Tractors, Social Credit and a Guinness: A day with John Rustad

Meet B.C.'s Conservative leader John Rustad, a soft- and plain-spoken man born in Prince George. He wants to be your premier. Read more

Published Sep 14, 2024  •  Last updated 0 minutes ago  •  10 minute read

B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad in Vancouver. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

On a recent Friday in Campbell River, B.C.’s Conservative leader stood on a flatbed trailer in the parking lot of Carmac Diesel, a truck repair shop, talking to a crowd of about 150 supporters in the late afternoon shade.

There were signs saying “Forestry feeds my family” and “B.C. salmon farms feed B.C. families.” Behind the audience, a Cypress Creek Logging truck carried six massive trees from the west coast of Vancouver Island.

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Logging and fishing towns are nothing new to John Rustad, 61, who opened his speech with an anecdote about learning to drive with his dad on forestry roads leading to their family’s sawmill just outside of Prince George.

“I keep looking at these trees, and I think, ‘What’s happened to our forest sector?'” he said.

“Forestry, quite frankly, should continue to always be the backbone of many communities across this province. It should always have a place, and we need a government with common sense to stand up and say it’s OK to have a forest sector.”

Rustad has brought the B.C. Conservatives back to life since taking over as leader in 2023. He’s transformed the province’s oldest political party — once a moribund shell that had less than two per cent of the vote in 2020 — into a freight train that caused the collapse of B.C. United, its once-mighty centre-right opponent, and is now threatening the NDP hopes for a second majority.

The Conservatives have had some problems.

The party dropped several candidates for promoting conspiracy theories that included the belief that COVID-19 vaccines make you magnetic and the claim that 5G wireless networks are a “genocidal weapon.”

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The NDP has slammed other Conservative candidates for coming out against abortion, against LGBTQ+ rights and for defending the 2022 Freedom Convoy. The party has also come under fire from former candidates upset with how the integration with B.C. United was handled.

None of this has fazed Rustad, who has been keeping up a breakneck pace of meetings and rallies.

Still, one analyst believes he needs to do more to connect with everyday voters and respond to criticisms levelled at him by the NDP and others.

“Rustad has been authentically himself for so long in public office that it is really hard to change his brand,” said Mash Strategy’s Allie Blades, who was senior manager of community engagement for former B.C. Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson. “He has these very authentic qualities, he represents a rural northern community, and he integrates a lot of those personal experiences into his speeches and into his thinking.”

She cited the example of Rustad’s recent interview with controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson as an example of a “political risk” that he took because “it was a conversation with someone who was interesting to him.”

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But at the same time, Rustad has been too “flippant” in his responses to allegations of climate denialism and of supporting candidates with socially conservative views on abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, Blades said.

B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad addresses a crowd outside Carmac Diesel in Campbell River. Photo by Alex Lazenby /sun

Rustad has said while he believes humans have played a role in causing climate change, it is not a crisis and that “taxing people into poverty” through the carbon tax “won’t change the weather.” He told Peterson he doesn’t understand “how … we have convinced carbon-based beings that carbon is the problem.”

Similarly, Rustad has responded to concerns around abortion by saying it is a federal issue and he wouldn’t change access to birth control provincially, but has yet to release specific policy stating his position on reproductive issues.

“There hasn’t been a strong message or a strong response on what they believe, what their policy might be in this,” Blades said, adding that if Rustad doesn’t put to paper policy on what a Conservative government would do, he runs the risk of ceding the narrative to the NDP.

“The NDP are trying to create these social issues as a polarizing divide and focus on the social stance of the leader and some of his personal thoughts,” she said. “If they do it and they put some money behind more ads on this issue, well, guess what? A 20 year-old who works at Lululemon is going to believe that abortion rights are a political issue.”

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20 years in politics

Despite having spent more than 20 years in politics — he served for three years as a Prince George school trustee before being elected to the legislature as a B.C. Liberal in 2005 — Rustad says he is not a natural-born politician.

Born to Laurie and Molly Rustad in Prince George in 1963, John Rustad is the youngest of three boys and was raised in a family that knew hardship.

Laurie Rustad was born on a farm in Saskatchewan and by the age of six had lost both of his parents. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was five and his father died a year later. He was raised by his older brothers until he was 16 and then moved to B.C. to work at a logging camp before moving to Prince George at 21.

Laurie owned a sawmill outside of town, which he eventually sold when John was nine and went into real estate.

Molly Rustad was born to a single mother in England and shipped to Canada as a nine-month-old to live with her aunt. Her aunt died shortly thereafter and she was placed with a relative of her aunt’s husband before he ultimately adopted her when she was nine.

Rustad went to UBC for a year to study engineering before returning to Prince George to work in forestry, eventually starting a logging consulting company, Geographic Information Systems Inc., in the late 1990s.

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He has been married to his wife Kim for almost 30 years. They met through one of his friends, who was dating Kim.

“We went to see a concert in Vancouver and came back, and he said his girlfriend was picking him up at the airport. That’s the first time I met Kim, and I didn’t even think about it, right? I mean, she’s my friend’s girlfriend,” Rustad said.

They started dating several months later after working on a community theatre production of Monty Python, which Rustad can quote at length. He said he was too shy to ever audition for a role, instead focusing on managing the lights and soundboard and helping with set design.

Kim was the more outgoing one, involved as both a producer and an actor. Rustad said he would get so nervous he didn’t even want his name on the playbill.

Rustad and his wife have had their share of challenges, including Kim’s cervical cancer in 2000 that prevented them from having children.

