- Incumbent: Jordan Sturdy (United | 2013)
- Candidates:
- NDP: Jen Ford
- Conservative: Yuri Fulmer
- Green: Jeremy Valeriote
- 2020 Results:
- Green – 38%
- Liberal – 36%
- NDP – 26%
- Description:
- Determined to not let 2020 be a one-off, West Vancouver-Sea to Sky is once again staking its claim as quite possibly the most chaotic riding in all of British Columbia. Federally, the riding is the leafier and leftier chunk of the incredibly wordy West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country, with hipster environmentalists to boot.
- Federally, left-of-Liberal environmentalists such as 2019 Green candidate Dana Taylor and 2021 NDP standard bearer Avi Lewis have come close but no cigar. That goes a long way in explaining the provincial dynamics in WVSTS, where the Greens have managed to knock the NDP into second two times in a row.
- With the retirement of incumbent MLA Jordan Sturdy, Green candidate Jeremy Valeriote is hoping to finally take the riding he won on election night in 2020 before the mail-ins were counted. Challenging him are Yuri Fulmer, Conservative candidate and worldwide Chairman of the United Way and Jen Ford, the NDP nominee, Whistler city councillor, and former Chair of UBCM.
- The riding itself is made of 5 distinct communities: Bowen Island, Pemberton, Squamish, West Vancouver, and Whistler. Bowen Island and Pemberton are Green strongholds provincially, both having given the party almost 50% of the vote in 2020. Whistler, Ford’s hometown, has quite the green thumb too - Valeriote won 46% there in 2020.
- Squamish is the main battleground in the riding. A tourist town just like Whistler further north, the right-of-centre option tends to get around 20~30% of the vote there, while the other parties split the remaining, vast pool of centre to centre left voters. Even in 2020, the BC Liberals, NDP, and Greens were all within 10 points of each other.
- What has kept West Vancouver-Sea to Sky in the BC Liberal column for so long is West Vancouver. Just the 2,000 vote margin there alone was enough to equalize the playing field with the Greens in 2020. The progressives’ saving grace in WVSTS was supposed to be a vote split in West Vancouver between United and the Conservatives, but now Fulmer is on a glide path to pad his margins. Ford and Valeriote will have to fight hard to establish themselves as the clear alternative to the Conservatives.
Hugh Chan is a second year student at UBC studying International Relations and Data Science. You can find more coverage of the 2024 BC election as well as politics across East Asia and the Anglosphere at https://x.com/shxnhugh.
