The calculus of predicting an election and identifying its key battlegrounds is complex enough in any race, but observers of the British Columbia poll this month are facing a pair of unknown quantities that make the maths even more confounding.
Those are the significant redistribution that has added six ridings to the electoral map, and the collapse of the Opposition BC United party, formerly the BC Liberals, coupled with the rise of the upstart B.C. Conservatives as the NDP’s main challenger.
Kennedy Stewart, Vancouver’s former mayor who also sat in Parliament in Ottawa for the NDP from 2011 to 2018, said those factors make the Oct. 19 election tough to call.
“Ordinarily, in a race where it has familiar parties with familiar ridings, familiar boundaries, it’s a lot easier to predict what’s going to happen,” said Stewart.
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“But those two main things — the boundary changes and the total upheaval on the centre-right — make this a very difficult election to …