How the BC Conservatives Rebuilt Their Brand

In the lead-up to this year’s provincial election, two big rebranding efforts redefined the politics of the right.

The first rebrand happened more quietly.

In August 2022, the Conservative Party of BC, then with zero seats in the legislature, emerged with new visuals.

It chose a bold typeface with a big C for a new logo, incorporating mountains alongside the sun and waves of the British Columbia flag. It embraced the conservative blue that voters associated with the Conservative Party of Canada. It also didn’t hurt that the federal Conservatives were rising in the polls, even though the provincial party has no affiliation with them.

The second rebrand played a part in bringing down what was once a successful pro-business party.

In April 2023, the BC Liberals changed their name to BC United.

It might have shed any perception that the party was connected to the increasingly unpopular federal Liberals, which a former party leader said “sticks in their throat like a chicken bone.”

But the new name was mocked for sounding like a soccer team. The rebranding effort also ditched the party’s old blue colour in favour of teal and pink.

Angelo Isidorou, the executive director of the BC Conservatives, said that BC United as a name and a brand required too much explanation.

“When you explain, you lose,” he told The Tyee. “I think voters want clear, concise messaging on who you are, and I think BC United suffered from a very vague brand that wasn’t really clear on what they stood for.”

While esthetics and professionalization were important to rebranding the BC Conservatives, it also offered a clear choice for voters looking for a political home.

“We wanted a proper blue conservative party,” said Isidorou.

The final tally of this year’s provincial election shows a majority for the BC NDP, who just managed to win the 47 seats needed to form government.

However, the BC Conservatives — with 44 seats and 43 per cent of the popular vote — show that the party was able to seize a window of opportunity, outperform the BC Liberal result of the 2020 election and mount a serious challenge to the ruling progressives.

Rebranding a party

The story of the current iteration of the BC Conservatives started in 2021 when conservative commentator Aaron Gunn was booted from the BC Liberal leadership race that took place in February 2022. The party’s organizing committee said that his candidacy “would be inconsistent with the BC Liberal party’s commitment to reconciliation, diversity and acceptance of all British Columbians.”

Gunn had previously expressed views on X that “the gender pay gap doesn’t exist” and that the BC NDP are “perpetuating the myth we live in a systemically racist country founded on ‘white supremacy.’”

Gunn went on to found a group called Common Sense BC in an attempt to establish an opponent that was more conservative than the BC Liberals to challenge the BC NDP.

In 2022, he and other members of the group were elected to the board of the BC Conservative party, kicking off its internal transformation.

Isidorou was among them. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, where he was director of the Free Speech Club, and had worked on various conservative campaigns before taking on his biggest role yet as the party’s executive director and campaign manager.

He had grand designs, telling the news site Northern Beat in 2022 that the party should be running candidates in all provincial ridings.

Coming into a party that had not won seats for most of the 20th century, it was obvious that it needed a facelift.

“It was hugely important,” said Isidorou, now age 27. “When we took over the party... [it] had no money, no data, no assets, and it has this brand. I wouldn’t say it was horrible necessarily, but it was very antiquated. It was very plain.”

The party had no design guidelines, he said. The digital file for the old logo, set in a sans serif typeface, was “literally a JPEG.”

Isidorou’s major inspiration for a new one? The world of professional sports.

“I’m a big sports fan and I felt as though it was necessary to create a brand that people could identify with, that people wanted to wear on a T-shirt that looked good.”

Isidorou’s wife, Sarah Lohin, who at one point worked for the Pacific Prosperity Network, a backer of conservative, free-enterprise politics funded in part by Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, worked on the rebranding effort.

“She came up with the concept of the logo,” said Isidorou. They wanted something loud and “punchy” that embodied the B.C. landscape.

Looking to sports, the inspiration for the jagged mountain in the logo came from that of the Vancouver Canucks, with its jagged shards of ice.

It was the centrepiece of a cohesive set of new design guidelines on everything from the website to the lawn signs.

“We have these little metal pins that you attach to your collar,” said Isidorou. “People hound me for these pins because it’s just a cool logo.”

A blue tide?

With the rising popularity of the federal Conservative brand, BC NDP Leader David Eby petitioned the courts to change how his rival appeared on ballots this provincial election.

The party shows up as the “Conservative Party,” with no mention of B.C. By the 2020 election, the BC Conservatives had changed their official name to the “Conservative Party of BC,” with the latter part lopped off for the ballot.

Elections BC opposed the petition, saying that the Conservative name meets the requirements of the Election Act.

