Who can make hide nor hair of the BC right? Eby, who inherited the NDP from the late John Horgan, didn’t exactly scrape past John Rustad; he won a majority while the right fractured into competing factions. In the political storms of the moment, the feeling of a close margin had lingered because Rustad’s Conservatives surged in the polls and briefly looked capable of replacing the NDP government.
The illusion of power forming on the right shattered again today. The MLA who crossed today was Elena Lawson — Conservative to Independent, citing Findlay's leadership.
The BC Legislature’s current standings tell the story:
93 seats in total.
The independents alone form a large bloc in the world of no BC United, and nearly half the size of the Official Opposition. The numbers show a safe governing party. Whatever the right was trying to build has scattered into a constellation of unaffiliated voices, each carrying their own weather system. This isn’t a disunity; it’s a discombobulation.
Eby’s plurality looks stable because the right keeps blowing holes in its own hull, but that doesn’t mean the government gets a free pass. Meanwhile the NDP has settled into a kind of managerial drift — a government that measures success by the absence of crises rather than the presence of direction. Eby governs like a man whose party is expecting the opposition to implode on schedule, and to be fair, the opposition is totally obliging.
Eby's comfort shows: files stall, priorities blur, and the government’s confidence feels less earned than inherited. When the right is this chaotic, the left doesn’t have to be brilliant; it just has to remain upright.
So what is the right doing wrong?
How does this ideological framework fail to capitalize on the NDP’s considerable list of problems — problems that aren’t subtle, aren’t hidden, and aren’t theoretical?
They sit in plain view:
• Drug and homelessness policy — a strategy that has failed on both humanitarian and public‑order fronts, leaving municipalities to improvise.
• Forestry collapse — the slow implosion of a provincial backbone, with mills shuttering and communities hollowing out while policy remains reactive.
• Energy posture — a government reluctant to articulate a coherent energy future, drifting between environmental signalling and industrial necessity.
• Low‑growth economy — stagnation masked by federal transfers and population inflow, with no provincial engine to replace lost sectors.
• AI infrastructure vacuum — while global jurisdictions race to build capacity, BC remains a spectator, treating innovation as an optional file.
• Indigenous aquaculture failure — an inability to defend a viable economic sector for coastal First Nations, leaving communities exposed and policy incoherent.
These aren’t minority issues. They’re the kind of structural deficiencies that normally define elections, topple governments, or at least force a rethink. Yet nobody on the right seems able to convert them into a coherent critique, let alone a governing alternative. Which begs the question: what exactly is missing?
Queue Kerry‑Lynne Findlay
Findlay arrives not as a saviour but as a correction — a lawyer’s steadiness applied to a party that has spent two years behaving like an actual climate crisis. Her early posture is procedural rather than ideological: tighten the caucus, calm the waters, stop the collapse.
She doesn't need to reinvent the right, since she's establishment in that regard; she’s trying to make it stand still long enough to remember what it is. That alone is a shift. Rustad ran the Conservatives like a man sprinting through a burning building, grabbing whatever policy furniture wasn’t already on fire. Findlay, by contrast, seems intent on turning the lights back on.
Findlay's challenge is structural. She inherits a party with momentum but no discipline, visibility but no coherence, and a base that has grown accustomed to outrage as strategy. Her leadership will rise or fall on whether she can convert volatility into an alternative governing posture. An Opposition with teeth would be a start.
Early signals suggested she understands the assignment: stabilize first, define second, expand third. Whether the caucus lets her get past step one is the looming question.
Three federal byelections certified Sep 2, 2o26
Another signal has arrived. Mark Carney’s Liberals made a clean sweep of three seats — one in BC, one in Ontario, one in Quebec — two of them with commanding margins, clearing the 50% mark. These weren’t surprise pickups; two were expected to go Liberal. But the margins weren’t expected. Not like that.
Margins tell you something polls don’t: they show where the public’s patience is thinning.
And that’s where the provincial story meets the federal tremor. Because while the BC right keeps scattering — defections, independents swelling, caucus discipline evaporating — the federal right is watching a Liberal figure consolidate.
Carney’s margins don’t explain the BC Conservative collapse, but they do suggest the collapse isn’t entirely provincial in nature — it’s part of a wider right‑side incoherence that’s beginning to show up in federal numbers too.
The BC Conservatives are losing the narrative, along with losing MLAs. And Carney, who pays attention to political weather patterns the way mariners watch tides, will see exactly that.
The right’s problems aren’t contained. They’re spreading.
Article by Mack McColl, assisted by copilot for McColl Magazine Daily
