B.C. Conservative Party leader John Rustad, speaks during a news conference in Surrey B.C., on Oct. 12.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
It was supposed to be an announcement focused on affordability, a pledge that if his Conservative Party of BC is elected, British Columbians will be able to write off upward of $1,000 a year of mortgage interest or rent costs from their provincial taxes.
But as party leader John Rustad concluded his remarks at the September campaign announcement, reporters interrogated him over his stand on the COVID-19 vaccine – or, rather, the “so-called vaccine,” as he stated in a video from June unearthed and disseminated by the BC NDP that morning.
What do you think would have happened without widespread vaccination, one reporter asked. Do you believe the vaccine science, asked another. Do you really feel it was about controlling the population? Why did you say you regretted getting three doses? Mr. Rustad responded by accusing the NDP of distracting from the real issues.
The event reflected the tightrope act that Mr. Rustad has walked since leading the upstart BC Conservative Party to its current position. Booted from the BC Liberal Party two years ago over his views on climate change, the rural conservative from Northern B.C. now holds the reins to a party that seeks to embrace the same kinds of unconventional views for which he says he has been silenced, while also appealing to a broader base of centre-right voters.
He has been successful to date. With Mr. Rustad at the helm, the party – which received less than 2 per cent of all votes in the last election – has experienced a meteoric rise to become neck-and-neck with the incumbent NDP in the weeks leading up to the Oct. 19 election.
Some of that success can be attributed to the BC Liberals’ disastrous rebranding to BC United, as well as the BC Conservatives’ ability to ride the wave of popularity buoying Pierre Poilievre’s federal Conservatives. But the balance falls to whether Mr. Rustad can convince the electorate that his ideas for the province are better than the status quo, while tempering criticism that his candidates’ contentious views make the party unfit for government.
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John Rustad was born and raised in Prince George, the youngest of three boys. His father, Laurie, worked for a logging company on Vancouver Island before moving to Prince George and forming a lumber company with his brother. His mother, Molly, worked the front desk in a planer mill.
In his early teens, Mr. Rustad helped his dad to clear fields and build roads, operating a bulldozer and grader before he was old enough to drive. That would be his introduction to about 20 years in the forestry industry, during which he logged, planted trees, fought fires and did various field analysis, forestry technician and inventory work before launching his own company consulting for the resource sector.
In the spring of 1992, Mr. Rustad and a friend flew to Vancouver to see the British rock band Dire Straits on its last tour. When they returned home to Prince George, his friend’s girlfriend, Kim Royle, picked the two up from the airport. Months after the pair split up, Mr. Rustad got to chatting with her at a party held by a local theatre society, with which he would be involved for several years.
“I was never somebody that liked to be up on stage, so I always worked behind the scenes, building sets, that kind of stuff,” Mr. Rustad told The Globe and Mail in an interview. “That’s where I got to know her a little bit, and we started dating through that.”
The two married in 1995. Ms. Rustad was diagnosed with cervical cancer soon after, precluding the couple from having children. But they dote on six nieces and nephews, whom they occasionally “borrow” for trips to Disneyland and Mexico. Ms. Rustad has been in remission for 24 years. They now live in a lakefront community just west of Prince George, with an African grey parrot named Biardi.
Shortly after the wedding, Mr. Rustad grew frustrated with economic challenges in B.C., feeling the governing NDP had destroyed the economy and made businesses reluctant to invest. He and his wife discussed moving to Calgary, but ultimately decided to stay put in Prince George, where they had family, a woodlot licence and various projects on the go.
“So that left me with two options: either live with it, or try to change what was going on, and I’m not the kind of person that tends to just live with a problem when I see it,” Mr. Rustad said.
In 2002, Mr. Rustad was elected to the Prince George School Board, where he served one term as a trustee before taking a run at provincial politics. In 2005, he was elected as a BC Liberal MLA for the Nechako Lakes riding. He was re-elected four times, later being appointed minister of aboriginal relations.
Bill Bennett, a former BC Liberal cabinet minister who shared a pied-à-terre with Mr. Rustad in Victoria for the dozen years they both worked in the legislature, said the two bonded over their shared rural conservatism and exchanged stories of frustration.
“We always felt a bit powerless,” Mr. Bennett said. “There were so many urban MLAs in government caucus that he had to make a lot of noise to get noticed.”
They both pondered the feasibility of one day taking a run at leading the BC Conservative Party, Mr. Bennett said.
In appointing him minister of aboriginal relations, then-premier Christy Clark tasked Mr. Rustad with securing huge projects that would bring liquefied natural gas from the northeast corner of the province to the coast for processing and export. Along those routes were roughly 40 First Nations communities.
