It looks like the BC Conservatives swept the province even though OneBC threatened to split the vote on the right around Kamloops and the Okanagan.

This was OneBC’s first election and the party branded itself as the “true conservative” option, but it didn’t attract many votes from the BC Conservatives.

OneBC was founded by former MLA Dallas Brodie and former MLA for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream Tara Armstrong after the pair left the BC Conservatives not long after the 2024 election.

In the party’s first, and possibly last, election it managed to get 1.51 per cent of the vote. The party’s leader, Brodie, received 805 votes. Following the election the party put out a statement that it intends on sticking around despite losing every race.

“We entered this election as the unapologetically conservative choice on the ballot and we make no apologies for that,” the party said in its statement. “Our principles will not change. OneBC is here for the long term.”

Kelowna Centre is a battleground riding where BC Conservative Kristina Loewen won by 40 votes at the final count in 2024 against BC NDP’s Loyal Wooldridge. This time around she’s leading in the preliminary results by around 130 votes, again against Wooldridge, unaffected by the 873 votes pulled by OneBC’s Bill Desrosiers.

Even though OneBC was campaigning for votes on the right side of the political spectrum, Wooldridge said he never thought they were going to be able to help him out.

“I found it to be an irrelevant party from the beginning,” he said. “I found it despicable personally. And I believe that most British Columbians felt the same way, which is why we didn’t really see it split the right.”

OneBC has been controversial because of their legislative focus on culture war issues when it had two members in the legislative assembly.

In six weeks OneBC introduced nine bills, mostly targeting the LGBTQ and First Nations. They include banning land acknowledgements, getting rid of Truth and Reconciliation Day, a bill that would ban flying LGBTQ Pride flags at government buildings and a bill against diversity, equity and inclusion.

OneBC’s worst showing in Kamloops and the Okanagan was in Kelowna-Mission where Abraham Nordine received 757 votes and its best result in the whole province was in Armstrong’s riding Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream where Alexandra Wright received 2,532 votes.

Wright’s campaign put out numerous attack posts on social media about BC Conservative Pavneet Singh, including about old sexual assault charges and abusing migrant hiring systems at his businesses, but he still won the race.

Wright previously said her race wasn’t about winning, it was about starting a “grassroots movement.”

“We are immensely proud of what our candidates, volunteers and supporters have accomplished under exceptionally challenging circumstances,” OneBC said in its statement.

Wright did not respond promptly to a request for comment.

The final election results will be in on Nov. 10.