BC’s new opposition leader is planning to release a report into the 2024 provincial election early in the new year.
Speaking with The Citizen on Monday, Dec. 23 to go over a 2024 that saw the Conservative Party of BC earn its best electoral results since forming a majority in 1949, party leader John Rustad said he’s received lots of questions about why the party didn’t question the results.
“I did that intentionally for two reasons,” Rustad said. “First of all, I wanted to make sure that I support democracy and the democratic process, but I also wanted to give us time to do some research and to look into the issues and bring things forward at the appropriate time.
“I’m looking forward to January because we’re actually going to be bringing forward a report on what we have found from the election and why we need to be able to have an independent review of not just the election results, but also Elections BC.”
Multiple errors were noted by Elections BC in the aftermath of the Oct. 19 election.
In Surrey-Guildford, the agency responsible for running provincial elections discovered while getting ready for a judicial recount that 14 votes hadn’t been counted the first time around. There were similar errors in Kelowna Centre.
Around the same time, Elections BC discovered that an entire ballot box containing 861 votes wasn’t counted on election night in Prince George-Mackenzie and applied for a judicial recount in the district.
However, the missing ballots weren’t enough to swing the results away from Conservative candidate Kiel Giddens, who ended up with 6,068 more votes than the person with the next highest number of votes, BC NDP candidate Shar McCrory.
In the wake of these errors, Premier David Eby proposed the creation of an all-party committee to investigate what went wrong.
Asked whether his party’s findings indicated wrongdoing or plain human error, Rustad declined to elaborate further.
“Unfortunately, I’m not going to reveal what we found so far,” he said. “But we are putting it together and we’ll be revealing all of that information certainly by mid-January at the latest.”
