British Columbia's three party leaders offered starkly different visions of the province and its future on Tuesday in the only televised debate of what appears to be an increasingly close election campaign.

NDP Leader David Eby promised on Sunday to support police in British Columbia to keep illegal guns off the streets and protect communities, but accused B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad of planning to make the province less safe.

The New Democratic Party shared the video Monday, while Leader David Eby said voters in B.C. should be aware that the B.C. Conservative Party leader's "health policy is driven by conspiracy theories from the internet."

The Conservative Party of B.C. that didn't elect a single member in the last election and gained less than two per cent of the popular vote is now leading the charge for centre-right, anti-NDP voters.

An opposition research file on the "extremism" of the Conservative Party of British Columbia's executive director has been leaked by BC United sources, less than two weeks after the parties' leaders announced a deal to work together in the fall provincial election.

Independent candidates in British Columbia's upcoming fall election could be potential "power brokers" after what is expected to be a closely-fought contest between the New Democrats and the B.C. Conservatives, says the latest BC United candidate to drop party affiliation.

As BC United candidates and staff pondered their futures, strategists and communications experts pointed to last year's ill-fated rebranding exercise, championed by Falcon, as a harbinger of the party's implosion.

Old-growth forests that were environmental and Indigenous rights battlegrounds over clearcut logging in the 1980s and 1990s during British Columbia's "war in the woods" are set to receive permanent protections in a land and forest management agreement.

Heiltsuk leaders met with RCMP officials earlier this week over the "racist text and images" the officer posted on social media before joining the Mounties, but the officer remains on duty in Bella Bella and is awaiting a transfer.

A pod of killer whales has been spotted far offshore from the remote Vancouver Island inlet where an orphaned orca has been spending time since escaping a lagoon last month, but a member of her rescue team is downplaying the prospect of an imminent family reunion.