Eby Called the Election. The NDP Still Missed a Ballot.
The final Elections BC record is a competence test David Eby’s campaign wrote for itself: 93 ridings, 92 BC NDP candidates, and no New Democrat on the Peace River North ballot.
David Eby chose the clock. That is why the missing BC NDP candidate in Peace River North is more than a footnote in a difficult riding. It is a clean administrative receipt from a snap election the premier’s own campaign demanded.
Elections BC says candidate nominations closed at 1 p.m. Pacific on October 3. Its final summary lists 355 candidates across the 2026 provincial election, including 92 BC NDP candidates and 93 Conservative candidates. The district-level list is even blunter: in Peace River North, voters are shown Independent Jordan Kealy and Conservative Curtis Whitford. There is no BC NDP candidate beside them.
The party table underlines the contrast. Elections BC lists 73 BC Green candidates, 35 Centre BC candidates and 33 OneBC candidates. Those smaller organizations did not need to carry a governing-party standard. The New Democrats did — and the final record still left them one short of the full provincial map.
That does not mean Peace River North would have been easy terrain for the NDP. It does mean a governing party that asks for an early mandate should be able to complete the basic paperwork to give its own supporters a named candidate in every riding. If a campaign cannot land 93 nomination files after choosing the election date, voters are entitled to ask what that says about the larger machine.
The Canadian Press report carried by iNFOnews said the Conservatives were the only party with candidates in all 93 ridings. It also reported that Eby called the missing NDP candidate “disappointing” and said paperwork prevented the party from fielding a candidate in the last riding. Juno News separately attributed the gap to incomplete paperwork, citing reporting from CHEK’s Rob Shaw and a similar statement from NDP campaign director Cheryl Oates. Those are claims about the cause of the gap; the harder fact is already in the official Elections BC record.
This is the same premier asking British Columbians to trust him with hospitals, budgets, housing results, permitting timelines and public safety. Yet on the simplest election-administration test, the NDP’s own slate came up one riding short. The party can argue the seat was not central to its path to power. That argument only makes the problem more revealing: the governing party apparently treated a northern riding as optional while asking the whole province for a fresh verdict.
Competence is not only measured in billion-dollar programs. It is measured in whether the basics get done before the deadline. Eby called the race. Elections BC closed the gate. The final receipt says the BC NDP was one candidate short.