David Eby drops election writ as B.C.'s centre-right continues to eat itself alive

B.C. Premier David Eby dropped the writ Tuesday afternoon for an Oct. 24 election, framing the campaign as a referendum on Donald Trump and warning that “the conservative parties would cozy up to Trump, make cuts, raise costs and invite U.S. corporations into our health care.”

Plural. Parties. By suppertime, even that count was out of date.

Peter Milobar, who walked out of the BC Conservatives this summer to lead CentreBC, announced he and a group of MLAs are heading back to the party they just left. He did not, according to his own former executive, bother to tell them first.

“We are disappointed that Peter Milobar and others did not stand by commitments made to this party, its Executive Council, and its members,” CentreBC president Mike Wignall said in a statement published on social media. “At the end of the day, you also have to stand for something.”

Wignall says CentreBC will soldier on as a centrist party and "field as many candidates as we are able." How many that is, with five weeks to go and no leader, nobody would say.

Kerry-Lynne Findlay quit as Conservative leader only days ago after a caucus revolt that saw 13 or 14 MLAs bolt, eight of them to Milobar's planned party, which would merge into CentreBC. Lorne Doerkson, himself a former BC United member, is holding the fort as interim leader and inherits a caucus that is, by headcount, mostly the same people who spent the summer denouncing the party for being hijacked by the hard right.

Which raises the obvious question: why go back at all?

Voters who backed BCU for years held their noses and voted Conservative in 2024. They then watched that party call them squishes and sellouts, and are now being told to come home a third time. Some may. Plenty won't. Meanwhile, Carol Fielding, a former BC United executive, has registered the separate "Unite Liberal BC" party, fishing in the same pond of voters as whatever is left of CentreBC.

And the right flank of the Conservative Party is already leaking.

Brent Chapman, Findlay's husband, has joined OneBC, the party formed after John Rustad turfed Dallas Brodie last year. If the populist base decides the Liberals just took their party, OneBC is where they go, and the Conservatives get squeezed from both sides at once.

Findlay had insisted she would stay on as the Conservative candidate in Abbotsford-Mission, but the party has not said whether she still is. Her own plans are unclear as of writing.

Doerkson, for his part, is an interim leader with no mandate, a rebranded caucus and a premier who would much rather talk about the United States than tent cities. That said, with surviving as Official Opposition being uncertain, actually forming government is likely not a realistic conversation.

Eby didn't need a wedge issue. He got one anyway, and then his opponents handed him the hammer.