Rustad’s Moral Failure

[Editor’s note: This is last in a series by Mo Amir called Logic Check, whose focus is explained in a sidebar to this article.]

As the Conservative Party of BC weathered an onslaught of campaign controversies involving hateful comments made by candidates in the past and during the provincial election, leader John Rustad did nothing. Rustad either abdicated his responsibilities as leader, or didn’t understand the assignment.

Whether it was Brent Chapman, Dallas Brodie or Marina Sapozhnikov, Rustad repeatedly refused to remove such candidates from his party, even if he condemned their statements.

Instead he insisted that it would be up to voters. “We have candidates who have said a number of things and represent their ridings, and it will be up to the people in the ridings to elect them.”

Facepalm. This is humiliatingly nonsensical.

Most obviously, as party leader, only Rustad held the authority to boot any candidate from his party (just as he would to remove a sitting MLA from his party’s caucus).

Voters decide on their riding’s MLA, not the candidates a party chooses to run.

Party leaders, in contrast, ultimately decide upon the candidates who represent their party, whether those candidates are appointed, acclaimed or elected by members in nomination contests.

While it was too late for Rustad to remove Chapman, Brodie or Sapozhnikov from the ballot, he was well within his right to expel those candidates from his party. If elected, those candidates would have then sat as Independent MLAs in the B.C. legislature, not as part of the Conservative caucus.

(In the 2021 federal election, a similar scenario occurred when Kevin Vuong was disavowed as the Liberal candidate in Spadina-Fort York. Vuong refused to resign, was subsequently elected and continues to sit in the House of Commons as an Independent MP.)

Winning was more important than moral fibre

In any election, a party’s candidates serve to represent it.

As much as Rustad positions himself as an opponent of “cancel culture,” he was never above removing problematic candidates who he felt did not properly represent the Conservatives under his leadership. In fact, he removed several candidates prior to the election’s nomination deadline.

However, during the official campaign period, Rustad refused to apply the same treatment to controversial candidates in safe Conservative ridings (Chapman in Surrey South, Brodie in Vancouver-Quilchena) or competitive ones (Sapozhnikov in Juan de Fuca-Malahat).

As politically disadvantageous as removing those candidates would have been, retaining them sent a clear message to voters across the province: While racism was frowned upon, it was not a big deal — certainly not a big enough deal to smother the goal of winning.

Even if Rustad condemned the racist comments made by his candidates, he tacitly condoned them in practice, given the severity of the comments in question.

After all, Chapman, Brodie and Sapozhnikov were not under fire for silly comments or distasteful jokes that offended a pearl-clutching mob of woke killjoys. Rather, those candidates were the receipts for the BC Conservatives being a political party with an unprecedentedly low threshold of moral fibre.

Rustad was not rejecting a purity spiral; he was embracing a transgressive circle.

Those candidates — even as they dodged debates or hid in janitor’s closets — were living proof that Rustad had lost the plot (and his backbone) in his pursuit of becoming premier.

Any party, team or organization relies on discipline to effectively function. That discipline requires a leader to determine and enforce what lines cannot be crossed, from insubordination to moral failure.

In August, Rustad declared his “lines in the sand”: hate and racism.

When those lines were crossed, Rustad failed to act. That’s a lapse in leadership, not an empowerment of voters.

The post-election hangover

The Conservatives may point to their strong election performance to repudiate the charge that their controversial candidates hurt their party’s overall brand and reputation.

After all, two of those candidates will now be sworn in as MLAs: Dallas Brodie for Vancouver-Quilchena and Brent Chapman for Surrey South.

(Marina Sapozhnikov’s racist comments towards Indigenous people were made after votes had already been cast. The acceptance or rejection of her racism was never up to voters in Juan de Fuca-Malahat.)

But this neglects how many voters the party had repelled in key ridings, perhaps in Vancouver, Burnaby or even Surrey. While the party champions immigrant communities as key to its electoral success, it may have expanded that success into winning government if it were not for candidates like Chapman tarnishing the Conservative banner across the province.

Moreover, the party must reckon with internal tensions that have clearly arisen from such controversies. When Conservative MLA-elect Peter Milobar publicly expresses his personal outrage over anti-Indigenous racism within his party — instead of just relying on his leader’s response — imagine his private outrage within his new caucus.

Rustad must now manage a diversity of MLAs from different backgrounds to whom he has promised free votes and free speech immune from cancel culture. Certainly, the post-election hangover of his candidates’ controversies does not help.

It’s obvious that the lack of standards for Conservative candidates is untenable. But if Rustad’s “lines in the sand” are enforced now, it would raise questions about why some of his current MLAs can continue to be a part of his caucus.

Rustad has already excused racism from candidates within the course of an election. Will he excuse MLAs for similar transgressions within the course of their elected term?

Even if Rustad does not remain as the Conservative leader for the next election, any future leadership candidate will have to answer whether Chapman and Brodie — now sitting MLAs — are morally fit as representatives for the Conservative party.

This fallout is not in the hands of the voters. It rests in the hands of Rustad, and it always has, much like the candidates who represented his party.