BC Conservatives predict radical changes to schools, housing, climate and Indigenous policies if elected

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British Columbia’s resurgent Conservative Party envisions sweeping changes to schools, housing, climate and reconciliation with First Nations if elected to form a government this fall for the first time in almost a century.

The party, which has been steadily rising in the polls and is currently well ahead of BC United, the current opposition, would repeal the provincial Declaration of Indigenous Rights Act in favor of moving to an “economic reconciliation” approach by signing business deals with individual First Nations.

The party will also create a committee to review all textbooks and school literature to ensure they are “neutral,” party leader John Rustad said during a wide-ranging meeting with The Globe and Mail’s editorial board in Vancouver earlier this month.

“It should not be about the indoctrination of anything, whether ecological, political or sexual,” Rustad said, referring to his proposal to censor books deemed inappropriate for students by his conservative government.

While the NDP continues to lead in most opinion polls in British Columbia, the Conservative Party of British Columbia is in solid second place, ahead of opposition BC United, formerly BC Liberals, the party that governed the province for the first decade and a half of this century. But an Angus Reid poll published this week found that more than half of the 1,203 Britons surveyed in an online panel could not identify Rustad as their party leader.

On Friday, BC United caucus chair Lorne Doerkson, who represents Cariboo-Chilcotin, crossed the floor to join the Conservatives, giving the Conservatives a three-member caucus. The NDP has 55 seats in the current 87-seat term, and BC United currently has 25. The Independents and the Green Party each have two seats.

Mr. Rustad was a five-term MLA for Nechako Lakes, west of Prince George, and served four years as Minister of Indigenous Reconciliation in Christa Clark’s Liberal government.

Rustad and Bruce Banman of Abbotsford South serve as BC Conservatives in the legislature after being elected to BC United in 2020. Rustad was kicked out of the BC United caucus in 2022 after his social media posts raised questions that humans are directly responsible for climate change around the world. Mr. Banman joined Mr. Rustad last September and declined to say whether he agreed or disagreed with climate change.

Longtime pollsters and Conservative strategists in Western Canada say Rustad is clearly taking advantage of the popularity of federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and that if he wants to win as many seats as possible, he would be well advised to continue to focus with a laser on the achievements of the politician’s main message. that life is inaccessible to most people.

He must, they warn, stay away from campaigning for other more divisive policies that reflect the reactionary “culture war” currents currently animating Donald Trump’s Republican Party in the United States. Over the past two months, three BC Conservative Party candidates have left or been fired from the party, one for xenophobic and homophobic posts and two for supporting quack science about COVID-19.

Rustad acknowledged that countless Surrey and Vancouver Island ridings will decide who wins this election, and added that his party plans to field a full slate of 93 candidates. He said he will spend six days a week traveling around the province this summer, examining the numerous crises people face, including skyrocketing housing costs, rising grocery bills, health care shortages, the supply of poisoned illicit drugs, disease forest sector and deficit spending.

In a meeting with The Globe, he said his party is not yet ready to release an election platform that will solve these problems, but he said he wants to reject most of the NDP’s housing policies.

“It’s more of a question: ‘Is there anything I would like to keep?’ So: probably not much,” Rustad said.

He highlighted the “authoritarian” way the province has selected 30 communities to build a set number of new homes over the next five years, which the NDP said is encouraging those cities to make more efforts to address housing shortages.

“I don’t think they should step in and overturn the decisions of the local government and local authorities,” Rustad said.

On health care, he said the Conservatives would commit to maintaining a universal government-paid system but would seek to increase the number of private clinics providing services and procedures such as hip replacements. He said this private care would be covered by the public system, an approach that Ontario and Alberta have adopted as a way to reduce wait times and that even the NDP government in British Columbia is increasingly taking.

Rustad said a group of doctors recently told him that the closest equivalent to British Columbia’s health care system is a totalitarian dictatorship across the Pacific.

“I’ve been told that there’s only one jurisdiction that can emulate what we’re doing, and that’s North Korea – and from my perspective, that’s not an exemplary model of success in health care,” said Rustad, who added that his government would immediately fire the health inspector. provincial health officer Bonnie Henry over her support for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

Mr. Rustad declined to name the physician group that provided the analysis.

On climate change, Rustad has been a vocal supporter of repealing the province’s carbon tax, which the British Columbia Liberals created in 2008 as the first levy of its kind in North America.

Rustad claims that the science surrounding the human causes of climate change is an “unproven theory,” a position that is widely contrary to accepted science. However, Rustad maintains that there is no urgent need for legal solutions.

“It’s not even a crisis,” he told The Globe.

These views led BC United leader Kevin Falcon to kick Rustad out of the club two years ago on his birthday.

The animation between two long-time politicians continues. Earlier this month, talks between BC United and the BC Conservatives aimed at providing a united front against the NDP failed. Mr. Rustad called his former colleague “irrational and unreasonable and willing to lie.”

Falcon said Rustad put his own ambitions ahead of ensuring the Conservatives’ “free market coalition” returned to power by rejecting a plan to divide the districts into 46 for BC United and 47 for the Conservatives.

Mr. Falcon said in an interview this week that he is confident that right-wing voters will realize that BC United has more in common with the rising federal Conservative Party than with its eponymous provincial party, which he described as an “extreme” group that now is working with political operatives to pressure him to resign.

Ken Boessenkool was Christa Clark’s short-lived chief of staff in 2012, when the British Columbia Liberals were considering two ways to deal with the provincial Conservatives to defeat the NDP the following year: “crush them or merge with them.”

But he said it might not work now.

“It’s not clear to me that Rustad has the innate ability to move to the center and win votes from centrist liberals, so it may be a little more difficult for him to employ a strategy to crush them,” he said.