The
2022 British Columbia general election was held on September 24, 2022 to elect the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, the second-largest province in the Commonwealth of Canada. The election was called on August 16, 2022, to be held two weeks before the election's statutory deadline of October 8th. 91 single-member seats in the Legislative Assembly were up for re-election by method of single-transferable vote.
The 2018 general election had seen the Liberal-Reform coalition government of George Abbott defeated decisively in a landslide, with the governing centrist Liberals reduced to the third party behind their coalition partner, the right-populist Reform, who also lost seats. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation of British Columbia (CCF-BC), led by former federal Cabinet minister Nathan Cullen, had earned 55 seats, their best result proportionately and in seat count since 2002's "Rankin Revolution." The Cullen government had been elected in large part due to concerns in BC about a slowing economy with unemployment increasing 45% over the course of 2018 (Canada entered the late 2010s recession earlier than most other developed countries), a cost-of-living crisis particularly attached to rising rents, automobile and health insurance co-payments, and a series of bribery and corruption scandals from the ruling Liberals in addition to a sense that Reform had pulled the governing coalition sharply to the right. To that end, the Cullen government embarked on delivering its ambitious electoral manifesto and raised the minimum wage by 25% in 2019 and by a further 10% in 2021, extended unemployment benefits, introduced a phased-in rise in British Columbia's novel carbon tax combined with the first-ever "carbon dividend" and introduced a new, simplified income tax reform. The Cullen government also put in place funding for new roads and bridges across the province, fully funded extensions to the SkyTrain rapid transit system in Greater Vancouver, and in June of 2021 earned the province the right to host the 2028 Winter Olympic Games.
The British Columbian economy remained stagnant, however, as the crucial trade partner United States entered recession in late 2019 and global equities entered a bear market in 2020 that would last late into the following year, limiting FDI in the province. Missteps by the Cullen Cabinet, such as a particularly infamous austerity policy cutting funding for universities and raising student fees while lowering total enrollment, emboldened the opposition, which had elected two new leaders - former MP Sukh Dhaliwal for the Liberals, who defeated several candidates to his right in the 2020 BC Liberal leadership election and was seen as moving his party back to the middle to appeal to suburbanites and wealthy but socially liberal Vancouver voters (the party's traditional base), while Reform's choice of John Rustad in mid-2019 was regarded as a shift further to the hard-right. A well-publicized spike in crime and strikes by teachers, transit workers and other public employees across the province in fall of 2021 led to the first polling lead by the Liberals in five years; however, an improving economic outlook, particularly throughout 2022, with falling energy and housing costs, good feelings after the securing of the Olympics in a less controversial and more consensus-oriented fashion than the 1986 edition, and a 30% reduction in unemployment over a twelve-month period boosted the CCF in time for the election.
The CCF won the election with a reduced majority of 48 seats, but dramatically outperformed their polling, winning 45% of the vote, their best percentage since 2002. While the Dhaliwal Liberals underperformed their polling, an efficient campaign focused on the Lower Mainland rather than contested seats in the Interior where Reform and the CCF competed more than doubled their seat count and made Dhaliwal the first-ever Indo-Canadian, and indeed visible-minority, Opposition Leader in Canadian history. Rustad's Reform lost seven seats, generally in the Lower Mainland, to become an even more Fraser Valley and BC Interior based party, and having lost its status of Official Opposition Rustad announced he would resign as party leader by mid-2023. The election's results were carefully scrutinized, being the second major provincial election (after Manitoba in 2021) in the wake of the 2020 federal election, which had seen the remarkable success of the left-nationalist, anti-globalization and anti-American Canadian Action Party; however, the CAP's BC affiliate did not earn a breakthrough, and the decline of the increasingly right-nationalist Reform suggested that the populist surge in Canada in the late 2010s may be abating.
