After one of the most tumultuous weeks in B.C. political history, John Rustad was back on the campaign trail Friday on the road to Kamloops.
Two days after BC United leader Kevin Falcon’s blockbuster announcement that he has suspended his provincial election campaign, urging his party’s candidates to join forces with Rustad’s BC Conservative Party in a combined effort to defeat the NDP government, Rustad says there’s still work to do to sort out the uncertain political futures of nominees from both parties.
Rustad spoke to all 81 of his Conservative candidates in a conference call Thursday night, but has not yet had that conversation with the 23 MLAs currently serving as BC United members.
“We’re going through this process with BC United and the Conservative Party and we have not concluded that process yet,” said Rustad in an interview with the Citizen Friday morning.
“It’s a commitment I made to Kevin and the United party, so it’s a process we’re going through and I wouldn’t want to jump to any conclusions with regards to the outcomes of that. I’m trying to get this done as quickly as possible so we can create the least amount of disruption for people. I do understand just how difficult it must have been for Kevin and the people supporting the United party, but my hope is that we’re able to bring everybody together.”
Rustad wouldn’t come out and say it, but he was obviously disappointed with Prince George-Valemount MLA Shirley Bond’s choice not to hitch up to the Conservative wagon. Her public disclosure Thursday confirmed she won’t be running for her seventh consecutive term in the Oct. 19 election.
“Shirley has served the community well for many years as a school trustee and MLA and I’m very appreciative of the work she did over that time. She served the community, the region and the province well, so I want to thank her for all those years of service and the time I worked with her,” said Rustad, who sat with Bond on the Prince George school board and served with her in government for 12 years.
Rustad, 61, knows he and the Conservatives are in for a war with the NDP. A Mainstreet Research poll of 962 adults released Aug. 20 showed the Conservatives (36 per cent) with a three-point lead over the NDP (33 per cent) despite trailing the Lower Mainland poll.
The Nechako Lakes MLA is confident his party has made significant inroads in the population centres of the province in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island and will also get the votes in forestry-dependent communities hard-hit in recent years by mill closures and job losses.
“We are actually connecting very well with the populations down there,” said Rustad. “The latest poll from Mainstreet showed us leading in Vancouver Island. Right now we are leading in seven seats in Surrey and competing in all 10. Right across the board through the Lower Mainland and certainly on the Island we’ve got good support that is building. We’re going to compete for every seat in this province.”
During the campaign, Rustad intends to go after Premier David Eby and what he says is his government’s failure to address the affordability crisis that’s hampering economic growth in the province.
“The challenge this province has is one in three people are thinking about leaving B.C. and the really sad thing is one in two youth are thinking about leaving B.C.,” he said.
“That’s a reflection of David Eby and his disastrous policies. We’ve got a crisis certainly in our resource sector and the affordability of housing and health care and so many other things.
“At the end of the day he’s a hardcore socialist, authoritarian, and I think most people in this province are not interested in that. We just need to make sure we connect with people and give them that common sense choice for change in British Columbia.”
Rustad has already been targeted in the NDP’s campaign advertising.
“The thing that disturbs me most right now is how quickly David Eby has turned to lies and misinformation,” Rustad said. “He’s making a claim that we are cutting healthcare spending, we’ve never said that. In fact, I’ve said we are going to expand healthcare spending.
“He’s making a claim that we will bring bridge tolls back. I’ve never said anything like that. He’s just making it up.”
The BC Conservatives want to make hard drugs illegal again and would end the safer supply harm reduction program the NDP introduced in March 2020, which provides people at high risk of overdose pharmaceutical-grade opioids free of charge as prescribed by a physician or nurse practitioner.
“Safer supply is not safe, it’s dangerous,” said Rustad, “and quite frankly it’s finding its way into our high schools and creating the next generation of addicts. That sort of nonsense has to come to an end, we have to have a very heavy focus on treatment and recovery.
“You’ve got somebody who wants to bring an addiction to an end and wants to go into treatment and the response is, ‘I think we’ll have a bed for you in six months.’ That’s completely unacceptable. This government has failed so badly when it come to that. Experts are telling me that we now have the highest number of addicts per capita anywhere in North America.”
Rustad was born and raised in Prince George and comes from a forestry family. He was involved in the sector for 20 years before he entered provincial politics in 2005.
He said the provincial NDP has created a layer of bureaucracy that delays approval of harvesting permits and that bottleneck is strangling logging companies and driving away investment.
“David Eby has run the forest sector completely into the ground - we used to cut about 75 million cubic metres a year and this year I’ll be surprised if we get over 30 million,” Rustad said. “They’ve driven up the costs and they’ve made the sector uninvestable.
“We will have a very comprehensive forest strategy and I was going to roll that out before now, but obviously with the way things are rolling I haven’t had that opportunity to do that.”
Before Falcon quit the election race, on Tuesday he revealed BC United’s plan to overhaul forestry policy and would relocate the ministry from Victoria to Prince George to give forestry companies easier access to government bureaucrats.
While that struck Rustad as an interesting proposal it’s not something he would do immediately.
“My biggest concern is to the workers, families and communities that have been affected by these devastating policies of David Eby,” he said. “I want to find a way to bring some stability and ultimately see this forest sector start to rebound and rebuild.
“The permit process in BC has just ground to a halt. I’ve been told the BC Timber Sales in my area (Nechako Lakes, west of Prince George), which has (an annual allowable) cut of two million cubic metres a year has issued zero permits in three years. That’s six million cubic metres, enough wood to run three sawmills, and that is completely unacceptable. So we’re going to be moving to a single project, single permit process.”
Rustad planned to campaign in the Okanagan on Saturday, then will head to Surrey before he comes back to spend Labour Day with his wife Kim and family at their home at Cluculz Lake. He’ll be crisscrossing the province constantly in the leadup to the election.
A televised leaders’ debate is being planned for Oct. 8.
The Conservatives did not win a single seat in the 2020 election and have not elected an MLA since 1975.
Port Alice native Dan Miller, a former Prince Rupert councillor, took over from Glen Clark as premier and interim NDP leader from August 1999-February 2000, but the province has never elected a premier from the northern half of the province.
Now, with a tight race expected, Rustad has a real chance to be the first.
“It would be one for history books, but I don’t focus on those sort of things,” he said. “There’s so much work that needs to be done to get this province going in the right direction again. This used to be a place where people would come to build a future for themselves, and for their kids and grandkids. That’s lost now. People are talking about leaving this province and that needs to change.
“We’ve got everything we could ever want in this province but we’re just hopelessly managed and that’s the big shift we need, to get back to basics and make sure people are the centre of everything that we do.”
