OTTAWA — The Conservatives head into the October election potentially facing major B.C. losses to the Liberals and especially the New Democratic Party, according to pre-campaign polling data.

And Prime Minister Stephen Harper should look in the mirror if he’s wondering why he could lose one of the western provinces that he has long counted on, according to one of Canada’s top election and public opinion experts.

“There’s a B.C. thing going on about Harper,” said University of B.C. political scientist Richard Johnston, who holds the Canada Research Chair in public opinion, elections, and representation. “I get the sense people here really are fed up, there is a more settled intention to defeat Conservatives this time than last time.”

Johnston blamed the Tory slide since the 2011 election on energy and pipeline politics, the poor federal response to a fuel spill earlier this year in English Bay, feuds with the city of Vancouver, and the Senate scandals.

However, B.C. pollster Dimitri Pantazopoulos said the Tories will likely lose some seats, but the grim scenario painted by some goes overboard. There are enough voters in B.C. concerned primarily with the economy, and supportive of Harper’s approach, to prevent a Tory collapse, he said.

“There’s not going to be a tectonic shift in B.C.”

Harper, who won 21 of 36 seats while taking a whopping 45.6 per cent of the B.C. votes in 2011, would win between nine and 13 of 42 seats if recent polls mirror actual Oct. 19 voting results, according to two separate analyses based on recent polling data.

Tom Mulcair’s New Democrats would win B.C. with 21 to 24 seats, while Justin Trudeau’s Liberals would take between six and eight and Elizabeth May would manage only to hang on to her Saanich-Gulf Islands riding.

The projections are based on a compilation of B.C. results from recent national and regional polls compiled by Eric Grenier, creator of the threehundredeight.com website and the CBC consultant on polling in the current campaign.

Polling data, which is weighed by Grenier based on how recently the polling was done and on the track record of the pollsters, shows the NDP in the lead in B.C. with slightly under 40 per cent support. The Conservatives are second at just over 29 per cent, the Liberals are third at 21.6, and the Greens fourth at 8.8 per cent.

Grenier used a particular mathematical formula to apply current polling to 2011 election results in various Canadian regions, which is known among experts as the “proportional” system. His figures give the NDP a whopping 24 seats in B.C., the Conservatives nine, the Liberals eight, and the Greens one.

A Vancouver Sun analysis, using a more conservative and simpler “uniform” formula that is commonly used by British political analysts, also showed the NDP dominating B.C. The New Democrats would take 21 B.C. seats, while the Conservatives would win 13. The Liberals under The Sun’s alternative formula end up with seven seats, and the Greens one.

The last time the NDP dominated B.C. was in the 1988 election, which was viewed by many Canadians as effectively a referendum on the Canada-U. S. free trade agreement, which the NDP opposed. In that election, the Ed Broadbent-led party took 19 of 32 seats with 37 per cent of the vote, or just over 59 per cent of the seats.

Poll-based seat projections are not always reliable, as embarrassed pollsters and media pundits learned to their chagrin in the surprising 2013 B.C. and 2012 Alberta elections.