John Rustad leaves the B.C. legislative house in Victoria on Wednesday.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
Hours after John Rustad resigned as leader of the BC Conservative Party Thursday, his former caucus members gathered outside the provincial legislature’s marble-clad library to rally around an interim leader, promising unity after an extended period of internal warfare.
Mr. Rustad had faced months of pressure to step down over his failure to contain the fractured caucus.
But in his final public appearance as Official Opposition Leader, Mr. Rustad said he had only that morning concluded that to stay and fight for his title “would be the creation of civil war within the Conservative Party of British Columbia, and that is not in the interest of this party.”
He promised to stay on as a Conservative MLA but suggested he would be prepared to quit the legislature if the next party leader needs to secure a seat.
“I’m still passionate about this party,” he told reporters.
Two dozen MLAs – not all of the Conservatives but a majority – showed up to support interim leader Trevor Halford. While they waited for his arrival, the group – Rustad loyalists and rebels alike – belted out an impromptu Christmas carol in a pointed display of collegiality that has been absent almost since the October, 2024, election threw them together.
Mr. Halford, a former BC Liberal who was recruited by Mr. Rustad to help build the BC Conservative Party before last year’s election, paid tribute to his former leader as a friend and mentor. “Today has been an incredibly emotional day for everybody,” he said.
Mr. Rustad’s departure was anything but smooth. He resisted pressure to resign, even when a majority of the 39 Conservative MLAs, and his party executive, declared he was unfit to serve.
Over the past few months, he fired dissident MLAs and maintained until the end that his party’s members had given him a mandate to continue.
On Wednesday, when the party was already promoting Mr. Halford in its fundraising efforts, Mr. Rustad lashed out at board members who he’d hand-picked as loyalists just last March.
Party president Aisha Estey, who was part of the efforts to dethrone Mr. Rustad, said in an interview that the Conservatives are preparing to launch a leadership race so that it can once again function as an opposition party to the province’s New Democratic Party government.
“The public should expect a refocusing on the NDP. That was the whole point of this, it’s been building a number of months. This internal turmoil was extremely distracting,” she said.
“We felt a change in leadership was necessary.”
A little more than a year ago, Mr. Rustad came close to forming government in B.C. His Conservatives won 44 seats, the Greens took two and the governing NDP held on by the slimmest majority with 47 seats.
It was an extraordinary rise for a party that had zero seats three years ago when Mr. Rustad took it over.
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As a long-time MLA in the former BC Liberal government, Mr. Rustad served mostly on the backbench with only a brief stint in cabinet and was kicked out of that caucus for questioning the existence of human-caused climate change. He jumped to the Conservative Party, recruited seven MLAs from the BC Liberal benches and then forced his former party to fold its tent just weeks before last fall’s provincial election.
Mr. Rustad and the provincial party benefited from the surge in popularity of the federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre, although the two parties are not affiliated.
Almost immediately after the election, Mr. Rustad’s commitment to free speech in caucus exposed a wide ideological gap between members of his caucus, and his handling of those tensions reduced the Conservatives to 39 seats. Two MLAs have moved to a fledgling party, OneBC, and three sit as Independents.
Tom Flanagan, an influential figure in the federal Conservative movement, said the BC Conservatives now need a leader who can unite the province’s centre-right forces.
That starts with bringing back former Conservative MLAs, despite the toxic nature of their differences that have been exposed over the past year, he said in an interview.
“It takes a high degree of authority to get people to bury the hatchet,” he said.
He pointed to former Conservative MLA Dallas Brodie, who now leads OneBC, a party of two that is campaigning against gender-affirming care and denies the harm caused by residential schools.
“A lot of people are going to have to climb down from positions they have taken,” Mr. Flanagan said. “Dallas has made her point, now it is time to stop talking about residential schools. And the others have to shut up, too. If they can’t be friends, at least they can be quiet.”
That would be a tall order. On Wednesday, Ms. Brodie interrupted her moment in the spotlight during Question Period to shout at Independent Elenore Sturko, who had been heckling her former caucus colleague.
Mr. Halford, speaking to reporters, stressed that his job is only to hold things together while the party chooses its next leader. There is no timeline yet for that, and he will likely have to make choices before then.
He said he won’t be reaching out to the five former Conservative MLAs who were either fired or quit because of clashes with Mr. Rustad. He said that will be a decision for the next leader.