Another day, another eyebrow-raising video clip from the past that B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad has to defend or avoid talking about.
Tuesday featured a video interview from last year in which he discussed his interpretation of the motive behind part of the climate-change fighting campaign. He said it stems from an “anti-human” or “anti-civilization” outlook aimed at “reducing the world population.”
He is specifically concerned about efforts to reduce use of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which he said contributes to 40 per cent of the world’s food supply. Curbing that would lead to a crisis where huge numbers of people would “starve,” he said.
A few days earlier, the NDP latched onto a PressProgress report of his concerns about efforts to produce insect protein on a large scale, where he is quoted as saying at a conference: “We should not be expecting our kids to eat bugs.”
In both cases there is a legitimate issue behind Rustad’s reactions. Insect protein production is well underway, in Canada and elsewhere, and is widely covered in media. Nitrogen fertilizer is widely flagged as a climate-change concern, and there’s a federal plan to voluntarily reduce its use.
But in the middle of a heated election campaign, the NDP is not highlighting them to prompt discussion. They’re doing it to get people laughing at Rustad.
A fixture of the government’s re-election effort to date is the theme that the Conservative Party of B.C. has extremely unusual views on some topics.
Ironically, much of the ammunition available to advance that case comes from the BC United Party, which gave the Conservatives a tremendous boost by suspending its campaign in August and throwing them their full support.
When they surrendered their weapons, the handover included a 200-page dossier of opposition research on B.C. Conservative candidates, full of startling statements from the past. They had planned to use it during the campaign, before Leader Kevin Falcon abruptly changed course, and endorsed the Conservatives as the only option to defeat the NDP.
It promptly leaked out, and the NDP has been using it and other sources to stress, as NDP Leader David Eby did again Tuesday, that Rustad believes in “bizarre … crazy internet conspiracy theories.”
Last week, he demanded Rustad fire seven candidates who he said have previously endorsed “anti-democratic conspiracy theories” or expressed bigoted and sexist views. The demand was ignored. Earlier, the NDP highlighted Rustad’s regrets at getting the “so-called” COVID vaccine (mRNA) and his remarks that vaccine mandates involved “shaping opinion and control of the population.”
Previous cases include the ex-candidates who think vaccines magnetize people, or that 5G cell networks are “genocidal weapons.”
The origins of that dossier go deeper than just months of opposition researchers scraping the internet for ammunition.
It stems from people’s 21st century compulsion to blurt their innermost thoughts and feelings out on the web for the world to see, regardless of the consequences.
Much of the dossier is based on social-media posts Conservatives made as private citizens. Now they are public figures, having to defend them before curious voters.
It’s not going well. Several have been dismissed from the campaign and Rustad’s media scrums now regularly feature questions about oddball Conservative beliefs.
The one upside to this for the party is that people may be inured to all the weirdness. It’s become increasingly obvious elsewhere for years and it is increasing, not decreasing. (See: Politics, United States).
Vancouver commentator Mo Amir advanced the view this week that the file being dumped all at once actually helps the Conservatives. He said that the news cycle is a constant firehose of information and people get confused and desensitized to it all.
Now that all the curiosities have been unloaded at once, people will digest it as best they can, until something else happens. That may dilute the NDP plan to dole the shockers out regularly.
Rustad appears to be banking on that.
He told the Canadian Press on Saturday that the legislature needs fresh people who are willing to “stand up, say things and be themselves.”
Campaigning in Brackendale on Tuesday, he said people don’t feel safe in B.C., there’s an affordability crisis, the health-care system is collapsing and B.C. is in decline.
“David Eby is going to do everything he possibly can to distract from that, because he doesn’t want to talk about his record.”
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