New leader of the BC Conservative Party set to be announced

Voting has now closed in the BC Conservative leadership race and the winner will be announced on Saturday.

Global BC will be hosting a special for the announcement, starting at 5 p.m. PT on Sat. May 30. That will be livestreamed above.

There are five candidates for the leadership race: Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmer and Peter Milobar.

“It is a race that has been shaped very much about articulating opposition to the direction of the NDP, but also opposition between one another,” Stewart Prest, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, said.

“We really see the articulation of two different views of what it means to be Conservative broadly on the stage, where we have two candidates, Iain Black and Peter Milobar, who are more associating themselves with a kind of moderate, big-tent approach to conservatism that tries to appeal to moderate voters.

“But the other three candidates, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay and Yuri Fulmer, all in some ways are really trying to signal that they are a more popular style of candidate and that they’re trying to cut any perceived ties with some of the history of the right of centre in the province, including dissociating themselves from the BC Liberal Party.”

2:10 BC Conservative leadership candidate debate

Prest said that whoever wins this race is going to have to find a way to continue to go against the BC NDP, but do so in a way that keeps the BC Conservative Party unified.

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“It is in some ways a young party,” he said.

“It is still very much showing some of the signs of having this past shaped by more moderate Conservatives, but also this more populist and more skeptical version of conservatism that’s become more common recently. And that’s going to be a challenge, to put it mildly, because we have seen evidence of almost like fractional politics on the right recently.”

Prest said there isn’t a clear frontrunner for the leadership position, so the vote will be an interesting one.

“We do see the different leaders have their own views, but polling suggests that it is that more moderate wing of the party that would stand a better chance to kind of pivot to the general election, to use a metaphor,” he added.

“It is this sense of trying to build the larger tent to bring over centrist voters that sends the best chance of defeating the NDP.”