Ranked ballot, broad winnability will weigh on B.C. Liberal leadership vote

Voting is underway for the new leader of the B.C. Liberal Party.

There are seven candidates vying for the top job, including serving MLAs Michael Lee, Ellis Ross, and Renee Merrifield; business leaders Gavin Dew, Val Litwin and Stan Sipos; and former cabinet minister Kevin Falcon.

The party is voting to replace Andrew Wilkinson, who resigned following defeat in the 2020 provincial election.

One UBC political science professor expects the vote to skew towards the candidate with the greatest winnability in a future general election.

“At the end of the day, people in the party want somebody to gain power back for them,” Allan Tupper said. “That’s what it is. It is not an ideological crusade. It is not really about policy, per se.”

He anticipates the new leader will be around for the long term, as there is no time to enter a sort of caretaker mode.

A ranked ballot system is being used to select the leader. If a winner is not declared on the first ballot, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped, and the second choice from that candidate’s ballots are tabulated and added to the results. This continues until a winner is declared and someone secures 50 per cent plus one of the vote.

This system can often create surprise winners, with coalitions and shifting votes common.

“People are pretty straight forward about this. They go straight for their candidates. The one they like the best gets [ranked] first, but if they don’t get enough votes, they have to reconsider and so their second and third [ranked candidates] are very significant as well,” Tupper said.

For someone like Kelowna-Mission’s Renee Merrifield, who is a first term MLA and pitched herself as a non-career politician, the voting system could be a boon. Her fresh take on issues without being too pushy could lend strength to her cause.

“You have to think all that through, but on balance, I think Renee is, on this one, certainly neutrally dealt by the ballot and possibly helped,” he said.

Where the leader is from might not weigh heavy on voters’ minds, Tupper said representation from where the bulk of the province lives doesn’t hurt.

Merrifield and Ross are the lone candidates from outside the Lower Mainland, calling the Okanagan and Kitamaat Village home, respectively.

“I think you could have a strong leader from any place in the province. You’ve got to put together a coalition now, that’s what this is all about.”

How recent political discourse will weigh on the vote is to be determined, but Tupper was adamant that anyone who hitched their proverbial wagon to the recent trucker protests made a “catastrophic mistake.”

He said the Liberals are a “big tent party,” and while it was perceived to be more right-wing in its public finance and policy positions under the early days of Gordon Campbell, there is not much support in the party for radical social attitudes.

The party membership can cast votes online and over the phone until Saturday evening. Each of the province's 87 electoral districts is allocated 100 points. A candidate must receive 4,350 points, plus one to be declared the winner.

Tupper did not want to make any predictions, only jokingly guessing it will take more than one round.

“I feel safe about that,” he said. “I don’t see any obvious person with the capacity to walk through on the first ballot. It is not likely. There are good candidates. There is more than one good candidate, and there’s controversary about a lot of them.”