No sign of late BC NDP surge as Conservatives lead by five points: poll

As the B.C. provincial election campaign enters the final week, a new poll shows that the BC Conservatives are leading by five points among decided voters.

“The biggest takeaway is that the Conservatives are ahead, and when we look at the overall pattern, it looks like it will be difficult for the NDP to narrow the gap in the time that’s left,” Greg Lyle with Innovative Research Group said.

The poll shows that the BC Conservatives have at least marginal leads in every region in the province, with a large lead among Punjabi and Chinese speakers, who are key voters in several Lower Mainland swing seats.

“One big thing is that this still remains a time for a change election,” Lyle added.

“So often, elections will evolve. They’ll start as sort of a referendum on the government, but then they’ll transition into a choice between alternatives. In this campaign, people have gotten even more angry at the NDP as the campaign progressed.”

Lyle added that the other big question mark was if BC Conservative Leader Lorne Doerkson was going to 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 being two points ahead,” Lyle said, over BC NDP leader David Eby.

“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 per cent of voters who have a second choice say they have not fully made up their mind and that number is highest for Green voters at 54 per cent.

The poll found that this group is the least certain of any party’s supporters who also strongly favour the BC NDP as their second choice.

But that would still not be enough to close the current five-point gap completely, Lyle said.

“When you look at the slides that we benchmark ‘time for a change’ against the worst it ever got for John Horgan and the worst that it ever got for Christy Clark,” he said.

“And as you’ll recall, 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? The numbers (that) strongly agree with that statement increased by 10 points over the course of the election. So it’s getting worse for the premier.”

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 undecided is pretty limited. It’s under 10 per cent,” Lyle said.

“The real story is people that need to hear more before they finally make up their mind. For the Conservatives and the NDP, it’s only about a third of their voters that still want to hear more, so their vote is fairly firm.

“But among the Greens, more than half would like to hear more. And so that’s gonna give a little bounce in the step of the NDP. Because when we look at their second choices, two to one, their second choices go to the NDP.”

These are the results of an online survey conducted between Oct. 15 and Oct. 19, 2026.

This online survey was conducted using 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 overall sample’s composition reflects that of the actual Canadian population according to Census data to provide results that are intended to approximate a probability sample.

Sample Size: n=1153 British Columbian citizens, 18 years or older. The results are B.C. weighted to n=1000 based on Census data from Statistics Canada.