The New Democratic Party set the stage for a comeback in next year’s provincial election by winning a pair of byelections Tuesday night.

In unseating the Liberals in Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, and maintaining an eight-decade hold on the eastside Vancouver riding of Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, the NDP tapped into a growing public disenchantment with Premier Christy Clark’s Liberal government.

In Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, voters handily elected Melanie Mark, 40, a former associate deputy in the office of B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth. She inherits the riding from former MLA Jenny Kwan.

In Coquitlam-Burke Mountain voters turned away from their traditional Liberal base and narrowly elected Jodie Wickens, a former executive director of an autism support network. Doug Horne had been the Liberal MLA in the new riding until last year, when he resigned for an unsuccessful run as a Conservative in the federal election.

The elections were marked by low voter turnout. In Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, which has 40,000 registered voters, just over 2,100 people, or a little over half a per cent voted in the six advance polls.

In Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, just 7,704 of the riding’s 38,099 registered voters cast ballots. Wickens finished with 3.562 while Liberal candidate Joan Isaacs was second at 2,936. The Green Party’s Joe Keithley finished third with 1,061 votes.

"This is an incredible feeling, I'm so humbled to have your support," Wickens told supporters. "We were honest, we were passionate and we fought hard for what is right."

While the election results see-sawed back and forth in Coquitlam-Burke Mountain, it was all but over from the first poll reporting in Vancouver-Mount Pleasant. Mark took the lead and never looked back. A third of the way through the counting, Mark had a commanding 60 per cent lead. The Green Party’s Pete Fry took a respectable one-in-four votes to finish second. Gavin Dew, the 32-year-old Liberal and former Kinder Morgan consultant, managed to capture just over one in 10 votes cast.

With all 91 polls reporting, Mark finished with 5,353 votes to Fry’s 2,325. Dew came third with 994.

Mark, dressed in a Nisga’a shawl, entered Heritage Hall on Main Street escorted by a group of Nisga’a singers and drummers. Holding an eagle feather high over her head, she told a crowd of about 300 well-wishers she was extremely proud to be elected. In a speech paying homage to her Nisga’a, Gitxsan, Cree and Ojibway heritage, she asked supporters to join her in the next year working to “dethrone” Liberal Premier Christy Clark.

“Will you join in getting into the canoe tomorrow and for the next 65 weeks work to take down Christy Clark and dethrone her, her lack of leadership, and restore home and confidence for the people of British Columbia,” she said.

NDP leader John Horgan, who accompanied Mark into the hall, said her election means his caucus will continue to have strong representation from one of Vancouver’s most diverse ridings.

“For me and my leadership, it is a renewal in our caucus,” Horgan said. “Jenny Kwan was a 20-year MLA. Now we’ve got a young, dynamic First Nations woman, a single mom, who has been just a dynamo. It reaffirms our relationship in the NDP with First Nations people right across the province.”