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As the BC provincial election campaign heads into last week, a new poll shows the BC Conservatives leading by five points among decided voters.
“The biggest exception is that the Conservatives are ahead, and if we look at the overall pattern, it looks like it’s going to be difficult for the NDP to close the gap over time,” said Greg Lyle with Innovative Research Group.
The poll shows the BC Conservatives have at least marginal leads in every region in the province, with a big lead among Punjabi and Chinese speakers, who are key voters in several Lower Mainland swing seats.
“One big thing is that this is still some time left to change the election,” Lyle added.
“So often elections will evolve. They start out as a sort of referendum on the government, but then they transition into a choice between alternatives. In this campaign, people got even angrier at the NDP as the campaign went on.”
Lyle added that the other big question mark was whether BC Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson would emerge as someone who could be seen to lead the province.
The poll found that Doerkson gained between six and 10 points on specific leadership attributes, including a 10-point increase in the share of voters who rated him as the most competent choice.
“Statistically, it’s a tie, but Doerkson gets the bragging rights of a two-point lead,” Lyle said, via BC NDP Leader David Eby.
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“And that’s pretty remarkable. I mean, David Eby has been the premier for years; he called this election. Doerkson was an unknown on the backbench until four weeks ago.”
The poll found that there is no indication of last-minute momentum for the BC NDP, but there is potential for the BC NDP to narrow the gap with Green voters.
Overall, 37 percent of the voters who have a second choice say that they have not quite decided and that number is the highest for the Green voters with 54 percent.
The poll found that this group is the least confident of any party’s supporters, who also strongly favor the BC NDP as their second choice.
But that would still not be enough to completely close the current five-point gap, according to Lyle.
“If you look at the slides we’re benchmarking ‘time for a change’ against the worst it’s ever gotten for John Horgan and the worst it’s ever gotten for Christy Clark,” he said.
“And as you remember, Christy Clark lost. The numbers for Eby are three points higher than for Christy and 10 points higher than the worst day for John Horgan. Not only that, but when we ask people, we ask, do you strongly or somewhat agree with that statement?
Lyle said the poll shows the biggest lead for the BC Conservatives is in the Lower Mainland, south of the Fraser River.
Other areas of the province are closer, but the BC Conservatives have at least a marginal lead, he added.
“The number of undetermined is quite limited. It is under 10 percent,” said Lyle.
“The real story is people need to hear more before they finally make up their minds. For the Conservatives and the NDP, it’s only about a third of their voters who want to hear more, so their vote is pretty solid.
“But among the Greens, more than half would like to hear more. And so this is a small bounce in the step of the NDP. Because if we look at their second choices, two to one, their second choices go to the NPP.”
These are the results of an online survey between October 15 and October 19, 2026.
This online survey was conducted by INNOVATIVE’s Canada 20/20 national research panel with additional respondents from Lucid, a leading provider of online samples. Each survey is administered to a series of randomly selected samples from the panel and weighted to ensure that the composition of the total sample reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to census data to provide results intended to approximate a probability sample.
Sample size: n = 1153 British Columbian citizens, 18 years or older. The results are BC weighted to n = 1000 based on census data from Statistics Canada.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
