It's weird too. Vancouver just elected a Green party mayor + a progressive city council last week, and the socialist slate (COPE) won seats for every candidate they put forward
Today, a week later, a large part of the city picked conservatives for the provincial election.
The only thing that is consistent between the two events is that they were both replacing incumbent governments.
I'd also like to point out, since this is the world news community, while this headline is technically true, it implies a long history of the "Conservative Party of BC". This party did not exist a few years ago in the capacity that it does today. Most of the people in it come from various other right / center right parties from the past few years.
What also hurt the NDP was that this election looked like an unnecessary political play while everyone is stressed about cost of living / trump / wars. The BC NDP had a majority already and they would have been fine for another 2 years. But I'm sure that we'll see a lot of analysis about this over the next few weeks