It’s more than three weeks since former B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad resigned, and no major political figures have stepped up to run for his old job.
This is despite the very real possibility that the next leader of the Official Opposition could one day be premier.
“It’s the best job in B.C. politics that no one wants,” said David Black, a political communications professor at Royal Roads University.
So far, several prominent conservative politicians have announced they will not run: MLAs Gavin Dew and Elenore Sturko are out. Federal Conservative MP Aaron Gunn is a no-go. Former premier Christy Clark does not plan on taking another shot. Interim leader Trevor Halford says he doesn’t want to take on the job permanently.
Ex-Save-On-Foods head Darrell Jones is the only officially announced candidate, and former federal Conservative MP Kerry-Lynne Findlay has a website up petitioning her to join the race.
“There’s a lot of tire-kicking, there’s a lot of rumour, a lot of subtle signalling,” Black said.
Plans for how the leadership race will operate and when it will be held are also still unknown. Skeena MLA Claire Rattée is leading the committee to oversee the race, and Halford says more will be made known in the new year.
Regardless of how the plans shape up, he says he expects to be leading the party when the spring session begins in February. This makes it likely that the race will not be held until the summer, once the session concludes at the end of May.
There is a major wildcard in the mix as well. With only a very slight NDP majority, the province could slide into an election should the government fall on a confidence vote — not an impossible scenario given the governing party has a one-seat majority and two of its MLAs are undergoing treatment for serious health issues.
And while Premier David Eby has said he does not plan to call an election, he could allow his government to fall to take advantage of leadership uncertainty in the opposition.
There is a historical parallel in B.C. for inducing an election to gain a more stable government. Former premier W.A.C. Bennett used a similar tactic in 1953 following a difficult year of governing with a minority, according to research by David Elkins, a University of British Columbia (UBC) political science professor.
Bennett allowed the government to fall on a school financing bill strongly opposed by opposition parties, which at the time was split between the Conservatives and Liberals.
In a clever bit of political maneuvering, Bennett included lower taxes in the bill, giving him a popular political platform to run on. The opposition supported the parts that lowered taxes, but because they voted against the bill, Bennett was able to seize that as his issue.
His next government won 28 out of 48 seats, and Bennett served as premier for the next 19 years.
But Bennett could serve as a cautionary tale for Eby as well. The year before this electoral engineering, the Social Credit Party was able to squeeze a victory and form a minority government in 1952 without a permanent leader in place. Bennett was chosen afterwards by caucus vote.
UBC political science lecturer Stewart Prest drew this historical parallel as a warning that voter frustrations could hand the Conservatives an electoral victory, even without a permanent leader.
He says the NDP would be “playing with fire” if Eby enabled an early election — if the New Democrats lost, it would go down as a self-induced blunder of “epic proportions.”
Overcoming an internal divide
Whoever takes on the job as Conservative leader will need to overcome the internal ideological divide between the moderate and populist wings of the party. This divide proved unstable for Rustad, with five out of 44 MLAs leaving or being ejected from caucus in an eight-month span under his leadership.
Black says that to be successful, the next leader must be a diplomat within the caucus, but also present an electable public face.
“It’s going to take someone with remarkable skills to kind of bring the moderates and the populists together,” he said.
Rustad was unable to do both these things, despite growing the party from a fringe-y alternative to the brink of government.
“But that’s not the same skill set that is necessary to hold this group together, and perhaps he was a little slow to realize that,” Prest said.
The one person consistently mentioned as potentially being capable of this is Gunn.
Gunn represents the populist side of the party and probably has enough cachet and name recognition to gain broad support. But he chose to stay in his federal post to prevent Prime Minister Mark Carney from gaining a parliamentary majority.
Other populist candidates aren’t as well-known. Langley-Abbotsford MLA Harman Bhangu, for example, is considering a run, but has limited experience in politics. Some are also outsiders with unknown political prospects, such as Chris Gardner, the president of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association.
There are still several possible candidates from the moderate side. But Black reckons those who have already said they are out — Dew, Sturko, Clark — have possibly done so because they’ve read the proverbial tea leaves and see the party’s membership base as too populist to vote them in.
“You’re looking at a race where the table is already tilted a little bit toward the more populist candidates,” Black said.
Possible contenders from the centre-right include Kamloops Centre MLA Peter Milobar, former B.C. United candidate Caroline Elliott, former B.C. Liberal MLA Iain Black, 2024 B.C. Conservative candidate Yuri Fulmer and former Conservative MP Dianne Watts.
Halford named Watts, also a former longtime Surrey mayor, as a mentor and one of his “most trusted friends” in a year-end interview with Black Press Media.
Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West’s name has also been floated as a possible contender, though his intentions are unknown at this time. He was once considered a candidate to lead a merged B.C. United-Conservative Party, and could fit somewhere on the spectrum between the moderates and populists.
Whoever does run faces a province dealing with a set of issues that could be favourable for a centre-right party in the next election, Black says.
This, along with an electorate fatigued by what could by then be a decade of NDP leadership, could mean this next Conservative leader winds up as the province’s next premier.
But to get there, the party must first bridge the gaps within and find a leader with a message to rally around.