Identifying battlegrounds tough as B.C. election race heats up

The calculus of predicting an election and identifying its key battlegrounds is complex enough in any race, but observers of the British Columbia poll this month are facing a pair of unknown quantities that make the math even more confounding.

Those are the significant redistribution that has added six ridings to the electoral map, and the collapse of the Opposition B.C. United party, formerly the B.C. Liberals, coupled with the rise of the upstart B.C. Conservatives as the B.C. NDP's main challenger.

Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver's former mayor who also sat in Parliament in Ottawa for the federal NDP from 2011 to 2018, said those factors make the Oct. 19 election tough to call.

"Ordinarily, in a race where it has familiar parties with familiar ridings, familiar boundaries, it's a lot easier to predict what's going to happen," said Stewart.

"But those two main things — the boundary changes and the total upheaval on the centre-right — make this a very difficult election to predict."

Mike McDonald, former chief of staff for B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark, said there are "always a few ridings that surprise you" but this year's realignment of both ridings and parties adds even more volatility.

Even so, both McDonald and Stewart say some areas will face scrutiny for their ability to turn the race. These include seats that swung into NDP hands in 2020 on the back of a 14 per cent gap with the Liberals in the overall popular vote.

McDonald said a gap that wide created a "wave" pushing the NDP over the finish line in ridings that are not traditionally left-leaning, including districts in Fraser Valley communities such as Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack.

The NDP took five of seven ridings in those communities in 2020.

"In this election, the public polls are telling us it's going to be much tighter, at least so far," McDonald said of the popular vote. "And so, if we were single-digit margin on the popular vote provincewide — say, less than five per cent difference — then you're going to see a lot of those NDP seats that were won in 2020 fall by the wayside."

The question then turns to how far such a Conservative wave in the Fraser Valley might push into Metro Vancouver, McDonald said.

He pointed to the importance of Langley-Willowbrook, which includes the City of Langley, as a riding that had seen a trend of younger families moving in from bigger communities in the Lower Mainland.

"That riding is in question," he said. "It's gone federal Liberal in some recent elections, and it went NDP last time, of course. So a riding like Langley-Willowbrook might be where the NDP start to push back and resist the Conservative momentum."

Stewart said attention should also be on deep urban ridings, historically places where the NDP has done well against centre-right parties.