BC Conservative leader John Rustad speaks with an audience member at a June 20 event at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. (photo by Pat Johnson)
It has been 96 years since the Conservative party won a provincial election in British Columbia. The last time a Conservative was elected to the BC Legislature was a 1978 by-election. So, the rapturous reception BC Conservative leader John Rustad and several of his local candidates received from a mostly Jewish crowd at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue recently may have been a phenomenon unseen in generations.
Public opinion polls over the last year have consistently put the BC Conservatives in second place, ahead of the BC United party, which was known as the BC Liberals before a rebranding last year. The four sitting Conservative MLAs, including Rustad, were all initially elected as BC Liberals and later crossed the floor.
The June 20 event was convened by Saul Kahn, a Jewish community leader who acknowledged he has not been politically active before. The synagogue, he noted, was a venue and the Conservatives’ presence there did not represent an endorsement.
Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt, Schara Tzedeck’s senior rabbi, said he would welcome any politicians who want to meet and answer questions from the community. He noted that the event took place three weeks to the day after an arson attack on the synagogue and said the Jewish community is deeply concerned about developments in education in the province at all levels – primary, secondary and post-secondary.
Rustad, the MLA for Nechako Lakes, an enormous riding sprawling across central British Columbia, lamented the situation.
“We shouldn’t need to have security,” he said, noting that churches and other institutions rarely even have to consider the issue. “We’ve allowed antisemitism to take root. We are not standing up and saying it’s wrong. It starts in our schools.”
Anybody who is promoting hate in the province should be criminally charged, he said, and, if they are not Canadian citizens, the federal government should consider deporting them.
Schools should be “teaching kids how to think not what to think,” said Rustad, and he promised to rescind the provincial government’s policy on sexual orientation and gender identity, commonly called SOGI. While promising to remove SOGI, Rustad pledged to support all students and pursue anti-bullying policies.
The leader, who has been in the legislature since 2005 and served in cabinet under premier Christy Clark, promised to go through all material in the education system “with a very critical eye” toward issues of ideology, gender and the environment. He said he assumes the BC Teachers’ Federation will fight back on issues like SOGI, which he calls the “sexualization of our children,” but said some of the things being taught in school could not be put on television or said in the legislature.
The party leader condemned anti-Israel protesters on BC university campuses.
“How is it that this is OK?” he asked. “People do not have the right to incite hate.”
He floated the possibility of holding back funding or otherwise putting pressure on universities to respond to this sort of activism.
Rustad condemned the province’s approach to addiction, saying that safe supply is “creating the next generation of addicts.” He called for long-term care and supports that help people get off drugs.
“I don’t think it’s OK as a society to say it’s OK for them to live on the street,” said Rustad.
Addressing the physical addiction is one thing, he added, but providing supports so that people coming off substances do not fall back into old habits and relationships must be part of the recovery process.
Rustad would like the province to gain the sort of autonomy over immigration that Quebec has been granted, “not from the perspective of saying people can’t come, but identifying those with the skill sets we need,” he said.
Housing construction needs to be ramped up and immigrants who can work in those sectors need to be encouraged, he said. Likewise, the province should be working with post-secondary institutions overseas to address issues of credentials before new Canadians move so that people can integrate smoothly into the economy when they arrive.
The foreign buyers’ property tax allows British Columbians to, he said, point at others and say “they are the problem” for high housing costs.
The province’s new densification policies overrule municipalities’ official community plans, he said. These “sound great” in terms of housing, said Rustad, but do not consider sewers and other infrastructures.
Dallas Brodie, the Conservative candidate taking on BC United leader Kevin Falcon in Vancouver-Quilchena, shared her “Israel coming-of-age story.” She had practised law for 10 years and served as a legal aid criminal defender for young offenders before getting into broadcasting. She intended to do legal analysis but broadened her scope to become a producer for CBC in Toronto and Ottawa and later for CKNW talk radio in Vancouver. She noted a media double standard in which, for example, if a pro-Israel speaker were booked, management would demand equal time for an anti-Israel voice. The process became so onerous, she said, “you just stop covering the topic of Israel altogether.”
Eventually, Brodie became host of a weekly program on the University of British Columbia campus station CITR, which she refers to as a “viper’s nest of Marxist thought.” There, she said, she was told not to say the word “Israel” on the air because it is upsetting to people. This UBC connection put Brodie in touch with staff at the campus Jewish organization Hillel, who included Brodie on trip to Israel that she says presented a balanced introduction to the region.
“Even the Palestinian perspective was presented to us,” she said.
The next year, she participated in March of the Living, where participants visit the Nazi death camps.
Running for the provincial legislature, Brodie said some people suggested that including her strong support for Israel in her political biography might hurt her chances, but she insisted on including it.
“My party more than supports my position and stands firmly and strongly behind me,” she said. “I will never go wobbly.”
Vancouver-Langara Conservative candidate Bryan Breguet, an economist who teaches at Langara College, noted that his institution became “internationally famous” last fall after a colleague (later fired) celebrated the atrocities of Oct. 7.
Breguet reflected on a recent incident in which a Burnaby public school teacher engaged in a “thought experiment,” asking students whether Israel had a right to exist. He questioned what the public reaction would have been to a thought experiment asking whether slavery should or should not have been abolished.
Breguet said he traveled to Israel in 2007 and was shocked to see the separation barrier in the process of construction. What shocked him, he said, was that the wall “hadn’t been built decades earlier.”
John Coupar, the party’s candidate in the newly created riding of Vancouver-Little Mountain, cited his 12 years of experience as an elected Vancouver park commissioner and his efforts to save the Bloedel Conservatory.
He condemned the provincial government’s “failed experiment to legalize drugs” and called for “treatment, recovery and safe streets.”
He addressed antisemitism and condemned the governing New Democrats for their choice of candidate to run in the riding he is contesting.
“Your community is suffering deeply,” he said, before criticizing the governing NDP who he says “doubled down” by nominating Vancouver city councilor Christine Boyle as the NDP candidate in Little Mountain, “the only councilor to vote against IHRA [the adoption of a working definition of antisemitism] not once but twice.”
“This is absolutely appalling to me,” Coupar said.
A question from the audience addressed concerns that a failure to unite Conservative and BC United voters could result in a reelected NDP government. Rustad said discussions to fuse the parties, or to form some sort of electoral alliance, were unsuccessful, a failure Rustad placed on the other party.
He claims his party’s polling and analysis suggest that, if the two parties merged under the Conservative banner, the election would result in a six-seat majority for the Conservatives while, if they coalesced under the BC United banner, the NDP would win by 20 seats.
The election is on Oct. 19.
