Rustad Leads an Unruly Lot. He Can Blame Himself

Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad crossed the Rubicon when he directed a search through the phones of his party’s MLAs in order to identify dissidents.

“What we have said in caucus is very clear, that we expect discipline,” Rustad explained.

The logic of party discipline is simple: caucus members vote and speak consistently under their leader’s direction to ensure stability and clarity on the party’s various positions.

Under Canada’s Westminster system, where governments can fall by losing key votes, party discipline keeps governing parties in power and helps opposition parties appear ready to govern.

Rustad’s embrace of party discipline is remarkable since he had rejected it for years.

Only 10 months ago, Rustad told the media that his caucus members “have the right to be able to say things.” He insisted that his party doesn’t “whip” MLAs on votes or speech, even when they publicly defy his leadership.

Indeed, the B.C. Conservatives’ renaissance — from zero seats in 2022 to 44 seats in 2024 — was driven by the vision of a party whose members could speak and act their conscience with little discipline from leadership.

The creation of the Rustad doctrine

After conservative commentator and activist Aaron Gunn was disqualified from the BC Liberal Party’s 2022 leadership race, he formed the political group Common Sense BC. In May 2022, a slate of its members — including Angelo Isidorou and Lindsay Shepherd — won seats on the Conservative Party of BC’s board, sparking the party’s reboot.

Angelo Isidorou, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” was a hotshot conservative organizer and commentator. As the director of the Non-Partisan Association municipal party in Vancouver, he faced backlash in 2021 after The Tyee resurfaced a February 2017 photo of him wearing a MAGA hat and making an “OK” hand gesture that he denied was hateful.

(At the time the photo was taken, the gesture was associated with an ironic, online hoax campaign aimed at triggering liberals. Three months before, however, U.S. neo-Nazi leader Richard Spence had flashed it in front of the Trump International Hotel on the night Donald Trump was elected and posted the image on Twitter. Some extremist groups came to adopt it, and by 2019, the Anti-Defamation League had categorized it as a hate symbol.)

Lindsay Shepherd was a prominent free speech advocate following a high-profile academic-freedom dispute at Wilfrid Laurier University, after which the university’s president and vice-chancellor apologized to her.

In August 2022, BC Liberal Leader Kevin Falcon — the benefactor of Aaron Gunn’s disqualified leadership campaign — booted MLA John Rustad from that party for refusing to delete a tweet expressing climate change skepticism.

“When I first joined the BC Liberal Party, it was a party that celebrated different voices. It was a party that had free votes,” Rustad told This Is VANCOLOUR. “I was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party because I dared to question this [climate change] narrative.”

By February 2023, Rustad joined Isidorou and Shepherd’s Conservative Party of BC. He was acclaimed leader a month later.

By September 2023, the accretion of political outsiders united by battles over speech and censorship hit critical mass when Abbotsford South MLA Bruce Banman defected from BC United (formerly the BC Liberals) to Rustad’s Conservatives.

Banman framed his floor-crossing as a stand to speak his mind and vote his conscience, free from party control.

“To think that a bunch of politicians in a room have to agree on everything... is just crazy.”

Banman’s decision not only gave the B.C. Conservatives official party status but also crystallized what could be called the Rustad doctrine: a party leadership style that let MLAs speak freely and vote their conscience without fear of reprisal.

The rapid deterioration of the Rustad doctrine

By the 2024 provincial election campaign, Rustad was explicitly promising free votes for any Conservative Party of BC candidates who made it to the legislature.

After the Conservatives narrowly lost the provincial election, Rustad’s permissive leadership oversaw a caucus of 44 MLAs — a far bigger test of the Rustad doctrine than when it was just him and Banman.

Within five months, Rustad expelled his first MLA.

After weeks of party tension over her comments about the Kamloops Indian Residential School site, Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie was removed from caucus. Rustad drew the line at belittling claims of residential school survivors.

That decision prompted two more Conservative MLAs — Tara Armstrong and Jordan Kealy — to defect. Armstrong and Brodie later launched the OneBC party.

The excision of those three MLAs — “growing pains” to an unfazed Rustad — has yet to make an impact, with OneBC polling at around one per cent.

More disastrous was the B.C. Conservative leadership review in September, marred by low turnout, fraudulent memberships and public calls for Rustad’s resignation.

Rustad survived the review but subsequently ousted Surrey-Cloverdale MLA Elenore Sturko, accusing her of undermining his leadership. Two weeks later, he admitted to whipping a vote against a motion to condemn the Association for Reformed Political Action.

Both moves stood in stark contrast to nine months earlier, when Rustad had doubled down on his belief in free expression within caucus and defended Sturko’s (previous) defiance of his leadership. “I expected that she would. We don’t whip our people.”

“I don’t think anybody has tried the route we have done and may be for good reason,” Rustad mused of his experiment in leadership around that same time. “So we will find out.”

Less than a year into his tenure as leader of the official Opposition, John Rustad found out: the Rustad doctrine had failed.

Political discipline is logical leadership

“It’s fun working in the British Columbia legislature,” OneBC staffer Wyatt Claypool chirped on his YouTube channel, the National Telegraph. “We can pretty much do whatever we want.”

(Before joining OneBC, Claypool worked as Bruce Banman’s campaign assistant.)

His remark captured the culture that Rustad had actually fostered within the B.C. Conservatives by the time they became the official Opposition.

It even spilled into caucus staff.

Communications director Ryan Painter ran a political Substack (now private) and a public relations firm that appeared in caucus email signatures while working on contract for the party, before officially joining caucus staff.

Off the side of his desk, caucus researcher David Denhoff registered a Conservative civic party in multiple B.C. municipalities.

(Denhoff later resigned to focus on the Conservative Electors Association.)

Lindsay Shepherd — then in caucus communications — disparaged the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on her personal X account. While criticized for poor judgment, her outspokenness reflected an organizational culture that let Painter, Denhoff and others pursue their own public-facing activities, even when they conflicted with caucus work.

Shepherd was fired, despite deleting her post at the party whip’s request.

Explaining her dismissal, Rustad’s chief of staff, Brad Zubyk, told Black Press Media that “staff is going to learn... that they are there to serve caucus, to amplify caucus positions, not to make policy or offer their own opinions.”

That lesson should have been taught in orientation.

A week later, Zubyk threatened Canadian Press reporter Wolfgang Depner for the grave sin of asking Rustad if he was paranoid, after Rustad ordered a search of his MLAs’ phones.

The Conservative Party of BC is predictably unravelling from a lack of discipline and the fault lies entirely with the leader.

Every expulsion, defection and controversy traces back to the Rustad doctrine of free votes and free expression, free from the consequences that once bound the party’s architects together.

That freedom may be “fun” for a nascent party with a handful of seats. But it is reckless for an official Opposition entrusted by voters to hold government to account.

Even as Rustad imposes whipped votes, party discipline and micromanaged surveillance — the opposite of what he long promised — the culture he created will be hard to unlearn, especially while he remains at the helm.