The Conservatives will take a bolstered B.C. caucus into their strengthened minority government when they head back to Ottawa after Tuesday's federal election.
The Tories now hold 22 of 36 B.C. seats, up five from the last election, four from their tally when Prime Minister Stephen Harper called the election Sept. 7.
They took ridings from both the New Democrats and Liberals but boosted their share mostly at Liberal expense.
It's the strongest right-of-centre showing since the Canadian Alliance won 27 seats out of 34 B.C. seats in 2000.
The Tories dominated in the B.C. Interior, much of Vancouver Island, the Fraser Valley and Vancouver's suburbs.
The Liberals went from seven to five seats but managed to hang on to three out of four core ridings.
The New Democrats won in nine ridings, down one from their result in the 2006 election.
Tory wins included taking suburban Richmond from the Liberals and unseating Blair Wilson, the Green party's sole, short-lived MP in West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea-to-Sky Country.
Conservative campaign co-chairman David Emerson called the party's B.C. performance historic, putting the Tories on a stable footing with a mandate from a broad swath of Canadians.
"I think we're now starting to build that comfort zone with the Canadian people," said Emerson, who defected to the Conservatives after winning Vancouver-Kingsway for the Liberals in 2006.
Tory candidate Dona Cadman, widow of former Canadian Alliance and Independent MP Chuck Cadman, took Surrey North from the New Democrats, whose incumbent Penny Priddy chose not to run again.
"I think he'd be happy," Cadman said of her late husband. "I really do because now I can continue on his fight."
Cadman, a crusader for justice reform, died of cancer in 2005.
The Liberals retained Vancouver Centre (Hedy Fry), Vancouver South (Ujjal Dosanjh), Vancouver Quadra (Joyce Murray), Newton-North Delta (Sukh Dhaliwal) and Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca (Keith Martin), but all the candidates had close contests.
Besides Surrey North, the NDP also lost Vancouver Island North, where incumbent Catherine Bell was defeated by Conservative John Duncan.
The New Democrats' Don Davies was the victor in Vancouver-Kingsway, previously won by Emerson as a Liberal before he joined the Tories and opted not to run again.
The Tories were pulling almost 45 per cent of the popular vote, close to the 49.4 per cent the Alliance party received in 2000. The Liberals polled just under 20 per cent and the NDP around 26 per cent.
"The numbers I've seen suggest that the most noteworthy things are the Conservative increase and the Liberal decline in the province of British Columbia, which is a more magnified version of what has transpired in Ontario," political scientist Allan Tupper of the University of British Columbia said Tuesday evening.
Tupper and colleague Patrick Smith of Simon Fraser University said a lukewarm reaction to Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, coupled with some antipathy to his Green Shift's proposed carbon tax, were factors in the party's reduced popular vote.
"They're down to historic lows," Smith said of the Liberals' B.C. seat total.
But while Tupper said there was an evident shift to the Tories from the Liberals, Smith said the fact Green candidates ran third and sometimes second in some races may have tipped the scales.
"I think some of the undecideds went Green; some of the undecideds slipped away from the Liberals, certainly," Smith said.
The Green party increased its popular vote to nine per cent from 5.3 per cent but were frozen out once again.
Conservative cabinet ministers, including Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, Agriculture Minister Chuck Strahl, Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn and James Moore, junior minister responsible for the 2010 Winter Olympics, all won handily.
Lunn prevailed in what had been billed as a close contest after New Democrat Julian West dropped out over a skinny-dipping scandal years ago.
He told supporters in Saanich that voters recognized Harper has been talking about economic stability for the last year "and I think that's why we received an increased mandate nationally as well. This is a sweet, sweet night!"
The Tories also gained a seat in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, as Alice Wong unseated former Liberal cabinet minister Raymond Chan.
With a report from The Canadian Press
