The Current - What’s going on with B.C. Conservatives

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Just 4 months after electing Kerry-Lynne Finlay as the new leader of the BC Conservatives, the party is in disarray.  So far, 9 MLAs have left the party. Of those, a faction of 7 MLAs has joined together to create another, yet unnamed, right wing party. Rob Shaw of Check News explains what's been happening and tries to give a sense of why. 

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. There is rarely a dull moment in British Columbia politics, but with so much attention on Alberta's referendum and the election in Quebec, both happening next month, if you aren't in BC, you might be missing all the political drama that's happening there. I believe British Columbia deserves a credible, a solid, a stable and thoughtful alternative to the NDP. There's one group here that's serious, that has experience, and that's us.

Those are just two of the BC Conservative MLAs who have split from the party in the past few weeks, Theresa Watt and Bruce Bannman. Nine MLAs have defected from the party. Seven of them have banded together to form a new, yet to be named, Small C. Conservative Party, all of which is bad news for the BC Conservative leader, Carrie Lynn Finley, who just took the helm of the party in May. Could be good news, though, for the NDP Premier, David D. Eby. Rob Shaw is a political correspondent with Czech news. He hosts the daily podcast political capital. He is in

the capital, Victoria. Rob, good morning. Good morning, man. What is happening with the BC Conservatives? Holy moly, yeah. It's kind of an implosion here. There's a civil war out here. There is a sort of collapse of the alternative to the BC NDP and Premier David Eby. It's splintering off in different directions. And I think there's two kind of sort of ways to trace this. The first goes back to the leadership race that just occurred that elected Carrilyn Finley as

BC Conservative leader by 60 votes. She only won 51% of the vote. There was a big split in the party. And then there's how she acted after she won. And several controversies that have happened within the party since then. And it's led to this disintegration

of what used to be a party that almost in the last election in BC just two years ago, almost won. It just about toppled the NDP, and now it is looking like a bit of a clown college. So walk through clown college, walk through what led to you using that description. First, the leadership win. She wins this leadership race.

As you said, 51%. There were four ballots that were necessary until she won. Who was she appealing to? It's very weird because she's a 71-year-old, long-time, federal MP and a former cabinet minister in Stephen Harper's government. And she portrayed herself as this outsider fighting a conservative establishment of lobbyists and elites from out east who are trying to take over the party in British Columbia and turn it into a light liberal party.

And she picked up kind of this new wave conservatism, young, more culturally focused, conservatives, a lot of online influencers, people who wanted to talk about the COVID vaccine, the freedom convoy, whether we should go to the former Kamloops residential school and dig up graves to see if there are actual bodies there, land acknowledgments, gender neutral washrooms, trans athletes and sports like ostriches, like the whole, the kind of spectrum of this new further right social conservatism. And Finley picked them up. And she ran with that. And her opponent, Carolyn Elliott, who was a young kind of in her 40s, made her chops kind of doing online videos and social media activity.

Sheeded up represented by the establishment of the Conservative Party, people who worked for Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, and Stephen Harper. And so he had this role reversal. It split the party in two. It's somewhat similar to what Pierre Polyev is having to deal with federally, and it just left the party divided. And they have failed to heal those fractions. And so when did the wheel start to fall off?

Well, they fell off pretty much immediately after the race. It was a very bitter race. And instead of trying to soothe hurt feelings and wounds, Finley acted like she had won 100% of the vote. And she came out and basically has since then said, if you don't like what I'm doing and who I am, you can leave. And maybe you don't believe in conservatism. And maybe you're being selfish and thinking about yourself.

And she's alienated a bunch of folks who might have been able to work with her. and she's hired some staffers, at least three of which now who have left under very dubious circumstances, the RCMP are sniffing around. There's a whole bunch of questionable choices she's made that have sort of made it worse for her here. And so she says, if you don't like it, you can leave. Nine people have left. One of them says we heard earlier that she is unelectable. Why would that former member of her party say that the leader that he was working with is actually unelectable?

Well, I mean, they're pointing to things like when Ms. Finley won, she started to declare that the mainstream media was out to get her, which is a thing people might be familiar with from the federal conservatives. She did one of her first interviews as a big exclusive with an online personality who now, if you check their page, posts AI slop videos of U.S. President Donald Trump throwing our prime minister into a pond at a golf course. And so some of her initial choices on who she wants to align herself with and how she wants to get her message out, alienated conservatives who just don't want to be part of that.

