Incumbent MLA: Dallas Brodie (OneBC | 2024)
Candidates:
BC NDP: Callista Ryan
BC Conservatives: Carson Binda
BC Green: Douglas Courtemanche
OneBC: Dallas Brodie
CentreBC: Petra Kuret
2024 Results:
BC Conservatives - 51.6%
BC NDP - 38.9%
BC Green - 7.8%
Independent - 1.7%
If you were to go looking for a seat that represented the base of the BC Liberals, you would find Vancouver-Quilchena. Encompassing much of Vancouver’s leafy west side and home to the city’s old money elite, what was once an ironclad safe seat for the right may be truly competitive for the first time this year.
Before the party’s collapse, Vancouver Quilchena had an impeccable BC Liberal pedigree. After wresting the party leadership from Gordon Wilson, future premier Gordon Campbell would represent this seat from 1994 to 1996, followed by Finance Minister Colin Hansen, who himself was succeeded by Attorney General and later BC Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson. When the time came for Kevin Falcon to return to the Legislature after becoming leader, he chose this seat as his re-entry hatch.
In the 2022 by-election, the newly minted BC Liberal leader dispatched his opponents with ease, holding NDP candidate and academic Jeanette Ashe below 30% of the vote. The only fly in the ointment was a surprisingly strong showing from the long moribund BC Conservatives, who fielded lawyer Dallas Brodie.
Falcon would go on to serve as the riding’s increasingly beleaguered MLA for two years before bowing out of re-election in August 2024. The withdrawal of BC United from the provincial election left Brodie, a Conservative candidate once again, as the last right-wing candidate left standing by default. Absolved of a vote split, Brodie nevertheless put on the worst performance for a right-wing party in the riding since inception.
Now Dallas Brodie is running for re-election, but not as a Conservative. After then-leader John Rustad expelled her from the party over irreconcilable differences, she co-founded OneBC with fellow MLA Tara Armstrong before the two split in December 2025, leaving OneBC with one MLA and without official party status.
Brodie was hopeful that the BC Conservatives would refrain from running against her and let her be the de facto right-of-centre candidate, but those hopes were dashed by the Conservatives nominating BC Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Carson Binda, to retake the riding.
Such a split on the right may make it possible for the BC NDP to accomplish the impossible and flip Vancouver-Quilchena. Between 2020 and 2024, the BC NDP surged from 28% of the vote to nearly 40% - a historic high for them in a middling year.
The BC NDP have renominated Callista Ryan, a communications professional who was severely under-resourced in the last election. With a surge in Brodie’s notoriety over the last two years, Ryan could tap into her federal Liberal connections and consolidate the left-of-centre vote at the expense of Green candidate and surgeon Douglas Courtemanche.
The riding’s newfound competitiveness is the result of a perfect storm. Brodie herself has become a lightning rod for controversy, but the Poilievre-inspired iteration of populist conservatism also plays less well in the genteel households of Kerrisdale and Dunbar, while Carney’s statesmanship and seriousness fits them like a glove. Brodie’s remarks on Indigenous issues simply accelerated a broader political realignment along education levels as seen in the last provincial election.
On a federal level in 2025, Quilchena gave the federal Liberals nearly 60% of the vote while the federal Conservatives stagnated. CentreBC will play well with a crucial slice of moderate federal Liberals who would never contemplate going for the New Democrats and would be choosing between going Conservative or staying home. Businessperson and CentreBC candidate Petra Kuret could peel off yet another crucial slice of the federal Liberal vote with her run.
Both Ryan and Binda have their own challenges. The BC NDP’s proposal for higher taxes on the wealthy may turn off wealthier voters and energize turnout, but Brodie may have poisoned the Conservative brand enough to blunt its effects.
Geographically, the BC NDP’s path to victory lies with convincing enough federal Liberals to prioritize getting Brodie out at all costs by not only running up the score in rental apartments around 41st Avenue and East Boulevard, but by winning northwest Dunbar with its low-rise developments. The Conservatives will need to contend for swing voters in more affluent parts of Dunbar and ensure that Brodie does not eclipse them in federal Conservative redoubts like Shaughnessy and Southlands to hold onto their last fortress in the City of Vancouver.
Hugh Chan is an International Relations student at the University of British Columbia who sometimes moonlights as a political reporter.
