It’s a Saturday afternoon in early September and B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad has just spoken to about 200 supporters packed into the Cobble Hill Farmers Institute Main Hall and spent close to an hour afterward posing for photos.
It’s a far cry from two years ago, when the Nechako Lakes Independent MLA didn’t have much of a profile, never mind an audience. Now, having resurrected the B.C. Conservatives to take on the governing NDP, he’s on the road every day, crisscrossing the province and building momentum in 93 ridings.
“I haven’t taken a holiday in two and a half years, other than four days of Christmas,” he said.
It was Rustad’s 59th birthday on Aug. 18, 2022 when he was fired by then B.C. Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon for questioning the role of CO2 in climate change — claims that continue to dog Rustad on the campaign trail and leaders debates — prompting him to become an Independent.
It had already been a bad year: Rustad’s dad died in January, followed by his father-in-law in February. He had shingles in April and his mother died in July 2022, a month before his ouster.
Rustad, now 61, contemplated retiring, but by February 2023, his wife of nearly 30 years had convinced him to join the B.C. Conservatives.
She had long pushed him toward leadership, but Rustad said he never felt the need to be the person out front. “I always felt that I could contribute by supporting somebody else who had the skill sets and the ability to be able to do it,” he said.
Nonetheless, he became leader in March 2023, and was joined by former BC United Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman in September 2023, for a caucus of two.
The party’s subsequent meteoric rise was built on the backs of blogger Aaron Gunn’s reviving of the party, and the federal Conservative Party’s popularity, with similar messaging. The failed rebrand of the B.C. Liberals to BC United, which caused voter confusion, was also a factor, as was the Conservatives’ populist stance against everything from drug decriminalization and the carbon tax to vaccine requirements for health-care workers.
The B.C. Conservatives grew to a four-member caucus, before failed merger talks ended dramatically in August with Falcon pulling the plug on his party’s campaign so as not to split the right-wing vote. Only a handful of BC United MLAs were picked up by the Conservatives — Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond was among those rejected, because Rustad said she carried too much B.C. Liberal baggage.
Rustad likes to tell the story of his interview with Tyee legislative bureau chief Andrew MacLeod last year. Rustad said he was asked to define success and replied “winning.” Asked if he meant winning his riding, Rustad said “no, winning the election.”
It was a bold statement. The B.C. Conservatives received only 1.9 per cent of the popular vote in the 2020 election. The last time they formed government was 1928.
Now Rustad has success within sight — the most recent Leger poll puts his party at 46 per cent, ahead of the NDP at 43 per cent.
Born and raised in Prince George, Rustad is the youngest of three sons of mother Molly (Mary), a homemaker originally from England, and father Laurie (Lawrence), who was from Saskatchewan and partnered with his brother to form Gillorn Lumber Company, with their first sawmill on the Nechako River.
Growing up, Rustad played several sports and describes himself as a bit of a “rebel.” He was at times bored at school, he said, since it didn’t challenge him enough.
Parrot and politics
He took post-secondary sciences for a year, thinking he may want to be an engineer, but ultimately decided to go into business. Rustad worked in the forest industry for more than two decades, building a technology company, Western Geographic Information Systems Inc, that served as a consulting service for the resource sector.
He met his wife, Kim Royle, when the two volunteered in theatre in Prince George. Royle was a performer, producer and production manager, while Rustad worked behind the scenes.
The couple, who married in 1995, got a pet African grey parrot named Biardi to round out their family. They wanted to have children, but in 2000, Royle was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Rustad said his wife said “I release you from our marriage” knowing Rustad, who dotes on his six nieces and nephews, wanted kids. He said he never for a moment considered the offer.
By 2000, he was fed up with the B.C. economy and contemplating a move to Calgary. He had two options, as he saw it: “either to live with [the economy] or get involved and I was ticked off enough that I wasn’t just gonna live with it, so I decided I would get involved.”
Rustad was first elected as a school trustee in 2002, then three years later as the B.C. Liberal MLA for Prince George-Omineca.
He and Kim moved to Cluculz Lake, an hour outside Prince George, in the Nechako Lakes riding, which includes Vanderhoof, Houston, Burns Lake and Fort St. James. There, Rustad has been re-elected four times since 2009 as a B.C. Liberal.
He served as both forests, lands and natural resources minister and Aboriginal relations and reconciliation minister. In Opposition, he was the forestry critic.
He made a discovery: “I actually like politics,” he said.
Last month, Rustad announced the “Rustad Rebate,” which would exempt up to $3,000 a month in housing costs from provincial income taxes, starting with $1,500 in 2026. He has said he would repeal a law to penalize communities for not reaching housing targets, and scrap legislation to allow multi-family homes on single-family lots.
On the health front, the B.C. Conservatives say they would implement “activity-based funding” for hospitals and health authorities as an incentive for “providers to be more efficient and treat as many patients as possible,” and a guarantee for out-of-province paid care for patients when diagnostic tests and surgical procedures exceed recommended wait times.
Rustad has also said he would end the province’s drug decriminalization pilot project, which he calls an “absolute disaster,” and transition drug-overdose-prevention sites to “recovery intake sites,” offering treatment information and services.
Rustad would end the distribution of pharmaceutical alternatives to toxic street drugs, called safe supply: “These drugs are not safe. They are dangerous. They are, as a matter of fact, they’re finding their way into schools, and they’re creating the next generation of addicts.”
On crime, health
The B.C. Conservative leader said he supports guaranteed minimum sentences for the small percentage of violent prolific offenders committing the majority of crimes, and involuntary treatment for repeat offenders assessed to be a harm to themselves and others who can’t be dealt with through the legal system.
He said he would allow parents greater say in the treatment of children in the throes of a mental health crisis and addiction.
Rustad said if there’s strong opposition to secure care — as the NDP faced in past attempts to bring in secure care — he’ll get around it.
“If we get to the place where, quite frankly, we can’t do it, then I’m prepared to use the notwithstanding clause,” he said. “I don’t want to use that if I don’t have to but there are decisions that government needs to make for the benefit of society.”
He’s promised to scrap the NDP’s plan for all new vehicles sold in B.C. to be zero-emission by 2035, stop the phase-out of natural gas and eliminate the low-carbon fuel emission standard.
Last week, Rustad said he would end ICBC’s monopoly on basic auto insurance, opening it up to private competitors, and reverse bans on plastic straws. This week he pledged to get rid of tent cities.
Since the writ dropped Sept. 21, the NDP has released a near-daily barrage of video clips and posts in which Rustad or his candidates question everything from COVID vaccines to climate science. Last week Chris Sankey, the B.C. Conservatives’ candidate in North Coast-Haida Gwaii, came under fire for a social-media post suggesting the mRNA COVID vaccine causes AIDS.
The B.C. Conservatives recently released their own video of Rustad’s wife Kim inviting people to get to know the “warm, loyal and devoted man” she knows.
In the video, Rustad is shown happily chopping wood, cooking, hanging out with family, and talking to their pet parrot.
Asked about worries that his party and candidates are untested, Rustad said he’s not concerned because he’s seen what politicians with seven years in government have accomplished — very little, he argued.
Rustad said the hundreds of people who packed into a Cobble Hill town hall on a sunny weekend in the last days of summer are representative of a groundswell he’s seen throughout the province of people who are unhappy and want renewal. He said one young woman with a baby stroller in Vancouver stopped him, asked to give him a hug and said: “You’re giving us hope. We need change.”
Having a parrot around the house, Rustad is accustomed to hearing the same phrases repeated, but that’s one he said he can’t hear enough.
