The B.C. Conservatives have seen bubbling internal disputes over party leadership and reconciliation burst into the open in recent days
Days before the B.C. Conservatives gather for their annual general meeting in Nanaimo, Leader John Rustad is facing questions about internal divisions after several unsuccessful candidates, including a party board member, called for his resignation.
Tensions between Conservative MLAs who hold differing views on Aboriginal reconciliation and how to respond to U.S. tariff threats have been on display this week in the legislature.
NDP MLA Jennifer Blatherwick tried to exploit these tensions Monday with a motion calling for a unified approach to target U.S. Republican states if tariffs were put in place. Although almost all Conservatives voted for the motion, five voted against and one abstained.
“As a family, you have these issues,” Rustad told reporters Tuesday. “People forget we built this party from nothing to winning 44 seats and just missing out on forming government in 18 months. You’re going to have issues.”
Those who voted against the motion by Blatherwick included Tara Armstrong of Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream; Dallas Brodie of Vancouver-Quilchena; Brent Chapman of Surrey-South; Jordan Kealy of Peace River-North; and Heather Maahs of Chilliwack-North. Harman Bhangu of Langley Abbotsford abstained.
Conservative whip Bruce Banman called the motion a “trap” and said members weren’t told how to vote. He said British Columbians want representatives who vote their conscience.
While the party denies there are any rifts, there have been other challenges, with former candidates Bryan Breguet and Paul Ratchford, who is also a party board member, calling for Rustad to step down, and for a leadership review if he doesn’t.
“John Rustad was the right guy to take the party from two per cent to 40 per cent. But he isn’t the right guy to take it to victory,” said Breguet on social media. “The main problem is that Rustad is really, fundamentally, just a boring old B.C. Liberals type, except he’s very stupid on some topics. And he doesn’t really satisfy anybody on the right.”
Within the caucus itself, issues of reconciliation and policing have caused disagreements.
Over the weekend, MLA Dallas Brodie defended lawyer James Heller over his request that the Law Society of B.C. change its training materials to say burial sites have “potentially” been found at the Kamloops residential school. In her post, Brodie said: “The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero.”
The Tk’emlúps First Nation in Kamloops announced in 2021 that they had found grave sites on the residential school grounds. They later clarified they found 215 “anomalies” that could be grave sites but further investigation was needed.
Brodie’s comments drew instant blowback online and resulted in Rustad asking her to take the post down, which she refused to do.
“I don’t think standing for truth takes away anything from the severity of what happened at the residential schools,” Brodie told reporters.
Conservative House Leader Á’a:líya Warbus, a member of the Stó:lō Nation, criticized Brodie’s stance on social media. She said Tuesday that anything that distracts from reconciliation isn’t helpful.
“I want the topic of reconciliation to continue to focus on the survivors that are still with us,” said Warbus. “Anything that’s going to trigger a response in them that’s negative and that’s going to take us away from the path of reconciliation is not conducive to the work that we need to do with First Nations communities and non-Indigenous communities across British Columbia.”
Chapman defended Brodie and alleged the money being sent to Indigenous communities for investigations into potential graves has been misspent.
He did appear to agree, though, with Warbus that the focus needs to be on those affected by the harm they suffered at residential schools.
This isn’t the first time since the B.C. election that disagreements among Conservative MLAs have come out publicly, with 13 members, including Brodie and Chapman, signing a letter in December calling on Rustad to discipline Surrey-Cloverdale MLA Elenore Sturko over her support for the resignation of Vancouver police board member Comfort Sakoma-Fadugba.
Sakoma-Fadugba had made comments that the “push for secular education isn’t about religion — it’s about erasing Christian values from the lives of our children.” She also accused “woke culture” of pitting “children against their parents by creating a judicial system where parents can be incarcerated for refusing to let their minor child undergo gender transitions.”
Sturko called these comments offensive to transgender people, to which a number of her party colleagues responded that Sturko had engaged in “cancel culture.”
Despite the various blowups, a number of MLAs said the party remains united and they aren’t worried about a potential fracture.
The challenge for Rustad is to chart a path forward for the B.C. Tory party, says strategist Allie Blades, with the annual meeting crucial to those efforts.
Elections for the party board and for potential constitutional changes will both take place and a leadership review is scheduled for sometime in the fall when the Conservatives are scheduled to have another major meeting.
The party is estimated to have 10,000 members and each of the province’s 93 ridings have been offered 10 voting delegates, but with only about 600 people expected to show up, not every riding has taken up that offer.
“This is an opportunity for the leader to really show those oppositional voices whether or not he has the confidence of the board, the incoming board and the membership,” said Blades.
“All caucuses, all across Canada, aren’t all in agreement about all things all the time, but they’re maybe a little bit better at keeping it within the caucus meetings behind closed doors. Right now, what we’re seeing is a little bit more of the public unfolding of these disagreements.”
Blades said Rustad’s own style is to let members vote their conscience and it is yet to be determined whether that is a good or a bad thing. She warned, however, that if these kinds of disagreements continue to play out publicly, some MLAs could decide not to run again, or even resign their positions.