John Rustad is out, and a new leader will be taking up the reins of the B.C. Conservative Party sometime in the new year.
Whoever wins will have to rebuild a fractured party.
But some of those fractured pieces should be left behind, to build a better opposition and a better vehicle for the province’s centre-right.
Rustad was ousted as leader in part because he was unable to keep a lid on his chaotic caucus, but also because he was never able to clearly articulate a vision of the party as a mainstream institution with an identity beyond the word “conservative.”
This is in large part because of how quickly the B.C. Conservative electoral machine was assembled. Before Rustad and a few other former Liberal/BC United MLAs joined, it was a perennial also-ran.
The party was only revived by the disastrous re-branding of the Liberals as B.C. United under their leader, Kevin Falcon. A party that received 1.91 per cent of the vote in the 2020 election suddenly united the entire anti-NDP vote into one block.
The party that ran in 2024 did not have deep history. It was hastily cobbled together. Candidates were not carefully selected, there was no extensive vetting, there were few veteran MLAs or longtime party backers who could guide the creation of a new force in British Columbia politics.
This has produced a wild mix of folks, some of whom would not have had much of a chance of ever getting nominated to run by a major party in any other year.
Some of the newly-elected Conservatives are normal representatives from various points on the centre-right spectrum of politics, hailing from the old BC United, from local politics, or from business backgrounds.
But some of them are conspiracists, others have expressed blatantly racist or homophobic views. The avalanche of news about these candidates in 2024 is arguably what kept the NDP in power for another term.
Will the next Conservative leader represent a party of the reality-based centre-right, or will it be a party that is obsessed with culture war issues? The two former Conservative MLAs who formed OneBC have spent much of their time in the legislature denying residential schools were harmful to Indigenous Canadians and trying to create a public holiday in honour of the “Freedom Convoy.”
We have real problems in B.C., ones that will be thorny for any government, including a forestry industry crisis, ER shutdowns and medical wait times, cost of living increases, housing, and fentanyl-related deaths.
Whoever is in power, a vital opposition is needed to keep them on their toes. To do that job, the future B.C. Conservative leader needs to thoroughly clean house.