The British Columbia NDP has overtaken the B.C. Conservatives in the ongoing count of absentee votes in a crucial Metro Vancouver riding, putting Premier David Eby on course to win government with a razor-thin majority.
An update from Elections BC at 2 p.m. on Monday put the New Democrats ahead in the riding of Surrey-Guildford by 18 votes.
If it hangs on there and in other races, the party will have a one-seat majority in the 93-riding legislature, although the prospect of judicial recounts looms in Surrey-Guildford and another close race.
Elections BC vote counters were tallying more than 22,000 absentee and special ballots provincewide on Monday, nine days after the province’s election.
The Conservatives had been ahead in the closest race of Surrey-Guildford by 12 votes going into the tally, but there were an estimated 226 votes still to count and hourly updates saw the lead whittled away, then change hands.
In the 2 p.m. update, the NDP was elected or leading in 47 seats, while John Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives were leading or elected in 44 and the Greens had won two seats.
A count of more than 43,000 mail-in and assisted telephone votes provincewide over the weekend put the NDP within striking range in Surrey-Guildford, sending the race down to the absentee ballots.
Conservative candidate Honveer Singh Randhawa had gone into the weekend’s count with a lead of 103 over NDP incumbent Garry Begg.
While Monday’s absentee vote could finally produce a winner in the election, there could still be judicial recounts in any riding where the margin is less than 1/500th of all votes cast.
Margins in two ridings were within that threshold at 2 p.m. Monday — Surrey Guildford, where the recount threshold is about 38 votes, and Kelowna Centre, where the Conservative lead of 46 was below the recount threshold of about 51 votes.
The completion of the hand recount in Juan de Fuca-Malahat on Monday, meanwhile, did not have a significant impact on the margin there, with the NDP leading by 123 votes amid the absentee count.
A recount on Sunday in Surrey City Centre reduced the NDP lead by three votes but it has since grown to 200, while a partial recount in Kelowna Centre saw the Conservative lead cut by four votes.
Aisha Estey, president of the B.C. Conservative Party, said she spent the weekend in a warehouse watching the counting of mail-in ballots.
In a post on social media, she said: “Elections BC staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work.”
“Would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to (election day)? Sure,” she added. “But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”