In an interview with The Globe, Ms. Clark said he did a good job at a hugely important file, keeping people with diverse interests at the table.
“John never came across as threatening in those meetings,” Ms. Clark said in an interview. “He was always open and listening to people and looking for opportunities to find common ground.”
In this year’s campaign, Mr. Rustad has boasted of signing 435 agreements with First Nations during his tenure as minister – an achievement that some Indigenous leaders scoff at.
Terry Teegee, regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations, said many of the First Nations leaders who signed those agreements did so under duress.
“I know my nation did, stating that this wasn’t accommodation,” Mr. Teegee, a member of the Takla Nation in Northern B.C. who previously served as tribal chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council, told The Canadian Press in September.
In the spring of 2022, Environment and Climate Change Canada released a clean-air strategy that included a goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from nitrogen fertilizer on farms across the country. Believing it was a nonsensical effort to “change the weather” that could have serious consequences for his riding, where agriculture is an important sector, Mr. Rustad said he tried to raise the issue within the BC Liberal Party, to no avail.
Deciding to “start putting some information out there,” Mr. Rustad shared on both Twitter and Facebook a post by climate-change skeptic Patrick Moore that said “the case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker by the day,” and to “#celebrateCO2.” The NDP pounced and his own staff urged him to remove the posts, prompting a phone call with an “annoyed” Liberal leader Kevin Falcon, who said he would have to toe the party line on climate change, Mr. Rustad said.
“I said, ‘Look, Kevin, I’m sorry, but I was elected to represent my riding, and this is an important issue in my riding,” Mr. Rustad said. “He said, ‘Well, that’s fine,’ and hung up on me. Half an hour later, I was kicked out of caucus.” It was his 59th birthday.
After the ejection from caucus, Mr. Bennett said, Mr. Rustad was “almost in the perfect place in his life” to carve his own path.
“What he’s been doing since he’s left the BC Liberal Party has offered him an opportunity to open up, to really let the real John Rustad come out,” Mr. Bennett said. “He’s always wanted to have an opportunity to show that he can be a leader.”
In his Conservative leadership campaign in March, 2023, Mr. Rustad declared that he was the only MLA to publicly support the “freedom movement” that protested against government-imposed health measures, including COVID-19 vaccine mandates, during the height of the pandemic. That May, as leader, he told the Reclaiming Canada conference in Victoria about attending a trucker convoy protest in Vancouver.
“The party that I was with at the time, which was the BC Liberal Party, said, ‘Don’t go anywhere near it. We can’t talk about it, we can’t support it. All it will do is cost us votes in the Lower Mainland,’” he said. “And I thought, ‘That’s nuts.’”
As leader, he has confidently campaigned on contentious positions, including his belief that climate change is not an existential threat. He has vowed to end SOGI123, the teaching resource on sexual orientation and gender identity, which he says is divisive and sexualizes children. He would repeal the provincial Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, which affirms that the international human-rights instrument adopted by the United Nations applies to laws in B.C. He would replace it with business deals with individual First Nations.
He has defended past and current Conservative candidates who were questioned for their views – including one who said 5G technology is a genocidal weapon, and another who said the COVID vaccine causes AIDS – saying his party embraces a variety of views.
Hamish Telford, an associate professor of political science at the University of the Fraser Valley, said the Conservative Leader is in the difficult position of trying to keep happy his earliest supporters, some of whom share contentious views, while vying for the broad middle of the political spectrum.
“And I think that he may have reached his limits,” he said.
However, a challenging four years – with the pandemic and its restrictions, a housing crisis and soaring inflation – have fuelled resentment toward incumbent governments and a strong desire for change, Dr. Telford said.
“There’s a long history in this province of people supporting anybody that’s not the NDP,” he said. “Evidently, some people with more mainstream views are prepared to tolerate a leader like John Rustad, with non-mainstream views on certain issues, as a preference to the NDP, at any cost.”
His opponents have spotlighted these views as evidence that Mr. Rustad’s Conservatives cannot be taken seriously.
Mr. Rustad has repeatedly called such attacks an effort to distract from real issues. But at a campaign stop this month, after pledging a suite of measures to address crime and safety, he was again pelted with unrelated questions about controversial comments that he had made.
“Hi John, you put out a statement now about the video clip where you discuss Nuremberg 2.0,” a reporter said, referencing a hypothetical series of trials to prosecute public-health officials for their roles in the pandemic response, parallel to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. “Were you confused?”
This time, he conceded.
“I apologize for that,” Mr. Rustad said at the Oct. 7 announcement. “I know that has offended some people, and it certainly was not my intent.”
With a report from Mike Hager