“She actually said to me that she released me from our marriage, if I wanted to pursue going and having children,” he said. “I said, ‘No, we got married for better or for worse, and sickness and health, and we’ll form a life together.'”

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Kim has been in remission for 24 years and the couple enjoy spoiling their nieces and nephews with trips to Disneyland and Mexico.

Around the time of Kim’s diagnosis, the pair almost moved to Calgary. Rustad was frustrated with how the province was being managed, particularly the forestry sector.

“I said, ‘Look, we can go to Calgary. I can do work out of there for the resource sector and make 15 per cent more on the bottom line,'” he said.

“We had a long conversation about it, and ultimately, you know, my whole family lived in Prince George, her parents lived in Prince George, I had a woodlot licence and I was involved in some other deals at the time.”

So they stayed.

“It left me two choices: Either I just live with it, or I try to change it. And I’m not the kind of person that just lives with things.”

B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad speaks to voters at the High Tide Public House in Courtenay, B.C. Photo by Alex Lazenby /PNG

To that end, Rustad went to the local B.C. Liberal campaign office to see about putting in nomination papers. He said the local riding president chuckled, as the party was close to choosing a candidate for the 2001 election.

Others within the party urged him to run as a school trustee instead, which is what he did successfully in 2002.

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Overcoming stage fright

Rustad said the thought of making a public presentation always made him nervous, particularly back when he owned Geographic Information Systems Inc.

“Politics was never an ambition. Matter of fact, I would do a business meeting with five clients and get sweaty hands, weak knees, the whole bit. I had a huge paranoia of public speaking,” he recalled.

But Mary Polak, a former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister, said Rustad wasn’t one to shy away from throwing ideas on the table for discussion, even if he didn’t really believe in them.

She said she’s always appreciated his belief in having healthy debates, dating back to their school trustee days when she served in Surrey and he served in Prince George.

“I think in part, he really loves politics, really loves everything around it,” she said.

Other former colleagues during his days as an MLA under Gordon Campbell and later as cabinet minister under Christy Clark remember him as a “contrarian” who would regularly take positions outside the norm on topics such as climate change, but was able to put those views aside for the good of the party and government.

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They believe he is now able to more fully express those views as the leader of his own party.

Rustad was kicked out of the B.C. United caucus in August 2022 for sharing a Facebook post that called into question the role of carbon dioxide in climate change.

Following his dismissal, Rustad spent time as an independent before joining the Conservatives in February 2023 and becoming leader.

He briefly flirted with joining the Social Credit party, the once powerful party of W.A.C. Bennett and Bill Bennett that collapsed in the 1990s following the resignation of premier Bill Vander Zalm over a conflict of interest scandal.

But the party rejected his request for it to open up to new members.

“They’re still around, and they’re still registered with Elections B.C., but turns out the people that are running are even further left than the B.C. Liberals were.”

Top Tory policies

During his speech in Campbell River, Rustad touched on the Conservative’s hallmark policies.

Cut the carbon tax. Get rid of decriminalization. Push for mandatory minimum sentences for repeat offenders. Introduce maximum wait-time guarantees for the health-care system.

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“We’ve got all the resources we can ever want. We’ve got a well trained, well educated population. We’ve got all that potential. The problem is we are hopelessly managed, and we’re caught up in ideology,” he said.

Many at the rally were local supporters of his North Island candidate, Anna Kindy. Others were eager to hear his message on health care, affordability and support for the natural resource sector.

One woman told him she liked his comments on the need to get rid of red tape so 17 mineral mines currently proposed in B.C. can get “out the door.”

Another said she is worried about her grandchildren being able to afford to live and work in the province.

Kristin Logan, who made headlines last year after she had to travel to the U.S. for cancer treatment, was excited about the party’s promise to use public dollars to provide private treatment for those who need it.

Unlike some politicians who are loud and charismatic, Rustad is more soft- and plain-spoken, preferring to exchange a few quiet words with voters before moving on.

Rustad tends to handle most of his social media posts, frequently pulling out his phone for a quick tweet or to film a selfie video on a topic he feels is important.

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After speaking to voters, Rustad took time to quickly say hello to federal Conservative candidate Aaron Gunn.

Gunn has deep ties to the B.C. Conservatives through people like executive director Angelo Isidorou, who took over the B.C. Conservatives after he was kicked out of the 2022 B.C. Liberal leadership race.

However, Gunn has to tread carefully, insiders say. He doesn’t want to be seen as being too intimately involved with Rustad because of the differences between the provincial and federal parties.

Conservative Leader John Rustad in Campbell River, B.C. Of September 6, 2024. Photo Credit: Alex Lazenby Photo by Alex Lazenby /sun

Later that Friday, it was off to Courtenay for a rally at the High Tide Public House pub with Courtenay-Comox candidate Brennan Day.

At the end of the night, with a Guinness in hand, Rustad trotted out his familiar lines to the pubgoers.

Enough of socialism.

Enough of losing our jobs.

Conservatives will deliver “common sense change.”

The messaging was received with applause and many thank yous.

Rustad’s big test now though is finding a way to win over suburban voters in ridings like Surrey, Langley and Richmond.

“He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to connect with voters. He’s going to do it authentically to himself, which I think is a very honourable to do as a politician,” Blades said.

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But not all suburban voters are able to go out and see him speak in person.

“Without a platform, without policy announcements, it’s really all speculation.”

John Rustad in Vancouver, BC, September 12, 2024. Photo by Arlen Redekop /PNG

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