Stewart Prest, a lecturer in political science at the University of British Columbia, hasn’t seen any evidence showing that the BC Conservatives did well only because voters thought they were electing the federal Conservatives.

“When the BC Conservative party came along, and the BC United name change really started to falter, it created this window of opportunity,” he said.

“What it really hinted at was the fact that conservative voters really wanted to vote for a conservative party.... The provincial Conservative party made it a really clear, unapologetic and explicit part of their campaign to say, ‘We’re a conservative party just like you’re familiar with,’ really leaning into the brand of conservativism that has been developed with great success for years, particularly by the federal Conservative party. Same colour scheme, similar lettering, similar iconography, similar phrasing that everything is common sense, and that idea of laying blame on the incumbent party.”

While Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre had endorsed Danielle Smith of the United Conservative Party in Alberta’s 2023 provincial election, he did not do the same in B.C. for Rustad and his Conservatives.

“I know Pierre,” said Isidorou, “but it’s not really something we sought out. Pierre is laser-focused on Justin Trudeau and Ottawa.”

A right-wing tent

Prest uses a theory called Duverger’s law to interpret the history of politics in B.C. The theory speaks to the persistence of a two-party system.

Even with the collapse of parties like BC United, “what we end up with again and again is this party of the right and a party of the left,” he said.

However, there are differences in what that party of the right looks like from era to era.

Prest says parties tend to fluctuate between a more centre-leaning, pro-enterprise vision, like the former BC Liberals, and one that is more “reactionary, populist and grassroots,” like the current BC Conservatives. He would consider the Social Credit party, which dominated for decades until a 1991 defeat, an incarnation of the latter.

“Part of that is tapping into elements of social conservatism,” Prest explained. That work involves “finding groups of voters who are perhaps less comfortable with elements of a more progressive political agenda, whether that’s ideas around gender-inclusive education or other aspects that might be denigrated as ‘woke’ politics.”

Prest muses that Kevin Falcon, the longtime BC Liberal MLA who led the party through the BC United rebrand, might have had the effort “blow up in his face” because he wanted to keep the party more centrist.

“[He was] finding out that for a right-of-centre party to succeed, you have to bring along those more populist voters.”

The electorate these days also seems to be more comfortable listening to those views espoused by the populist right, adds Prest.

‘Political noise’?

A number of BC Conservative candidates have run into controversies in the lead-up to the election.

One of them is Brent Chapman, the BC Conservative candidate for Surrey South. He had come under fire during the campaign for a number of comments he made publicly in past years, as well as more recently.

In a 2015 Facebook post, he called Palestinian children “little inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs... figuratively and quite literally.”

The BC Muslim Association called for Chapman to step down, but party leader John Rustad refused, saying it was up to voters.

In September 2024, Chapman appeared on an episode of a podcast hosted by Maryann Gebauer, who described residential schools to Chapman as a “massive fraud.” Chapman asked, “Why are we made to feel so ashamed as Canadians?”

Chapman has apologized for these comments. He handily defeated his BC NDP opponent by a margin of 20 per cent of the vote and will become an MLA.

On the controversy that dogged Chapman’s ultimate election win, “People can effectively filter it out as just normal political noise,” Prest said. “[Even though] a few years ago, it would have been utterly disqualifying.”

Isidorou of the BC Conservatives shared a similar opinion.

When asked whether controversy has also become a part of the renewed brand this election, the scandals among candidates ultimately “don’t really mean anything,” he argues, which is proven by electoral support.

A new blue coalition

The BC Conservatives won 43 per cent of the vote this election, much more than the BC Liberals’ 34 per cent back in 2020. Isidorou insists that this is because his team has built a new brand with a new coalition.

This is not a party of “old white guys in suits,” he had told host Mo Amir of the This Is Vancolour podcast after election night.

“A lot of pundits have pontificated that, well, they’re just the new centre-right party,” Isidorou later told The Tyee. “We have the residual BC United people, but it is a new group of people, and you can see it just by the demographics.”

Within that coalition are rural residents who traditionally may be expected to vote conservative.

But young people are among them too. A Leger poll ahead of the election showed that almost half of voters between 18 and 34 were fans of the BC Conservatives.

So are voters in cities like Richmond and Surrey with large immigrant populations, East Asian and South Asian respectively, who turned local ridings blue this election.

“Ultimately, we don’t own the party, we don’t own the brand. We’re just stewards of it,” said Isidorou.

“So I’m humbled by the fact that there are so many people that identify with it. I hope over the next 10 years, they take it and make it their own.”