B.C. Premier David Eby speaks to reporters after announcing the snap election. Rather than dwell on his motives, we would do well to consider how he came to possess the means and opportunity to act as he did, Andrew Coyne writes.Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press
The province of British Columbia is having an election, barely two years after the last. There is, it is commonly acknowledged, no pressing matter in the public interest that obliged Premier David Eby to call it.
He has called the election now, two years before its scheduled date under the province’s fixed-election-date law, for one reason only: to take advantage of the disarray within the ranks of the opposition Conservative Party, culminating in the resignation of its leader, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, on Sept. 20 – two days before the election call.
There is no precedent for this in Canadian history: No prime minister or premier in possession of a majority has ever called an election while its chief rival was without a permanent leader. The closest parallel is Alberta in 2015: Conservative premier Jim Prentice called an election 10 days after the Wildrose Party elected Brian Jean as its leader.
It is difficult, indeed, to find a precedent in any parliamentary democracy: Britain (Stanley Baldwin) in 1935, maybe Australia (Malcolm Fraser) in 1983, one or two others.
Much criticism has properly been directed at Mr. Eby for his crass opportunism, forcing British Columbians into a choice between his own tottering government and a leaderless opposition. It is certainly dirty pool. But rather than dwell on Mr. Eby’s motives, we would do well to consider how he came to possess the means, and the opportunity, to act as he did.
Editorial: Eby’s snap election snubs democracy
It is an extraordinary thing, that the head of any government should still, in 2026, be able to call an election at a time exactly suited to his own political interests. We do not allow one side in the Stanley Cup final to decide when the games will be played, and how long they will last. In most contests, we insist on an impartial set of rules set in advance by an independent authority.
Indeed, that was the point of the fixed-election-date law the province passed in 2001: the first in the country, soon to be emulated by all provinces and the federal government (Ontario and Nova Scotia have since rescinded theirs). But in B.C., as elsewhere, the law left a giant loophole, stipulating that nothing in it limited the discretion of the lieutenant-governor, in whose name elections are formally called.
At the time, this was presented as pro forma boilerplate, to avoid constitutional challenges. But given the record since then – one government after another, federal and provincial, calling a snap election; I count 17 in all – Canadians must wonder what the point was.
Scofflaws – people who feel entitled to disregard the laws – exist in any country, but only in Canada do they include the governments that passed them.
Mr. Eby should not have done what he did, but more important, he should not have had the power to do so. Even so, he might not have had the opportunity, had it not been for the implosion of the Conservative Party under Ms. Findlay. That Ms. Findlay’s short tenure was a disaster is universally acknowledged. But again, it is better to ask how she came to be leader in the first place.
The job of a party leader is, first and foremost, to lead the caucus of elected members in the legislature. (That is, if you think elected members or legislatures are central to our system of democracy.) Yet caucus members have next to no power in deciding who should lead them, even as party leaders have come to possess the power of life or death over their careers. Strange but true: The maxim “government with the consent of the governed” applies virtually everywhere in Canada, except to the people we elect.
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Classically, party leaders in Westminster democracies were chosen by caucus. They still are, elsewhere. But in Canada we long ago allowed the presidential model to take hold, in which the leader is elected by the party membership at large. Ms. Findlay had the support of only a handful of her party’s legislators in the leadership contest earlier this year. She was imposed on them by another body altogether.
Who was that body? The members? Not really. As of December, 2025, the B.C. Conservative Party had only 7,000 members. By the mid-campaign cutoff for membership sales, the party had grown to six times that number. It was those new members, with no history of involvement in the party before the vote and, most of them, no involvement after, that decided it.
It is good to see the Conservative caucus reasserting itself. They may even pull off an upset, free of Ms. Findlay and fuelled by popular revulsion at Mr. Eby’s cynicism. But if they are wise they will consider how to ensure neither they nor the province are ever put in this position again.