According to The Globe and Mail, British Columbia elected a Conservative majority government on October 24 for the first time in nearly a century. The Conservatives under interim leader Lorne Doerkson secured 63 of 93 seats. The New Democrats fell to 28 seats and the Greens held two.
What Happened
Turnout sat near 48 percent, down more than ten points from the prior election. The Conservative raw vote did not surge; the NDP vote collapsed as many of its supporters stayed home. Final counts are still pending, with the official final count scheduled for early November, but the majority is clear.
The last time the Conservative Party formed a government in the province was 1928. It is also the first time in Canadian history that a party led by an interim leader has won an election. Doerkson took the interim role only weeks before the writ dropped, after internal party turmoil. Eby’s decision to force an early vote, aimed at exploiting that disarray, instead produced the NDP’s worst result since 2001.
On policy, CBC News reports the incoming government pledged to restore letter grades for grades 4 through 9, expand trades training, and repeal SOGI 123—the province’s teaching resource on sexual orientation and gender identity—while adding parental notification and opt-out rights. Conservatives also promised to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), double liquefied natural gas production by 2032, cut red tape, and freeze or cut provincial taxes. Doerkson framed SOGI as “an absolute lightning rod for division” and called for classrooms focused on reading, writing, and math.
Why Authors Care
School curriculum is a leading indicator of what the next cohort of readers will have been exposed to. Removing a specific identity-focused resource and restoring letter grades and parental rights reduces the institutional pipeline that has funneled certain themes into children’s and YA shelves.
Authors who write traditional adventure, military SF, progression fantasy, or craft-first stories already serve a readership that has been skeptical of message-first publishing. A provincial government now explicitly prioritizing “core fundamentals” creates a clearer market signal that those readers are not outliers.
Parents with new notification and opt-out rights become more active buyers. Books that treat identity as the plot rather than a character trait face a harder path through school libraries and parent-driven purchases in that province.
Indie authors can move first. Traditional houses that doubled down on institutional preferences over the last decade may see softer demand in markets where parents regain influence; authors who already publish outside those preferences can market the difference without waiting for a sales data lag.
The shift is provincial, not national, and reader preference does not flip on a single election night. It does mark a concrete institutional change in one of Canada’s largest English-language markets. Authors who treat the education pipeline as a demand signal rather than a political talking point can test what their own readers actually want when the institutional default changes.
Sources:
- B.C. Conservatives win majority government, Lorne Doerkson to become premier
- 2026 British Columbia general election
- What to expect from the new B.C. Conservative government
- Elections BC results
ommentary
Thomas: British Columbia just did something notable. For the first time in almost 100 years, they elected conservatives to run the province.
Jonathan: Turnout was much lower, which tells us the people who voted last time are very disappointed with what happened in the interim.
Thomas: This was a snap election called by the Liberal Party, and it blew up in their face.
This is like Seattle electing a Republican. Seattle and Vancouver are very close geographically, and they're very similar culturally.
Jonathan: The Canadian Conservative Party is not the same as the American Republican party. Every country is different, and every political party is different, especially in other countries. What matters here is that the party that has been in power for the longest period of time lost.
Thomas: Conservative Party is their actual name, but it doesn't really describe their positions. If that party ran for office in Texas, we would just consider them Democrats. They're not that conservative on the issues.
I don't think they're pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, or pro-small-government. They're just more conservative than the Liberal Party or the Green Party.
Since we're doing a tour of countries, the other big news in Canada is that Alberta had a big election on whether to start the process of seceding from Canada. Canada is not particularly united.
Every major Canadian city is culturally closer to its nearest American city than to any other Canadian city. Vancouver is far closer to Seattle. Toronto, I think, is very close to Detroit.
Different regional cultures are more similar to their neighboring regional cultures in the United States. Alberta is more similar to Montana and Wyoming than it is to British Columbia.
Quebec in some ways is more similar to Louisiana than to any of its neighbors. Believe it or not, the French population of Louisiana came from Quebec. They have an old ancestral tie and a common language in French, but both have been separated from France politically for a long time. I believe Quebec, and I know for certain Louisiana, are still under the Napoleonic Code rather than English common law.
The big political challenge in Canada is keeping this fractious coalition together. Each of these big cultural trunks has its own reasons, and sometimes the motivation, to go independent. Quebec is often agitating for independence, and now Alberta is too. They don't like each other, but they also don't like the mainstream Canadian political alignment.
