a system that had a common sense consensus of conservatives and liberals for 150 years.”
NDP leader Jagmeet Singh said that Trudeau was “acknowledging he messed up” but called the changes a “minor tweak.”
He continued, “People come to Canada with the hope that they can build a good life, but that is not what is happening right now.”
This policy reversal marks what could be the first in Justin Trudeau attempting to move the Liberal party to the centre before next election.
It’s clear that based on polling data they need to try whatever they can to have a shot at winning even as their government approaches the usual 8-10 year federal government expiry date.
In Question Period this week the topic of the immigration flip-flop came up in a question asked by Conservative MP Eric Duncan who asked if the high 500,000 immigration numbers from previous would cause the Prime Minister to admit that his “flip flop” caused damage to the housing market, health care, and jobs in Canada.
The Liberal MP to respond was the Minister for Employment and Workforce development Randy Boissonault.
Randy Boissonault instead turned the question back at Eric Duncan who is openly gay saying that he hasn’t done enough work to support the queer community while listing off a list of perceived attacks on the queer community by other politicians and governments in Canada.
Boissonnault is gay and rather than answering questions about his portfolio made the question one about LGBTQ issues.
Eric Duncan posted the exchange on X and said that he feels that Randy Boissonault was effectively saying that he is not gay enough.
On one hand we have the government policy announcement and on the other hand we have Boissonnault reducing what was announced this week to horrible rhetoric.
While not all MPs are afflicted with this issue there are many who are and illustrates the rot that has infected this government and its governing MPs.
The Trudeau administration presents themselves as a case study in how to break a model immigration system and spur on anti-immigrant views.
This system was used by both Liberal and Conservative governments and was largely successful and produced immigrants who became valuable Canadian citizens.
Now anti-immigration views are on the rise and it’s a lot more difficult to put these sentiments away than to uncork them.
To illustrate how large the news was, the story made headlines in BBC news.
This is a policy shift that may as well be seen as a reversal and it garnered international headlines.
It is a big deal and might be a signal of things to come going forward.
Supplementals:

Quote of the Week

“Sonia is not obviously a big fan of democracy. The people of various ridings have spoken as to who should be elected and who shouldn’t be elected.” - Conservative Party of BC leader John Rustad on unelected Green Leader Sonia Furstenau’s criticism of elected candidates.

Word of the Week

Statistical Tie - A situation in which the difference in popularity of two options in a poll is less than the margin of error.

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Show Data

Episode Title: In Limbo
Teaser: The BC election results are still in limbo, the Alberta Pathways Alliance has high hopes for carbon capture, and Trudeau laments that he didn’t get the balance quite right on immigration.
Recorded Date: October 27, 2024
Release Date: October 27, 2024
Duration: 1:05:10
Edit Notes: Pot in toenail, last story pause

Podcast Summary Notes

Duration: XX:XX