As British Columbia enters the last week of a provincial election, one of the parties, OneBC, is proposing to withdraw funding for third-trimester abortions.
OneBC is relatively new to the political landscape of British Columbia. MLA Dallas Brodie, OneBC’s leader, was removed from the BC Conservatives in 2025 for comments about residential schools and then started OneBC as an alternative right-wing party. The party is running 33 candidates across British Columbia this election.
On October 14, OneBC announced the following on social media:
With this announcement, OneBC joins the BC Christian Heritage Party as the only two provincial parties in British Columbia that oppose abortion, and one of the very few across Canada. (The BC Christian Heritage Party hasn’t listed any abortion policies among their platform priorities this election, but its foundational party policies include the promise to “remove abortion from the list of taxpayer-funded surgical procedures.”)
In the 2025 federal election, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) also promised to restrict abortion after the first trimester and prohibit late-term abortions outside exceptional circumstances.
While such steps would not protect all pre-born children, they would be significant steps forward.
And policies restricting late-term abortion would bring Canada more in line with peer countries. Abortion on demand is only permitted in the first 10-24 weeks in Western European countries, with abortion heavily restricted in the later weeks of pregnancy. Likewise, nearly every American state – both more conservative and more liberal states – restricts abortion at some stage of gestation.
While mainstream political parties and media outlets decry any attempt to restrict or defund abortion, most Canadians agree that late-term abortion is unacceptable. Perhaps one of the clearest opinion polls about the acceptability of abortion at different stages of pregnancy is from Dart/Maru in 2020. That poll found that 70% of Canadians believe that abortion should generally be illegal in the final trimester of pregnancy. That figure is still at 43% in the second trimester.
Beyond just defunding late-term abortion, OneBC promises to provide government funding to pregnancy care centres to expand their indispensable work assisting women facing an unplanned pregnancy.
This is a heartening promise at a time when the federal government has been threatening the charitable status of pregnancy care centres. In late 2024, the Trudeau Liberal government announced that it would introduce legislation to require charities offering pregnancy counselling services to disclose whether they offer abortion and birth control or refer for those services. Leading up to the 2025 federal budget, the federal finance committee recommended that the government “no longer provide charitable status to anti-abortion organizations.” And just last month, the finance committee recommended “greater transparency from anti-abortion pregnancy centres in order to mitigate harm to clients and prevent the misuse of charitable status.”
In such a climate hostile to pregnancy care centres and celebratory of abortion, OneBC’s policy announcement is encouraging. Ultimately, though, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. We must continue to advocate on behalf of our pre-born neighbours not only until the larger political parties adopt some incremental pro-life stance or some sort of law restricting abortion is passed. We must continue to call for the full protection of life at all stages.