Jonathan: It matters to authors because much of the book industry is connected to Canada. We reported on this about a year ago when we were talking about tariffs. The paper industry is very interconnected with Canada. The more Canada divests from U.S. relations and moves toward Chinese relations, the more this will matter for where books are printed and how we source even the boxes to ship books in.
It's not just the couple thousand people who live within three miles of our northern border. There are economic ramifications for the publishing industry as well as Canadian readers themselves.
Canada has a cold climate. For a good deal of the year, they don't go outside. They don't travel to the U.S. for tourism anymore because of the anti-U.S. sentiment that has been growing during the Trump administration. So they stay home and read.
If you target Canadian readers, you need to know what Canadians are experiencing right now. They're experiencing the dissolution of what they've known and expected for 100 years. I bet many people's heads are spinning right now that they’ve elected the Conservative Party in British Columbia.
Thomas: It's so mind-boggling I don't even know how to interpret it.
Canada has more trees than any other country in our hemisphere. In fact, it has more trees than any other country, period, with the exception of Russia, which cheats because it has Siberia.
So while not many books are published in Canada, a surprising number of books are printed in Canada, and some of the biggest printers in North America are based there. We also have a large Canadian audience, and many Canadians try to write for an American audience.
The perception of Canadians has gone through a dramatic shift in the last few years. The old stereotype was that Canadians were quirky, very polite, and very friendly.
Jonathan: When I was in college, Canadians were just the nicest people.
Thomas: That is shifting radically. Americans no longer see Canadians as nice people. Many of them see Canadians as murderers.
Every week there's some new MAID story. MAID stands for Medical Assistance in Dying, which is killing people who are sick or sad. One in 20 deaths in Canada, that’s 5.1% of people who die, are now killed by the government through this MAID program.
It is very offensive to Americans that the Canadian government is euthanizing so many Canadian citizens, and it's constantly in the news. In the same way American school shootings are constantly in the news around the world, so that when people think of America they think of school shootings, even though they're not nearly as common as the media coverage would suggest, MAID stories are constantly on social media.
There's the grandma who says, "No, I changed my mind. I don't want to die," and the doctor pushes the button anyway, saying, "You're too infirm to change your mind." There's the grandmother who insisted she wanted to stay alive, and while her daughter was on vacation, the doctor killed her. "Oh yeah, she agreed to MAID."
These stories are constantly in the news in parts of the States, at least in the red states.
Today, when we think of Canadians, we think of people who kill grandma, who kill people who are depressed, and even children. Canada has explored extending MAID to what they term “mature minors,” which means children as young as 12 years old. Americans are horrified by this. I'm struggling to find the language for how repugnant it is.
Jonathan: It's so offensive to us culturally that this kind of thing can happen. It has vastly transformed the way we view anyone who even gets close to defending that kind of behavior.
YouTube commentor MM Ward said in the chat, "MAID is terrible. My friend took her life on the anniversary of her daughter's death because they told her the one appointment she could get was put off for two months after she had waited six months for it." That's a horror story all by itself.
Thomas: It's a really common story, though. A common version that spreads in America is that your MAID appointment is quick, but your appointment to see a doctor is slow. "You could see a doctor in six months, but we can kill you tomorrow." Now that's what we think of socialized medicine as well.
Jonathan: This works especially well for dystopian authors. People are living longer now because health care has gotten better, largely due to American investment in medicine.
But people living longer is a problem for a socialist health care system that's required to take care of them. So there's an opt-out program, and the way they're reworking the rules, it isn't even you who makes the decision to opt out anymore.
Thomas: I've seen those kinds of stories, like a doctor prescribing MAID for someone having an episode at a restaurant, and a day later he's dead. It's really out of hand.
Those stories color Americans' perception of Canadians. I'm not saying it's fair, and I'm not saying all Canadians support Medical Assistance in Dying. But it does color how Americans interpret Canadian authors. When you say, "I'm from Canada," the view is different now than it would have been before MAID.
That's not true for all Americans. I'm sure some Americans support it. MAID is probably pretty popular in American urban centers. The American term is doctor-assisted suicide, and there are other euphemisms, like end-of-life care, which is the classic euphemism for killing grandmother. Some Americans support that sort of thing.
