SURREY, B.C. - Zeeshan Wahla of the Conservative Party of BC has won Surrey City Centre by 392 votes over BC NDP incumbent Amna Shah in the Oct. 24, 2026 provincial election, the closest race in Surrey and one of the closest in the province, with every ballot box in the riding now counted in Elections BC’s preliminary results.
In Elections BC’s final election-night count, Wahla had 5,710 votes to Shah’s 5,318 in the downtown Surrey riding. All 65 final-day ballot boxes and all seven advance ballot boxes have reported, 72 of 72 boxes in total. Results remain preliminary; Elections BC’s final count runs Nov. 6 to 10, 2026, when ballots that could not be counted on election night are added before results are declared official. Apna News will update this story after the final count.
Update, Oct. 25: Elections BC’s final election-night count gave Wahla 5,710 votes to Shah’s 5,318, a margin of 392. Results are preliminary; the final count runs Nov. 6 to 10.
Full Surrey City Centre results
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeeshan Wahla | Conservative Party of BC | 5,710 | 47.47% |
| Amna Shah | BC NDP | 5,318 | 44.21% |
| Oliver Wildfong | OneBC | 583 | 4.85% |
| Raman Sharma | CentreBC | 418 | 3.47% |
Elections BC counted 12,029 valid votes in Surrey City Centre. The riding’s boxes averaged about 167 valid votes each.
A lead that changed hands all night
Surrey City Centre produced the seesaw count of the night in Surrey. The lead changed hands repeatedly through the evening as boxes landed, at times by single digits. At 9:58 p.m., Shah nosed in front by a single vote, 3,061 to 3,060, the closest margin in the province at that hour. Minutes later, at 10:01 p.m., Wahla retook the lead by two votes, and his advantage grew as the final boxes in the riding reported, reaching 395 votes by 10:46 p.m. and settling at 392 votes in the final election-night count. With every box counted, the riding is no longer too close to call, and Wahla is the winner on the preliminary count.
The knife-edge count is a rematch of 2024, when Shah won the seat with 6,726 votes (46.70%) to Wahla’s 6,494 (45.08%), a margin of just 232 votes that triggered an automatic Elections BC recount. Two years later, the same two candidates finished election night separated by a few hundred votes again, this time with Wahla in front.
Who is Zeeshan Wahla
Wahla is a Professional Engineer, registered as a P.Eng. in four provinces, who runs his own engineering consulting firm. He arrived in British Columbia as an immigrant in 2007 and has called Surrey home ever since. He and his wife are raising their four daughters in Surrey, in a home they share with his mother. His Apna News candidate profile describes a campaign built on the Conservative pitch for the riding: make life affordable again, restore safety to Surrey’s streets and fix health care. The 2024 loss by 232 votes framed his entire 2026 run, which his campaign presented as a return to finish the job against the same incumbent who edged him out.
The incumbent he defeated
Shah is the incumbent BC NDP MLA for Surrey City Centre, first elected in 2024. She emigrated from Malaysia to Canada with her parents and two siblings as a teenager, attended Johnston Heights Secondary School and has called Surrey home for nearly 20 years. Before entering politics she served on the board of directors of the Surrey Food Bank, where she helped lead the expansion of food distribution services across the city, and worked as Director of Outreach and Stakeholder Relations for the BC NDP caucus. After her 2024 win she was appointed Deputy Government Whip and Parliamentary Secretary for Mental Health and Addictions and for Anti-Racism Initiatives. Apna News’s results page lists her as the riding’s incumbent, and she held the seat her party has held since the riding was created in 2024.
What it means for City Centre residents
Surrey City Centre is the city’s downtown core, covering Whalley, the Central City shopping and office district, the King George Boulevard corridor and the SkyTrain corridor around Surrey Central and King George stations, with Surrey Memorial Hospital at the riding’s southern edge. It is one of Surrey’s fastest-changing neighbourhoods, with tower construction, a growing university and college presence, and some of the city’s most acute pressures on housing costs, transit capacity, hospital wait times and street safety. Wahla now sits on the government benches, with a direct line into the cabinet that will decide the Surrey Memorial Hospital expansion, SkyTrain service into the city centre, provincial funding connected to the Surrey Police Service transition and school capacity downtown. A few hundred votes decided whether that voice belongs to the government benches or the opposition.
Conservatives form a majority government
The City Centre suspense played out against a settled province-wide result. As of 10:49 p.m. PT, Elections BC’s preliminary results showed the Conservative Party of BC leading in 64 of 93 districts, the BC NDP leading in 27 and the BC Green Party in 2. A party needs 47 seats for a majority, and the Conservatives, led into the election by interim leader Lorne Doerkson, will form a majority government, ending nine years of BC NDP government. Conservative candidates led in all 10 Surrey ridings late Saturday night, with City Centre the last one to settle.
Full riding-by-riding numbers are on the Apna News live results hub and update as Elections BC reports. This story will be updated after the final count.
Source: Elections BC news release / official results, October 24, 2026
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