The B.C. Conservative party says it expects to kick off a leadership race in January after John Rustad submitted his resignation as party leader on Thursday.
His departure capped a tumultuous 24 hours after the party board moved to remove Rustad and install South Surrey-White Rock MLA Trevor Halford as interim leader.
Rustad, who defiantly insisted Wednesday that he remained the leader, said he had talked it over with to his wife and a number of key supporters on Wednesday evening. He said he came to the conclusion Thursday morning, after only four hours of sleep, that stepping aside was the right thing to do.
While the mechanics of choosing a new leader still have to be worked out, there have already been rumours around about some of the possible candidates, including Conservative North Island-Powell River MP Aaron Gunn, who is close with much of the party board, and Caroline Elliott, sister-in-law of Kevin Falcon, who is leader of the dormant B.C. United party.
Halford said he has no intention of seeking to be the permanent leader of the party and indicated his goal is to heal some of the divisions within the caucus while a new leader is chosen.
“I wouldn’t characterize this as a festive happy moment, because I think there’s some people that this has been very emotionally difficult for and I think we as a caucus are united on that,” he said. “My biggest focus is to be behind these guys and supporting everything that they’re doing and making sure that they know that I’m there to do that work, and they’re there to help me do that work.”
Rustad said he intends to stay on as an MLA and that it has “been a great honour building this party, taking this thing from where it was, and bringing the Conservative party back to life in this province.”
He said there were ways he stayed on as leader, but that it wouldn’t have been worth the cost.
“Essentially that’s saying I want a civil war, I want to have sides divided, I want to take our party and drag it through a fight,” he said. “And I just look at that, and I think that’s not why I built this Conservative party.”
Gone along with Rustad is his chief of staff, Brad Zubyk, as Halford works to install his own team.
The new interim leader said he will not be making any wholesale changes and that includes not reaching out to any of the five MLAs, Elenore Sturko, Amelia Boultbee, Jordan Kealy, Dallas Brodie and Tara Armstrong, who left or were kicked out of the party under Rustad’s leadership.
In a statement, Halford listed some of what he feels are the NDP’s failures that he wants to hold the government to account for, from the Cowichan title decision to forestry mill closures, the government’s record deficit and the extortion crisis in Surrey.
Other issues mentioned include emergency closures, long wait-lists for medical specialists and the decision by potash producer Nutrien to choose to export from a Washington state port instead of B.C.
Party president Aisha Estey said there is a board meeting planned for Friday and that the hope is to have a chair appointed for the leadership election organizing committee in short order.
Estey said she had hoped Rustad would leave in mid-October after she and six of her colleagues on the management committee asked him to step aside over what they felt was the turmoil his leadership was causing, including a precipitous drop in fundraising and allegations of improper membership sign-ups before this summer’s leadership review.
“John Rustad was no longer the best person to lead this party, and we felt that it was our duty to make that known to him,” she said.
“As the months went by, I would say things sort of began to deteriorate within caucus. There was some blocking of meetings occurring, blocking of being able to hold secret ballot votes, which is how everyone would have preferred for this to go.”
That deterioration of the relationship between Rustad and his caucus came to a head Wednesday morning with a letter sent by lawyer Bruce Hallsor, managing partner of Crease Harman LLP, to Estey. It said that Hallsor had statements from 20 of the 39 Conservative MLAs, saying they no longer had faith in their leader.
Rustad then told reporters that he had no intention of stepping down and stating that there was no way the board or caucus could force him out of his position given the only mechanisms for doing so are through a leadership vote or if the leader resigns, dies or is incapacitated.
Board members disagreed with that interpretation and by early afternoon Wednesday had ruled that a majority of MLAs wanting the leader gone meant he was “professionally incapacitated” and could be removed. A caucus vote conducted earlier that morning led to Halford being named interim leader.
This led to extraordinary scenes in the legislature with most MLAs urging Rustad to leave quietly while a small group of loyalists — caucus chair Jody Toor of Langley-Willowbrook, deputy whip Reann Gasper of Abbotsford-Mission and Sharon Hartwell of Bulkley Valley Stikine — among them, stated that nothing had changed.
By the end of the day, the situation was no clearer and as session wrapped up for winter break it appeared as if a resolution might not come until the new year.
But by Thursday morning, it appeared Rustad had accepted what might have been inevitable and by the afternoon it appeared a weight had been lifted off, telling reporters in the press gallery that politics is nothing like the time he faced down a charging full-grown moose.
“Politics is nothing compared to that,” he said.
