If John Rustad was premier, he said, he would give Donald Trump what he wants to avoid the 25 per cent tariffs the U.S. president-elect has threatened to put in place when his second term starts on Jan. 20.
BC's Opposition leader wasn’t referring to Trump’s recent comments imagining Canada as the 51st American state, but instead his criticism that illegal immigrants and drugs are flowing south of the border.
Rustad opened the second day of the 2025 BC Natural Resources Forum with a breakfast on Wednesday, Jan. 15, using the opportunity to rebut Premier David Eby’s speech from the previous night that included a rundown of what his government will do to try and head off the tariffs.
Roughly half of his caucus, including all three of Prince George’s Conservative MLAs, were in attendance for the breakfast at the Coast Hotel.
The premier talked about launching a diplomatic campaign and the need to strengthen BC’s economy.
Rustad likened Eby’s plan to “getting on one of his NDP fast ferries with a pop gun, firing back.”
“We should just be dealing with the issue at hand as opposed to this trade issue,” Rustad said. “David Eby said he’s going to head down to Washington with the premiers and he wants to talk about how he can clean up the permitting process — which I would absolutely welcome if (he was) serious about it.
“And he wants to be able to expand our trade and to be able to make sure that we diversify trade. This is a government that shut down all of our trade offices overseas and he shut down all of the activity that we had been building over the years with other jurisdictions to diversify our trade.”
He said there’s a three- to five-year wait to get permits to salvage wood affected by wildfires and a 15 year-wait for mining permits.
As for Trump’s requests, he said his response would have been to immediately recall the legislature to put funding in place to deal with border security and policing. He said he would have already visited the United States and started discussions on how the two countries can work together to protect our borders, instead of trying to ramp up a trade fight.
“Forestry is already on its knees and if the 25 per cent tariffs come in, forestry is gone from British Columbia,” Rustad said.
Moving on to more general conversation about the province, he said BC isn’t facing a climate change crisis. The real crises, according to him, is the amount of money the province is paying to service its debts and affordability by BC residents.
To deal with the deficit, Rustad said he would put in more work to streamline the permitting process for mines, open up liquified natural gas resources and remove climate targets.
There’s another window of opportunity for LNG projects coming up, Rustad said, and BC needs to be prepared to not freeze out investment by making too stringent requirements for investments.
While the opposition leader expressed openness to clean energy projects, he said they won’t be enough to meet BC’s demand with the province having imported 20 per cent of its power last year.
Instead of twinning the North Coast transmission line to bring power from northeast BC to northwest BC as Eby discussed the previous night at a cost of $3 to $5 billion, Rustad pitched building a $300 to $400 million natural gas-powered energy plant in the northwest instead.
Rustad said he’s a “huge fan” of hydrogen energy projects, but he said they need to be able to generate their own electricity as the province doesn’t have the capacity to do so, especially since their products will end up being shipped overseas. Again, he touted natural gas power plants as a potential solution.
Another form of power Rustad expressed interest in was nuclear, though he said BC needs to be cautious of potential seismic problems that could affect nuclear plants.
During a short question-and-answer question, Rustad was asked about his stance on BC’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard subsidies as well as the carbon tax. He said he’s opposed to both and would remove them, though he would like to keep part of the LCFS program in place as it benefits renewable diesel refineries like the one operated by Tidewater Renewables in Prince George.
In the opening to his speech, Rustad reiterated concerns he first aired earlier this month that there were voting irregularities in last year’s provincial election, especially in the district of Surrey-Guildford where the Conservative candidate lost to the NDP by just 22 votes after a judicial recount.
Tory candidate Honveer Singh Randhawa has filed a lawsuit asked for NDP candidate Garry Begg’s win to be declared invalid in that district.
Rustad alleged that there were non-citizens voting, people who voted in ridings they didn’t live in and people voting multiple times. However, he once again did not offer proof of these allegations, saying that the province needs to suspend penalties under the Elections Act to encourage people to come forward with evidence.
Once again, he said that an independent review of the election process, Elections BC and the Elections Act needs to be carried out and that a “C” for “Citizen” needs to be put on BC-issued ID.
