Following Justin Trudeau's announcement that he would resign as prime minister and as leader of the federal Liberal Party, Clark was considered a potential candidate to succeed him.

[5] Her father was a teacher and a three-time candidate for the legislative assembly, and her mother, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, was a marriage and family therapist in Vancouver.

[18][19] In 2002, the BC Liberals and Education Minister Christy Clark introduced Bills 27 & 28 forcing teachers back to work and banning collective bargaining.

[22] In 2009, Michael Bolton, defence attorney in the Basi-Virk trial, alleged that Clark had participated in the scandal by providing government information to lobbyist Erik Bornmann.

[13] On August 31, 2005, Clark announced that she would seek the nomination of the Non-Partisan Association (NPA) to run for mayor in the Vancouver Civic Elections against local councillor Sam Sullivan.

While Clark had long been touted as a potential successor to BC Premier Gordon Campbell, she often claimed she had no further interest in a political career.

[29][30][31] Public polling conducted prior to and after the announcement of her candidacy showed that Clark was the frontrunner to succeed Campbell as leader of the BC Liberals and premier.

[39] Despite her perceived frontrunner status, backbench MLA Harry Bloy was the only sitting member of BC Liberal caucus to endorse her candidacy for leader.

[23][45] It was in the wake of the controversial Basi-Virk guilty pleas that ended the trial proceedings that she declared her candidacy for the party leadership on her radio show.

Clark had called for more questions to be answered about BC Rail, but since then has said that there is no need for a public inquiry, as have the other Liberal Party leadership contenders.

[22] At the leadership convention held on February 26, 2011, Clark was elected leader of the BC Liberals on the third ballot, over former Health Minister Kevin Falcon.

Clark ran in former Premier Gordon Campbell's riding of Vancouver-Point Grey and defeated NDP candidate David Eby by 595 votes.

[49] After Clark became premier, the Liberal Party saw a bounce in support and lead in opinion polls, after falling behind the Official Opposition NDP under Campbell.

Dix's strategy of taking the "high road", similar to Jack Layton's successful approach in the 2011 federal election, left him vulnerable to "relentless [BC] Liberal attacks on the economic competence of his party".

However, she suffered personal defeat in Vancouver-Point Grey, losing her seat to NDP candidate David Eby by a margin of 785 votes.

Clark became premier during the aftermath of the 2008–09 recession, and continued to hold the line on government spending, introducing two deficit budgets before a balanced one for the 2013–14 fiscal year, which included a tax hike on high-income British Columbians.

While continuing with BC's first-in-North-America carbon tax, she promised to freeze the rate during the 2013 election and her LNG development aspirations seemed to contradict greenhouse gas emissions targets set by the Campbell government in 2007.

The entire legislative assembly acknowledges the perseverance of Chinese Canadians that was demonstrated with grace and dignity throughout our history while being oppressed by unfair and discriminatory historical laws.

[66]In October 2014 the British Columbia government exonerated First Nations leaders who had been sentenced to be hanged in the Chilcotin War by Judge Begbie in 1864.

At the time, Miller was facing charges in Ontario for allegedly deleting emails while in service with the Dalton McGuinty provincial Liberal government,[68] though she was later found not guilty.

However, the opposition NDP and Greens criticized her inaction on "lax political fundraising laws" and portrayed her as "beholden to big money interests", attacking the BC Liberals on "housing, transit and other affordability issues".

While BC enjoyed strong economic growth and her government had five balanced budgets, BC was also "becoming behind the country’s most unequal province, socio-economically speaking, thanks to 37 per cent cuts to income tax levies, tightened rules for welfare eligibility, cuts to child-care subsidies, reductions in support for women’s centres and the doubling of post-secondary tuitions".

Clark also faced "relentless criticism over bottomless corporate and foreign donations that gave her party a four-fold advantage over the NDP, such that even The New York Times labelled BC the "wild west" of political cash and the province's elections agency referred its investigation to the RCMP".

During her leadership of the BC Liberals, she had shifted them "so far to the right [with regards to environmental and energy policies] to appease its ascendant federal Conservative flank it is now unrecognizable from the centrist party led by Gordon Campbell, her predecessor".

[58][70] Furthermore, a video of Clark having a run-in with a disgruntled voter inside a North Vancouver grocery store went viral with the hashtag #IamLinda.

[71] Clark subsequently recalled the legislative assembly to test its confidence in her government, with a speech from the throne that included billions of dollars in new funding and key policies supported by the NDP and Greens.

One critic saw Clark's gambit as unprincipled "because it’s disrespectful to voters who rely on parties as aggregators of ideas that lead to policies they like", noted that the 30 pledges were absent from the Liberals' election platform, but also the "dramatic conversion to an NDP/Green-light version of her party appear like an over-correction, given the modest shift in support" as the Liberals lost 4 percentage points of popular vote in the general election.

[72] However, both the NDP and Green Party leaders said they would not consider legislation by the Liberal minority government, and none of their MLAs broke ranks to support the throne speech.

[80] In September 2024, Clark gave a speech at the Ontario Liberal Party's annual general meeting about running a winning campaign.