Seven MLAs Gone, OneBC Steps Aside: Eby Gets Cover While the Anti-NDP Vote Splinters

British Columbians should be talking about David Eby’s record: the health-care waits, rural emergency-room closures, housing affordability, debt, public-safety disorder and the government’s trust problem on DRIPA and private-property certainty. Instead, the province is watching another opposition implosion play out in real time.

CityNews reported Monday that Chilliwack-Cultus Lake MLA Áʼa:líya Warbus has left the BC Conservative caucus to sit as an Independent. CityNews says Warbus is now the seventh MLA to leave the party caucus since Kerry-Lynne Findlay was elected leader in May. The list reported by CityNews is not a small procedural footnote: Warbus, Bruce Banman, Teresa Wat, Brennan Day, Peter Milobar, Ian Paton and Rosalyn Bird.

Warbus’s stated criticism is an allegation about leadership and party direction; it should be treated as her claim, not as a proven fact. But the arithmetic is not alleged. Seven departures under a new leader is a political earthquake. Every hour spent explaining caucus exits is an hour not spent forcing the NDP to defend the actual conditions British Columbians are living under.

The timing makes it sharper. Elections BC confirms the Abbotsford-Mission by-election has been called for Saturday, September 26, 2026. Candidate nominations close Saturday, September 5 at 1 p.m., advance voting runs September 18 to 23, and preliminary results are expected after voting closes at 8 p.m. on election day.

That by-election is where Findlay is trying to win a seat in the legislature. The Tyee reported that former NDP MLA Pam Alexis is running for the NDP, and that Dallas Brodie pledged OneBC would not run a candidate while urging others not to split the right-of-centre vote. That is a political claim and a strategic signal, not a merger, not a formal pact, and not proof the anti-NDP vote has consolidated.

But it does put the accountability question in plain view. If OneBC can see the danger of splitting the anti-NDP vote in one riding, why are voters across the province still being asked to watch opposition parties and independents fight over the microphone while Eby governs through the damage?

The NDP benefits when its opponents make themselves the story. Eby does not need a spotless record if the public conversation is consumed by Conservative defections, splinter parties and by-election lane-clearing. He only needs enough chaos on the other side to turn dissatisfaction into hesitation.

Abbotsford-Mission voters now get the first hard test. They can judge the NDP’s record, Findlay’s leadership pitch, Brodie’s stand-down signal and every other party’s choice before September 26. But the lesson is already bigger than one riding: a fractured opposition is not accountability. It is political cover for the government British Columbians were supposed to be scrutinizing.