Not long ago it was a government-in-waiting.
Now it’s an opposition-in-weakening.
It should surprise few that it has taken mere weeks for the rifts to appear in the Conservative Party of B.C. After all, it was designed on the fly and held together with the political version of Krazy Glue in its otherworldly ascent in the polls – an incubator that kept the hatched chickens, including the fowl laying the rancid political eggs.
The party led by John Rustad was indeed a moonshot, so it was to be expected some passengers from outer space would be aboard for the voyage. But you’d also expect a little gratitude from his fellow travellers hopping a free ride. Instead, they’ve soiled their spacesuits and called Houston to say we have a problem.
And what a problem it is becoming. Weeks after the election, Rustad has a defining moment for his leadership and the future of the party he resuscitated to be within spitting distance of government.
In case you missed what now stirs the pot, the sequence of the play has gone like this:
Act One: Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba, vice-chair of the Vancouver Police Board, complains about gender transition and claims minorities are contributing to the decline of Christian values and a Canadian identity. The board accepts her resignation, given it governs an entity dedicated to treating everyone equally. Conservative MLA Elenore Sturko, a former Mountie who knows a thing or two about policing and a prominent LGBTQ2S+ member of caucus from nearby Surrey, strays slightly from her lane and says she supports that resignation.
Act Two: The party president criticizes Sturko’s move and 13 MLAs write Rustad to lean on her to apologize. They cry cancel culture, claim she’s gone astray of policy, and say everyone should be free to express themselves – except, it seems, Sturko. Rustad’s unorthodox method of mediation is to dine with Sakoma-Fadugba, praise her on social media and ask Sturko to meet with her. His MLA sticks to her political guns.
Act Three: still unwritten, anyone’s guess, but it will not end well.
Now you would think that a new opposition party’s first notable move would not be to eat its own, that there are better priorities than to weigh in on a municipal matter when there are dozens of provincial ones upon which to feast – trifling matters like unaffordability, health care, a struggling economy.
And you cannot help but suspect that the cadre of arch-conservative MLAs were just waiting to pounce on the first opportunity to lay claim to the party’s identity, and particularly to quell Sturko’s influence on it. The two sides are of different worlds, and sometimes when you try as a party to pitch a big tent, you find it just smells more.
Rustad had an election that was his to lose, and lose it he did, in part because he would not show more of the most intolerant Conservatives the door – particularly the ones who thought of themselves as social media seers of social conservatism – and open that same door to more of Sturko’s former MLA colleagues available in a snap when BC United folded its tent. Had he’d brought, say, five or six into the fray and told everyone to get along and enjoy his coattail, David Eby would have had to run on his record and not on those of the Conservative wannabe MLAs, and Rustad would be premier.
But no, and when the campaign commenced, so did emerge a clown car of candidates and their puerile and painful social media pronouncements. Rustad never could penetrate their fog to spell out his vision. And the public sufficiently noticed the tweets, sufficiently winced when he was not dousing the fire, and sufficiently concluded it was the better of two flawed choices to give the NDP four more years of who knows what.
Perhaps Rustad, traumatized, didn’t want to foist on others what had happened to him in BC United – a dismissal from caucus by Kevin Falcon, the beginning of the end of the party expected to rule in 2024 and the beginning of the party that nearly did. Perhaps he thought the same rupture would ensue, only more swiftly; indeed, it has taken a little longer, but now it may.
In their election as MLAs, many Conservatives assumed British Columbians wanted to swing far right, when what they appear to have wanted was to just stop swinging so far left – and on the economy, more than anything. Those MLAs haven’t sufficiently studied the national party’s success stories of fiscal conservatism. Too many cling to the delusion that the day awaits similar social conservative success; the notion has its proponents, but the thinking just isn’t British Columbia writ-large.
It was decent of Rustad to keep the early adopters of his party, I suppose, but it was fatal to the electoral hopes, past and seemingly present. Now the 13 MLAs, many of them those early sign-ons, have done him a supreme disservice. If he bounces Sturko, he lionizes her, chooses a clear and unwinnable identity, opens a flank again to a party wedged between the Conservatives and the BC NDP, and pushes the prize further from reach. If he doesn’t, then the 13 will think they need to walk if they want to get their way – their leader will have spoken, if rather late in the day. Anything less definitive, anything that just countenances ambiguity of values in a bickering party, is hardly inspiring confidence.
To repeat: Act Three awaits.
Kirk LaPointe is a Glacier Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism.
