B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad at the legislature in Victoria, on Feb. 18. He has won a 70 per cent show of support after a months-long review marked by low turnout.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
B.C. Conservative leader John Rustad abruptly fired his highest-profile MLA ahead of a caucus meeting on Monday where his leadership was on the table, removing a prominent moderate voice of the party.
The MLA, Elenore Sturko, emerged from her legislature office with a box of personal items in hand, saying she had been blindsided by the decision to turf her from caucus and the party.
Ms. Sturko said she and other Conservative MLAs were prepared to question the outcome of a leadership review whose results had been announced earlier Monday. Those results showed Mr. Rustad had the support of 70 per cent of his party’s membership. Ms. Sturko said the review was tainted by allegations of improper, mass membership sign-ups.
Mr. Rustad, speaking to reporters after the two-hour caucus meeting, would not say why he had fired Ms. Sturko. But he said he had made up his mind as soon as he learned that he had won the leadership review.
“We’ve just come out of a leadership race. We need to be able to be in a position to go forward with a united voice,” he said.
With Ms. Sturko’s departure, the Official Opposition Conservatives have now been reduced to 40 seats, down from the 44 the party captured in the provincial election less than one year ago. The legislature is set to return on Oct. 6.
Mr. Rustad, who had recruited Ms. Sturko from the B.C. Liberals in 2024, had been pressed by other members of caucus to fire her for failing to adhere to a social conservative agenda. But as justice critic, the former RCMP officer was the Conservatives’ most effective critic on the opposition benches.
On Monday, she said Mr. Rustad should “absolutely” resign.
“He’s a terrible leader,” she told reporters. “My deepest apologies to anyone who had been hoping that I would be able to stay and help bring the party more towards centre.”
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In a party that says it has at least 9,000 members, only 1,268 members participated in the leadership review vote.
The party’s constitution says the leader can be removed if they have less than 50 per cent support from party members in good standing. Mr. Rustad declined to speak to reporters prior to the caucus meeting to answer questions about the vote result, but released a written statement saying he intends to stay on as leader.
“I believe the members have given me a mandate to lead and I believe British Columbians are hungry for an unapologetic common-sense Conservative government. We will make it happen,” he said in the Monday statement.
Just last fall, Mr. Rustad’s party was celebrating after coming within a whisker of winning the provincial election. It was a remarkable achievement for a party that had zero seats in the legislature just two years earlier.
Mr. Rustad’s path to becoming leader of the Official Opposition was also extraordinary. As a long-time MLA in the 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.
The B.C. Conservatives benefitted from the surge in popularity of the federal Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre, although the two parties are not affiliated. In the span of year, Mr. Rustad recruited seven MLAs from the B.C. Liberal benches, and 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 candidates 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.
The Conservatives under Mr. Rustad won 44 of 93 seats in the legislature last October, with the NDP at 47 seats and the Greens with two.
Suddenly thrust into the role of government-in-waiting, facing down the NDP government with its fragile majority, the Conservatives looked to be in a strong position to force an early election. But the caucus, made up mostly of rookie politicians, has been mired in internal strife over ideology – particularly, just what social values the party stands for.
Mr. Rustad’s refusal to impose caucus discipline has proved challenging to manage. One of the party’s failed election candidates, Tim Thielmann, was removed as the party’s research director in December for his role in a highly public dispute, where 13 MLAs criticized Ms. Sturko for remarks she made as the party’s public safety critic defending ethnic and gender minorities.
Three members of the Conservative caucus have since defected: Two have formed a new party called OneBC, and the third sits as an Independent.
When the party’s membership gathered for its first post-election convention in March, instead of celebrating Mr. Rustad’s achievement in lifting the party to Official Opposition status, a faction of delegates sought to take over the party executive in a bid to return the party to its “grassroots.” The divisions centred around concerns that the Conservatives were being influenced by former B.C. Liberals.
Mr. Rustad was able to hang on to his loyal executive at that convention, but he spent the summer meeting with party members seeking to retain his leadership. While he was busy with internal politics, the NDP government faced little pushback from the Official Opposition.
The NDP government has amassed a growing deficit and local governments are up in arms about street crime, but Mr. Rustad has far lower approval ratings than his rival, Premier David Eby, according to a recent Angus Reid poll conducted between Aug. 28 to Sept. 5. The poll also found that, despite strong public disapproval over the provincial government’s performance on key issues such as health care and affordability, the Conservatives were in a statistical dead heat with the NDP in voter preference.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives’ political fundraising efforts have been mediocre. Elections BC, in its most recent quarterly report on campaign finance, reported that the BC NDP raised twice as much money through fundraising as the Conservatives, while the Greens, with just two MLAs, were only $150,000 behind the Conservatives.