And nine have left. We think out here that many more are planning on leaving. If she loses around 11 more in her party, she could lose official opposition status. And the bottom line takeaway is that the NDP in British Columbia haven't won that many elections, even though they've been in power recently for almost 10 years. and they always win when the center-right splits. And the center-right has never been more split than it is now. And that's why we think Premier David Eby might be heading to an early election out here.

And we all have election fever, which, as you know, Matt, can be very contagious. There's no vaccine or cure for election fever. I'm not a doctor, but it does spread quickly. It's not even anointment for it. And the Premier out here may be sending us to an election very soon to take advantage of this. How long can Kerry Lynn Finley hang on? I mean, she could say you can leave if you don't like the path that I'm taking. But when people are leaving and they set up a rival party, how long can she hang on as leader of the conservatives?

Yeah, I think a normal politician would have quit by now. The parties dropped eight points in the polls. The premier has jumped 10 points in his personal popularity. The fundraising is down. The MLAs are leaving. But she doesn't have anything else to do. And she has long wanted to be the leader of this party. and the speculation here is that she would rather watch it burn to the ground

and be left with a handful of pure conservative far-right social culture warriors then leave for the good of the party, if you believe in that kind of thing. And so it's possible this split is permanent, and some folks are looking to this new party of MLAs who've left to have to basically come up with a new vehicle because the BC conservative, the driver of the BC Conservatives, refuses to leave the car. And we'll see how long, how many election cycles that might actually take to kind of readjust

the electorate here. What does the new party stand for? Do we know? I mean, I said it doesn't have a name yet, but. Yeah, we call it the Peter Party out here because it's the Peter Milibar is the MLA who's leading it. That's going to catch you on if he doesn't come up with a name soon, I think. But the Peter Party picked a pack of peeved politicians is kind of, we're all making jokes out here. Yeah.

But it stands for a more, you know, middle road, center-right focus on the economy, leave the social issues at the door, lower the deficit, what we call sort of traditional conservatism. And they don't want to fight the culture war, as it's called now. And some people say that's kind of an antiquated view. And you need to fight things like, you know, land acknowledgments and explicit language in books and that kind of. of thing. That's part of the new conservative movement, but that's not the direction that this

new party wants to go. When we were in BC in May, I spoke with the Premier, but you and I also spoke, and we talked about how David Eby's popularity was quite low. Has he sent a gift basket to Carolyn Finley, do you know? Just a couple months ago, we thought he was toast, done like dinner. Angus Reed has a pullout this morning saying he's jumped 10 points since Finley became leader of the conservatives and Trump has has become into play again. So yeah, he looks like a guy who was writing his own kind of obituary to a guy who if he was to go to an election now, which is speculation is in the next few weeks he's going to do this. You think there's the real possibility of that? There is a real possibility of that that he could win a super majority here at like just a thunderous

majority. And in that case, he's, he's, this is the greatest thing to ever. happened to David Eby is the election of a new conservative leader. And usually it's not how this plays out. A new party gets a new leader. They get momentum. There's a honeymoon period. The exact opposite is happening here. Just before I let you go, what do you think conservatives elsewhere in this country are taking from what is happening to the conservatives in BC? You mentioned the reaction to Carolyn Finley winning. In part, some of that reaction came from Pierre Pahliaf, who praised her and took some shots against the people. He called, what, liberal lobbyists who were working for the rivals in that leadership race.

So what might conservatives elsewhere in the country take from this situation? Well, I think they should take that this is the looming civil war that is going to grip conservative parties in different provinces and federally. Do you want to stay centrist? Are you going to move to the farther right and fight the culture wars? is there a new movement of online kind of influencers and conservative voices that feel left out of the establishment that are going to try and flex their muscle and influence the future of their party?

And if so, what does that mean? And are they in the tent or not? And these things played out here, and they're still playing out, and they're playing out in Ottawa around Polyev as well. And there's no easy path. But the worst path would be what the BC Conservatives have just done. So it's kind of a cautionary tale of perhaps not, you know, don't do this, try to avoid the situation that BC finds itself in.

Rest, hydrate, cold compress. I mean, there's some of the things you might apply to the election fever that you might be feeling right now. We will talk again if this snap election happens. In the meantime, Rob, good to speak with you as always. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Rob Shaw, political correspondent with Czech News.

He's also the host of the Daily Podcast Political Capital Capital. We reached him in Victoria. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m. at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.