B.C. Interior loses blue hue

Voters in B.C.'s interior have broken Conservative dominance in the region, but the changes come after incredibly tight races.

Liberal Stephen Fuhr narrowly edged Conservative incumbent Ron Cannan for Kelowna Lake Country with 47 per cent of the vote to Cannan's 40.

Fuhr is a former CF-18 fighter pilot with 20 years of military service.

The win is considered an upset after Cannan won re-election in 2011 by more than 20,000 votes, but the riding changed in 2013 and no longer included downtown Kelowna.

The area is renowned for its orchards and vineyards.

UBC political science professor David Moscrop says the unexpected win can be tied to Liberal success across the country.

"When you get such a surge, like you saw with the Liberals, and so unexpected a surge, you're going to have results that are a little unanticipated and that seems to be one of them," he said.

Meanwhile the NDP's Richard Cannings won South Okanagan-West Kootenay in a tight race with the Liberal's Connie Denesiuk and Conservative Marshall Neufeld.

The NDP incumbent for West Kootenay-Okanagan, Alex Atamanenko, decided not to run in 2015. The riding was was renamed in the 2013 redistribution. Atamanenko had held his seat since 2006.

Perhaps the tightest race in B.C.'s Interior was between Conservative David Wilks and the NDP's Wayne Stetski in Kootenay-Columbia.

Originally, Elections Canada had Wilks, an RCMP officer for 20 years, winning as the incumbent, but that was reversed in the early hours of October 20 to show a Stetski victory by 285 votes.

Conservative Jim Abbott enjoyed decisive victories in the previous five elections in Kootenay-Columbia.

The riding, located in the southeast corner of the province, borders Alberta and the U.S. and has four major coal mines as well as jobs in forestry, farms, ranches and on orchards.

In the 2011 National Household Survey, 7.8 per cent of the people in the riding said they were Aboriginal.