AMIR: The establishment lost the BC Conservatives' leadership race — and learned nothing

“Things are looking pretty good for Caroline Elliott”, announced Ben O’Hara-Byrne, Global BC’s legislative reporter, moments before the final ballot was announced at the Conservative Party of BC’s leadership convention.

It was a curious assessment.

After the penultimate ballot, former federal cabinet minister Kerry-Lynne Findlay led political commentator Caroline Elliott 38.6 per cent to 31.3 per cent. With only the votes for former BC Liberal cabinet minister Iain Black’s supporters left to be distributed, Elliott needed nearly two-thirds of Black’s down-ballot support to overtake Findlay and clinch the leadership.

“This is looking very, very good for Caroline Elliott,” responded Richard Zussman, former president of the B.C. Legislative Press Gallery and current vice-president of public affairs of Burson.

They were both wrong.

Kerry-Lynne Findlay won.

“This is a frankly shocking result,” remarked Mike McDonald, former chief of staff to B.C. Premier Christy Clark, in his immediate reaction while providing commentary on the same Global BC broadcast.

The misread and subsequent surprise were not confined to one broadcast.

For months, the conventional wisdom of political insiders, journalists, strategists, and establishment conservatives had settled on the conclusion that Caroline Elliott would be the next leader of the B.C. Conservatives.

After all, Elliott raised over $1.5 million: “the most ever raised in a B.C. leadership race”.

She assembled an all-star team of organizers from across the country: Kory Teneycke, campaign manager for Doug Ford; Jeff Ballingal, founder of Canada Proud; Nick Kouvalis, strategist for Rob Ford; and Anthony Koch, former director of communications to Pierre Poilievre.

She secured endorsements from former B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell, former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, and The National Post editorial board.

While Caroline Elliott’s front-runner status was evident, Kerry-Lynne Findlay was widely viewed as having a ceiling of support too low to win.

From the onset of the leadership race, the province’s chattering class dismissed Findlay. One commentator suggested that her campaign was “nothing more than a data mining exercise for an eventual Surrey mayoral run.”

The doubts then came from inside the Findlay campaign.

In March, Findlay’s campaign manager David Denhoff resigned to endorse Caroline Elliott. (Findlay denied that Denhoff was the official campaign manager.)

“KLF can’t win this leadership. The campaign does not have the capacity required to win the leadership race and defeat the NDP,” he wrote, in a now-deleted X post.

The skepticism would only prove Findlay’s point.

From the day she launched her campaign, Findlay framed the race less around electability and more as a battle for the soul of her party.

Her central message was of her own identity: she was “the only Conservative who can stop the Liberal takeover of the BC Conservatives.”

With little daylight between the leadership candidates on major policy, the political identity Kerry-Lynne Findlay offered was the clearest distinction.

While Elliott’s validation came from establishment conservatives, Findlay’s validation came from a different, more populist (and controversial) corner of the conservative movement: online media figures, such as Keean Bexte, Drea Humphrey, Elie Cantin-Nantel, Billboard Chris, and Max Genest.

Findlay emphasized authenticity, ideological conviction, and an unapologetically conservative populism that reverberated with members who no longer viewed establishment approval as a virtue. If anything, establishment approval was a red flag.

That message was supported by simple cost-of-living proposals – tailored to kitchen tables, not think-tanks – including the elimination of taxes on gasoline and removing PST from ready-made food.

Most importantly, Findlay’s identity and central message offered voters an explanation for events that would have otherwise sunk a leadership campaign.

When Findlay accused rival candidate, Kamloops Centre MLA Peter Milobar, of a conflict of interest because his Indigenous wife had worked for the Kamloops Indian Band, she drew backlash. Four Conservative MPs, including some she sat with in Parliament, described her comments as “atrocious”, “morally indefensible”, and “abhorrent”.

Weeks later, Rob Shaw reported that the Office of the Commissioner of Canada Elections was investigating Findlay’s unsuccessful 2025 federal re-election campaign over undeclared campaign services. This prompted the Conservative Party of BC’s Leadership Election Organizing Committee (LEOC) to consider disqualifying Findlay’s campaign altogether.

On the eve of voting, LEOC issued a statement criticizing Findlay’s lack of cooperation, although no further action was taken.

Controversies of this magnitude would have derailed most leadership campaigns, but instead, they reinforced Findlay’s political identity. 

What political observers saw as damaging, her supporters saw as manifest evidence of a party establishment, mainstream media, and political insiders weaponized against her – and her supporters themselves.

These were the attacks from the foretold ‘Liberal takeover’ that Findlay had warned about from the beginning. 

They provided proof to the premise and strengthened the very anti-establishment, outsider narrative that powered her campaign.

Yet even after Findlay’s victory, much of the commentary – surprised or otherwise – focused on Findlay’s divisiveness, not her appeal.

Commentators struggled to understand how Findlay’s Bad News Bears beat Elliott’s New York Yankees, but those were not even the teams on the field.

Most electoral analysis relies on familiar indicators to gauge a campaign’s strength: fundraising, endorsements, campaign infrastructure, and favourable media coverage, especially in traditional media. Those metrics still matter, but they matter less now.

In a fragmented information environment where voters increasingly distrust institutions, the traditional signals of political strength are themselves becoming suspect. An overly polished or savvy campaign, meticulously crafted by a slick consultancy class, can feel like a product launch more than an organic political movement.

Through that lens, many of the advantages held by Caroline Elliott’s campaign may not have been advantageous at all. Her high-profile endorsements, her accomplished out-of-province strategists, and her massive fundraising numbers were not the strengths many had assumed, but a perceived confirmation of the elitist ‘Liberal takeover’ Findlay had campaigned against from the outset.

Findlay’s proposed tax cuts did not win her the B.C. Conservative leadership. It was her identity that resonated most with a membership imbued with anti-establishment sentiment.

Those same anti-establishment currents that carried Findlay will increasingly shape politics and influence ballot-box decisions across British Columbia, especially as institutional trust is being eroded and material needs are not being met. 

Dismissing these forces as fringe or unserious (or ‘MAGA’) does not make them disappear. 

It only makes it easier to miss what is hiding in plain sight.

Mo Amir is the host of “This is VANCOLOUR”, British Columbia’s bonafide culture and politics TV talk show, now in its sixth season on CHEK-TV, Thursdays at 9 p.m. He is also a prolific political commentator across several outlets.