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A lot of B.C. Liberals are furious at Leah McCulloch these days because she ran in last week’s provincial election as a member of the B.C. Conservative party.

The Conservatives are a broke, leaderless, barely organized outfit scuttling around the fringes of the B.C. political scene. They ran just 10 candidates provincewide.

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But McCulloch still managed to get 2,061 votes in Courtenay-Comox, the crucial riding where the NDP beat the governing Liberals by just nine votes in the preliminary results.

The Liberals ended up with 43 seats on election night — one short of a majority in the 87-seat legislature — and now some Liberals see McCulloch as the vote-splitting spoiler who denied majority power to Christy Clark.

“There’s a lot of hate coming my way,” said McCulloch, a 53-year-old dietitian who ran for political office for the first time.

“They think the Liberals would have won the riding if there hadn’t been a Conservative candidate on the ballot. They’re probably right, but they have only themselves to blame, not me.”