It was meant to be a political party where people could speak and vote freely.
The “big tent” B.C. Conservatives began 2025 ready to check the power of the governing NDP. The party held 44 seats to the NDP’s 47. The B.C. Greens held two.
Then personalities and politics collided.
Conflict burst into the B.C. legislature hallways and onto news headlines. By the end of the year, the Conservatives tenuously held onto 39 seats, and the leader who grew the party from an electoral has-been to the brink of government was forced out of the role.
Much of the blame fell on the shoulders of that leader, John Rustad, who had pledged freedom of speech as a mantra.
“The first thing he does when challenged is kick people out,” Peace River North MLA Jordan Kealy complained in a year-end interview. “So, now we’re left in a scenario where there are five Independents, and that leader is no longer the leader.”
University of British Columbia (UBC) political science lecturer Stewart Prest said this is part of a trend he calls “fractional politics.”
“Where it’s endless divisions upon division upon divisions.”
Kealy and the other newly Independent MLAs shared their thoughts with Black Press Media about this past year, and what’s ahead for them as the Conservative Party begins a leadership race. None of them would rule out one day rejoining the Conservative caucus – though each would need certain conditions to be met.
Interim Leader Trevor Halford said any offers to return will be up to the next leader, who might not be chosen until the summer, but he did not rule out the possibility.
Meanwhile, their individual needs for a return vary widely.
Penticton-Summerland MLA Amelia Boultbee, for example, wants an investigation into a summer leadership review that Rustad won, but which was marred by accusations of stacked voter rolls.
Kealy said he will only rejoin a truly conservative party, not “Liberals 2.0.” Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie said something similar, specifically mentioning MLA Peter Milobar as a leader she would not work for.
Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream MLA Tara Armstrong said “never say never,” but after tempestuous ends to terms in two caucuses in one year, she is happy to go solo.
Surrey-Cloverdale MLA Elenore Sturko says she just had a problem with one person — John Rustad — and she has already exchanged texts with Halford about a possible return, though Halford told her he still wants to leave it up to the next leader.
“I’m sure that I would be able to mend relationships with people in the caucus,” Sturko said.
How we got here
Brodie says Rustad’s choice of candidates in the 2024 election created caucus discontent from the get-go when B.C. United folded two months before election day, and the Conservatives took on several of the party’s MLAs as candidates. She thinks this brought the party too far to the left, leading to a situation where people’s views were too far apart.
“It’s extremely difficult because of the wide range of views held within that caucus,” she said.
Brodie, Kealy and Armstrong were the first to leave, in early March. Rustad forced Brodie out after she posted on social media questioning the evidence of children’s graves at residential schools. The other two quit in solidarity.
Since then, Brodie and Armstrong formed the populist, far-right One B.C. party. The pair regularly introduced controversial private members’ bills, such as one to prohibit land acknowledgments by public officials, a bill to prohibit reconciliation flags on public property and one to recognize the Freedom Convoy with a public holiday.
Armstrong defended these positions, saying that these are the things people in her riding told her they care about — and that they represent views widely held within the Conservative Party before the B.C. United candidates were brought in.
She bats away criticisms that some of her policy proposals are racist, saying that this is just something said by people who cannot defend their position.
“If you’re not being called racist or other names in this world, you’re probably not doing it right because you do need to speak up,” she said.
Later in the year, Rustad wound up battling with the liberal wing of his party. After his controversial leadership review concluded, he accused Sturko of leaking caucus information to the press and fired her. Boultbee quit soon after.
Eventually, even the partnership between Armstrong and Brodie fell apart. Brodie wanted to fire a 22-year-old male caucus staff member who allegedly made antisemitic comments and social media posts. Armstrong and other party board members attempted to keep him employed.
The disagreement ended with Armstrong claiming the board removed Brodie as leader, but later cutting a deal to step down from the party herself. Brodie remains in control of One B.C. and Armstrong now says she has no plans to start another party.
“You stand up for the values that you campaigned on, and sometimes that means, in B.C. politics, you don’t always end up in a party,” Armstrong said.
One thing all the Independents have in common is that it was a difficult, stressful year. Sturko relied on jogs along Victoria’s waterfront trails to clear her head. Brodie made sure she had her Bose speaker on hand to “play nice music and reduce stress.” Kealy flew home to the Peace River region, hopped on his Massey Ferguson tractor and made sure the cattle were fed.
Boultbee just gripped her stress ball.
“It’s been that kind of year,” she said.
Where the Independents stand on the issues
While Sturko and Boultbee clearly fall on the moderate side of the political spectrum, there are some similarities in their views about the state of the province with those expressed by Kealy, Armstrong and Brodie.
All of them complain about inadequate health care, a stagnant economy, and the impact on private property rights from recent Indigenous rights court rulings.
But the approach to policy is far different.
Sturko and Boultbee advocate for repairing the health-care system so it better serves people’s needs. They call for altering addiction policy to focus on treatment, rather than housing and harm reduction first.
“It’s more expensive to actually build residential treatment beds and treatment programs and find the medical professionals to do that, but they need to start doing it because their housing first model isn’t working,” Boultbee said.
Armstrong, Brodie and Kealy want to slash taxes to stem bureaucratic bloat. They argue that this is the only way for B.C. to have a healthy economy.
Brodie says the NDP has killed the economy through “environmental strangulation,” the “reconciliation industry,” and support of unions.
“We need a massive course correction,” Brodie said. “And it is going to be very difficult to make when you’ve got a government in power right now that is ideologically committed to cultural Marxism, and bordering on full communist.”
On Indigenous affairs, the two sides also have similarities, to a point. Both support changes to legislation that align the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples with B.C. law, but the moderates only take this so far.
Sturko is drafting a bill to require landowners to be informed if there is an Aboriginal title claim over their properties. She supported an effort by Kealy to repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which enshrined the U.N. declaration in B.C. law, but at this point doesn’t see that as politically possible.
Sturko said that after watching in the legislature as Kealy’s bill was “straight-up rejected,” she would bring it back in a “softer way.”
Brodie and Armstrong, on the other hand, have made complete opposition to reconciliation initiatives the touchstone of their legislative agenda.
“We’ve got the reconciliation industry that is only benefiting a very elite group of people who are demanding payment just to use the land in B.C., which is really a kind of shakedown, and it can’t go on,” Brodie said.
It is unclear whether Brodie and Armstrong could ever coexist in a caucus with someone like Boultbee, who called these views “shocking,” saying the goal seems to be to “rewrite history” for ideological reasons.
“It was difficult for me to be in a caucus with people who were publicly embarrassing us like that,” Boultbee said.
With these competing visions from the Independents, it will take an outstanding diplomat to bring them all back into the fold, UBC’s Prest said.
Ultimately, the leadership race may enable party members to decide what its true identity is.
“It is an opportunity for the conservatives to do something they didn’t in 2024, which is actually have an open conversation about what this party truly stands for,” Prest said. “And the choice of leader is going to tell us a lot about how the majority of B.C. Conservative members see their party and who is welcome and who is not.”