The 1952 British Columbia general election was the 23rd general election in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was held to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, alongside a plebiscite on daylight saving time and liquor. The election was called on April 10, 1952, and held on June 12, 1952. The new legislature met for the first time on February 3, 1953. It was the first BC general election to use a preferential ballot, a short-lived phenomenon in the province. The presence of multi-member districts, such as Victoria City with 3 MLAs, in conjunction with the alternative voting system called for an innovation where the district's candidates were split into three "ballots", each with one candidate from each party. Due to the preferential ballot, the election resulted in a surprise victory for the new Social Credit Party. Not even the Socreds had expected to win the election; the party had no official leader, and was nominally lead through the election by Ernest George Hansell, an Alberta MP who did not contest a seat himself. The newly elected caucus selected W. A. C. Bennett, a former Conservative MLA, to be their leader and premier-designate. This began what would be 20 years of uninterrupted Social Credit rule in British Columbia. This would also be the last election to produce a minority government until the 2017 election. Background The government until not long before the election had been a Liberal–Progressive Conservative coalition (the Conservatives had recently changed their name to match that of the federal party). After the coalition had collapsed, the Liberals felt threatened by the rising popularity of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. To lock out the CCF, the government adopted the alternative voting system instead of leaving the existing system in place or switching to the single transferable vote system. While they ran candidates separately under their own names, Liberal and Conservative party leaders believed that if Liberal voters picked the local Tory candidate as their second preference and vice versa, one of the candidates of the two parties would have enough votes to be elected in many districts, hopefully ensuring the coalition's retention of power. Campaign However, the Liberal and PC leaders had not reckoned on being so unpopular with the province's voters. The combined Liberal and PC vote total was 120,000 fewer votes than in the previous election, while the Social Credit party received almost