BC Election Final Count Complete: Conservatives 64 Seats, NDP 27 — Four Ridings Decided by Under 100 Votes

Photo: The British Columbia Parliament Buildings in Victoria. File photo by Michal Klajban, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Two weeks after British Columbians went to the polls, the counting is finally done. Elections BC finished its final count in all 93 ridings on Sunday, November 8, and the picture it leaves behind is the same one voters saw on election night — only now it's as close to official as it gets before the writs come back on November 18.

The BC Conservatives hold the most votes in 64 ridings. The BC NDP holds 27. The Greens hold two. A majority takes 47 seats, so Lorne Doerkson's party clears the bar by 17. According to Elections BC's count, 1,944,980 valid votes were tallied — including the mail-in and absentee ballots that election night couldn't include.

The headline numbers barely moved. Election night had the Conservatives at 64, the NDP at 27 and the Greens at two, and that's exactly where the final count landed. But underneath those numbers sits a sharper story: the most dramatic provincial election BC has seen in a generation, and a handful of races genuinely too close to call.

BC election final count results: Conservatives 64, NDP 27, Greens 2

The Conservatives finished with about 47.7 per cent of the vote — 928,019 ballots, according to the Elections BC figures tracked by Poliwave. The NDP took about 37.6 per cent, or 730,939 votes. The Greens, who won just two seats, still pulled roughly 11 per cent of the vote provincewide.

Twenty-two ridings changed hands compared with 2024. Most flipped the same way — NDP to Conservative — clearest in Metro Vancouver, where the Conservatives took a string of long-held NDP seats. Surrey, long an NDP stronghold, went Conservative across the board, and the NDP's surviving seats now cluster on Vancouver Island and in a few urban pockets.

Four races decided by fewer than 100 votes

Four ridings were decided by fewer than 100 votes. None could have changed the government — but each could have flipped a seat.

Kelowna Centre was the tightest of all: Conservative Kristina Loewen finished 43 votes ahead. In Ladysmith-Oceanside, NDP incumbent Stephanie Higginson held on by 50 votes over Conservative Kris McNichol — a margin so thin it falls inside the range for a judicial recount under BC's Election Act. Burnaby South-Metrotown went to Conservative David Xie by 64 votes, a seat the NDP had held, and Cowichan Valley went to Conservative Bert Chen by 82 over the NDP's Debra Toporowski.

What the final count means for Doerkson and Eby

For Lorne Doerkson, the final count closes the book on a campaign that nobody, including his own party, quite saw coming. He took over as interim leader weeks before the vote was called, and now leads his party to its first BC election win since 1928. He won his own Cariboo-Chilcotin seat by 11,623 votes. In his victory speech he promised to double natural gas production by 2032 and cut red tape.

For David Eby, the count confirms the worst night of his political life. He called the snap election on September 22, two years early, while his party led in the polls — and lost 20 seats. He resigned as premier and as NDP leader in his concession speech on election night, telling supporters he took responsibility for the result. He kept his own Vancouver-Point Grey seat by 744 votes. The NDP must now pick a new leader to rebuild a party that governed for nine years.

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Green leader Emily Lowan kept her seat in Saanich North and the Islands by 5,457 votes, and her party held its second seat. CentreBC and OneBC won nothing, and both of their leaders lost their own ridings.

What happens next in BC politics

One thing worth saying plainly: the final count is complete, but the results aren't certified yet. Elections BC has not formally declared every seat, and the certified results arrive with Return Day on November 18, when the writs go back. A judicial recount is still possible in the closest ridings, and Ladysmith-Oceanside is the obvious candidate.

After that, the focus shifts to the transition — Doerkson's cabinet, the date the legislature sits, and the first budget of a Conservative government in nearly a century. The election answered the question of who governs. The next few months will answer the question of how.

And if there's a lesson in the final count, it's a small one, but it matters: 43 votes in Kelowna Centre. 50 in Ladysmith-Oceanside. In an election where nearly two million ballots were cast, two ridings were decided by fewer people than fit in a city bus. That's not a platitude — it's arithmetic, and it's why the final count took two weeks.