BC Conservative Leader John Rustad leaves the House following question period at the B.C. Legislature in Victoria, on Wednesday.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
The B.C. legislature was in turmoil Wednesday after BC Conservatives attempted to oust their leader, John Rustad, by declaring him unfit for the job.
A lawyer’s letter released by the Conservative Party said 20 members of the Official Opposition caucus – a bare majority – had lost confidence in Mr. Rustad. The party’s board declared a new interim leader, MLA Trevor Halford, to serve while it begins the preparations for a leadership contest.
But the remaining 19 Conservative MLAs did not sign the letter and Mr. Rustad declared the dissidents were acting outside party rules. He said he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m currently still the leader,” he told reporters in the corridors of the legislature.
The Speaker of the House has now been dragged into the conflict, as both sides make their case to determine who should be recognized as leader of the Official Opposition.
Throughout the afternoon, Speaker Raj Chouhan and the clerks of the House shuttled back and forth, entertaining arguments from Mr. Halford, Mr. Rustad and Government House Leader Mike Farnworth.
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Mr. Farnworth told reporters he believed that the Conservatives should “sort their mess out” and not drag the Speaker into the debate.
In the end, Mr. Chouhan said he would need at least a day to render a ruling.
As the fall sitting of the legislature wrapped on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Rustad maintained he is in charge of a caucus that is now extraordinarily divided.
Mr. Rustad sat in the seat assigned to the leader of the Official Opposition, but in the hallways, his House Leader, A’aliya Warbus, said he had lost his standing.
“I have all the gratitude in the world for John Rustad and what he has done for the Conservative Party and the movement,” she said in an interview. “This decision was to uphold the will of the caucus majority.”
The ability of the caucus or the party executive to remove Mr. Rustad is limited. He won a leadership review among party members in the summer with about 70 per cent of the vote.
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The decision to oust him Wednesday was announced by the party’s board of directors, who passed a motion “certifying that Rustad is … professionally incapacitated and unable to continue as party leader,” a party press release says. The party’s website now lists Mr. Halford as the interim leader, with links inviting donations.
In a social-media post, Mr. Rustad lashed out at his party’s board, which he had hand-picked as loyalists at the previous party convention.
“I am not going anywhere,” he wrote. “A political party’s board can throw around whatever creative terminology they like, ‘professional incapacitation’? Give me a break.”
A little more than a year ago, Mr. Rustad came close to forming government in B.C. His Conservative Party won 44 seats, the Greens took two, and the governing NDP held on by the slimmest majority with 47 seats.
Caucus strife within the Conservative ranks have since reduced Mr. Rustad’s team to 39 seats. Two have moved to a fledgling party and three sit as Independents.
Mr. Rustad told reporters he would not call a caucus meeting – although the caucus was set to gather on Wednesday evening for a long-planned Christmas party.
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Outside the Conservative caucus offices in the legislature, many MLAs struggled to answer a simple question: Who is your leader?
Mr. Halford, the MLA for Surrey-White Rock, would only say that “my whole thing is about stabilization.”
Lawyer Bruce Hallsor wrote the letter to the party president, saying 20 individual members of caucus each had declared that they had lost confidence in Mr. Rustad’s leadership.
This was the latest – but most devastating – attack in a long-running challenge to the politician, who helped build the party from zero seats to Official Opposition status in less than two years.
As a long-time MLA in the former B.C. Liberal government, he served mostly on the backbench with only a brief stint in cabinet and was kicked out of that caucus for questioning the existence of anthropogenic climate change.
But in March, 2023, Mr. Rustad turned his maverick status into a feature, taking over a moribund party that hasn’t formed a government in British Columbia in almost a century.
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The B.C. Conservatives benefited from the surge in popularity of the federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre, although the two parties are not affiliated.
In the span of a year, Mr. Rustad recruited seven MLAs from the B.C. Liberal benches. He then forced his former party (which had rebranded as BC United) to fold its tent just weeks before last fall’s provincial election, after business leaders threatened to divert campaign contributions to the Conservatives.
Mr. Rustad, who promised his candidates the right to free speech, rejected calls during the election campaign to dump any who had publicly shared racist and transphobic views, as well as conspiracy theories about vaccines. His would be the party of free speech, he maintained, and MLAs would not be whipped to maintain caucus discipline.
But that lack of caucus discipline has been a source of internal tension, as moderates and social conservatives in the caucus locked horns.
Mr. Rustad’s style rankled some in his caucus.
In September, he was forced to apologize after discussing a party member’s alleged romantic relationship at a meeting with legislators.
In October, Mr. Rustad confirmed the cellphones of Conservative members were searched during a meeting to find a leak from inside his caucus. Rustad said the phones were searched by other members to “make sure that there was nothing that had gone out that was inappropriate.”