Although the final numbers will still take days to come due to a very large number of mail-in ballots, the NDP has won a majority mandate given that they are leading or won in over 50 ridings. Is this the way the NDP intended it to happen when they called the election that has been criticized as unnecessary - you bet! They wanted to catch the fumbling and bumbling Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson at his weakest and they got that. The election went exactly the way the NDP think tank intended and the results Saturday night bore out the results the party had hoped for and then some, winning a majority government.

By R. Paul Dhillon – Editor-Founder DESIBUZZCanada With News Files

VANCOUVER – While the Pandemic election may have been a boring exercise with minimum public engagement but it was sweet music for the BC NDP which strategically called the election this fall and was rewarded with a historic landslide victory, winning 55 seats, it’s best performance ever.

Although the final numbers will still take days to come due to a very large number of mail-in ballots, the NDP has won a majority mandate given that they are leading or won in over 50 ridings.

 Is this the way the NDP intended it to happen when they called the election that has been criticized as unnecessary - you bet! 

They wanted to catch the fumbling and bumbling Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson at his weakest and they got that. The election went exactly the way the NDP think tank intended and the results Saturday night bore out the results the party had hoped for and then some, winning a majority government.

In my facebook post Saturday evening before the election results came, I predicted that the NDP will likely win over 50 plus seats as polls had indicated that the NDP may win anywhere from 45 to 60 seats. The BC Liberal vote crashed as had been predicted and many Green voters ended up going over to NDP.

Following the win, Premier John Horgan said his majority New Democrat government is open to exploring new ideas that can help shape British Columbia regardless of their political or geographic origins.

The NDP's election win in B.C. will see a government guided by strong ideas, not politics, Horgan told Canadian Press Sunday.

 “I'll be influenced by good ideas wherever they come from,” said Horgan at his first news conference following the election result. “I don't care where an idea comes from, if it makes sense we're going to implement it. That's how I will approach working with all members of the legislature.”

More than 500,000 mail-in ballots and 75,000 absentee ballots must still to be counted. But the results on election night gave the NDP 53 seats, the B.C. Liberals 27, and the Greens three. Four ridings remain undecided.

Neither Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson nor the Greens Sonia Furstenau held news conferences on Sunday. Wilkinson did not take questions on Saturday night after making a statement that didn't concede defeat and urged people to be patient in waiting for the final vote count.

On Sunday, Wilkinson sent out a statement on Twitter saying he had spoken to Horgan on the telephone and “congratulated him on his win. The people of B.C. have spoken.”

The results show a geographically divided province with Liberal victories in many rural ridings and the NDP winning primarily in urban areas, a division that Horgan acknowledged, reported Canadian Press.

Horgan said now that there is a majority government he plans to spend more time outside of the legislature meeting people across B.C.

“I would have liked to have seen better results in rural B.C.,” he said. “I'm going to have to do some more work, clearly, to get to those communities. Clearly, having a majority government will allow me to get out of Victoria.”

Horgan credited the NDP win with the party's political vision, saying that mainstream values are New Democrat values.

“People don't think of the world as left and right,” he said. “They think of the needs of their family, the needs of their community and I think that's how you build big-tent politics by responding to the needs of people.”

But political experts said Horgan's election win was more about the government's handling of the pandemic, which largely involved leaving critical health decisions to provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry.