Gavin Dew’s workout routine apparently paid off after knocking on more than 11,000 doors in the Kelowna Mission put him in comfortable lead ahead of the three other candidates vying for the position of MLA.
The B.C. Conservative had more than 51 per cent of the vote in the riding, with B.C. NDP Harpreet Badohal in second followed by Independent Ashley Ramsey and Green Party Billy Young.
“We set some targets for what we hoped to achieve but at the end of the day what you do when you’re in a campaign like this is you wake up everyone morning and you act like you’re 50 to 100 votes behind,” said Dew, after winning his riding.
When asked why he has been more accessible and communicative than his fellow B.C. Conservative candidates in the Central Okanagan, he said he has experience with media which makes him comfortable in public speaking thanks to stakeholder engagement in his private sector life.
Conservatives Tara Armstrong (Kelowna-Lake-Country-Coldstream), Kristina Loewen (Kelowna Centre) and Macklin McCall (West Kelowna-Peachland), who all won their ridings on Oct. 19, did not respond to all community candidate forums or media requests during the campaign.
Given Dew’s political past, where he ran for the BC Liberal Party leadership in 2021-2022 against Kevin Falcon and lost, before joining the Conservatives, Black Press Media asked if he felt he felt some responsibility to carry the newly elected Okanagan MLAs in Victoria.
“I think it is going to be really important to get our whole team up and running. There are lots of key priorities that we will want to advance but we have a lot of new MLAs who are brand new to the legislature, so we will have to familiarize ourselves with all the processes and the way business gets done,” said Dew. “It’s important we get everybody ready to go, boot camp, skilled up and be an effective caucus, because that is how we will set the stage to set our objective.”
Dew held his election party at the Hotel Eldorado, where he gathered with Kelowna Mayor Tom Dyas and City Councillor Maxine DeHart.
Since the 2009 election, the riding was represented by BC Liberal Steve Thomson who announced in December 2019 he would not be looking for re-election when the time came. In 2017, Thomson won the seat handily with 57.64 per cent of the vote, trouncing the second place BC NDP candidate who earned 21.03 per cent.
The riding was created in 1991 and then called Okanagan West. The Social Credit party won it in the 1991 election but since 1996 the riding has been held by the BC Liberal Party.
In 2020, Liberal candidate Renee Merrifield won the Kelowna-Mission riding. However, on April 12, 2023 the B.C. Liberals changed its name to B.C. United.
Then ahead of the 2024 election, Merrifield along with MLAs Norm Letnick and Ben Stewart announced they would not be running.
Prior to this year’s election the Electoral Boundaries Commission made changes tot he area, boundaries and names of the B.C.’s provincial electoral districts adding six new ridings.
There are 50,150 registered voters in the Kelowna-Mission riding with 14,271 marking their ballots ahead of Election Day compared to 11,082 advanced voters in 2020.
Final count will begin on Oct. 26.
