British Columbians have a choice to make on October 24. This is just one week after local elections, and some folks object to David Eby’s timing. But that’s a small issue compared to others that face this province.

Morgane Oger wrote a thoughtful message on Facebook. It’s worth repeating:

You can be disappointed in the BC NDP and still refuse to hand the BC Conservatives power.

I ran in the 2017 provincial election and served four years on the BC NDP executive, including two as vice-president.

The party is imperfect. They take too much activism for granted. Today I am no longer a member.

Still, my biggest concern this election is protecting the progress we fought for, and I am deeply worried.

Yes, the BC NDP deserves criticism. We should demand better on housing, health care and public safety. We should demand meaningful diversity and a better stewardship of unreasonable demands.

Voting for the BC NDP doesn’t give them a free pass. But punishing the BC NDP because I am disappointed by where partisan politics has gone isn’t the answer.

Consider the only real alternative for forming government. The BC Conservatives have been campaigning on eliminating SOGI 123 resources in schools and have repeatedly called for repealing BC’s Indigenous rights declaration legislation.

A more reassuring leader doesn’t erase those choices.

Our electoral system allows a candidate to win even when most voters choose someone else. In a close NDP–Conservative race, splitting the opposing vote can help elect the Conservative.

A vote for the Greens or for an independent is not a vote for a far-right Conservative candidate, but our intentions and our ballot’s practical are not the same thing.

Look at credible evidence in your riding. Support the candidate best placed to defeat the Conservative – BC NDP or otherwise.

Go and speak to the candidate. Tell them what you’re looking for. Then hold whoever wins accountable.

We owe no party unconditional loyalty, but we do owe one another serious consideration of the consequences of our vote.

Fact check electoral claims. Protect the progress we have made. Keep fighting for the progress we still need.

And please, please don’t leave vulnerable people at risk of suffering to the whims of a far-right team like the BC Conservatives who are making promises to racists and transphobes.

Indeed, the B.C. NDP deserves criticism. But the reassembly of the disassembled B.C. Conservative Party offers little confidence that it is ready to govern.

Let the Conservatives first demonstrate that they can manage their own party with a measure of cohesion and discipline. Only then can they credibly claim to be prepared to govern an entire province.

The party’s leading voices have advocated ideas that would take British Columbia backward—toward a time when casual intolerance was accepted, public services were treated as dispensable, Indigenous rights were viewed as inconvenient, and climate responsibility could be ignored.

These are not modest policy adjustments. Taken together, they amount to a retreat from inclusion, public health, climate responsibility, public medicare, personal autonomy, and reconciliation. A partial list:

1. Eliminate SOGI 123, a set of optional, age-appropriate resources intended to make schools safer and more inclusive. The program teaches that families differ, gender stereotypes can limit children, bullying is wrong, and every person deserves respect. Conservatives portray these basic lessons in dignity and acceptance as ideological indoctrination.
2. Compel treatment for people whom the state decides cannot make “life-saving” choices. This risks detention based on broad judgments about addiction, mental illness, or behaviour that makes others uncomfortable—without adequate due process, voluntary treatment capacity, or lasting support after release.
3. End prescribed safer-supply programs, reverse decriminalization, and close overdose-prevention sites. Rather than treating addiction as a health crisis requiring a full range of evidence-based supports, the Conservatives would return to a punitive approach that may drive people back to toxic street drugs and more isolated use.
4. Roll back climate measures while accelerating fossil-fuel production. They would weaken net-zero building requirements and expand fossil fuel production—precisely when worsening wildfires, drought, floods, and heat demand faster reductions of emissions.
5. Push more public money toward private clinics and out-of-province care. This risks draining staff from public hospitals, creating a two-tier system by stealth, and weakening the universal public medicare on which most British Columbians depend.
6. Limit access to MAID. A party that constantly invokes personal freedom would deny some competent adults the freedom to make the most personal and difficult decision of all: how to end unbearable suffering in accordance with the law.
7. Repeal Indigenous-rights legislation in the name of “certainty.” This treats Indigenous rights as an obstacle to be managed rather than constitutional rights and a moral obligation. It would deepen distrust after generations of broken commitments and overt discrimination and could replace negotiated agreements with more litigation, conflict, and delay.