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BC Election 2024
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What The Tyee Would Ask John Rustad. If We Could

The BC Conservative leader is accused of ducking debates. He’s certainly avoiding us.

Andrew MacLeod 3 Oct 2024The Tyee

Andrew MacLeod is The Tyee’s legislative bureau chief in Victoria and the author of All Together Healthy (Douglas & McIntyre, 2018). Find him on X or reach him at .

BC Green Leader Sonia Furstenau said she’s dismayed Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad is ducking debates.

Rustad has backed out of leaders’ debates organized by CHEK News and the Surrey Board of Trade, Furstenau said in a statement. “This is a worrying trend for someone who wants to lead B.C., but is not willing to show up and answer questions.”

The Conservatives did not respond to a request for comment about the skipped debates. Rustad participated in a CKNW radio debate Tuesday and will join a televised one Oct. 8.

We understand Furstenau’s point. Over the past month The Tyee has made multiple requests for an interview with Rustad, but he has yet to accept.

I and other Tyee reporters have been able to ask Rustad the occasional question during press conferences. But that’s not the same as a detailed exchange, with room for followup questions and time to cover a range of issues.

We had those kinds of interviews in recent weeks with Premier David Eby and with Furstenau.

And Rustad has spoken with me in the past, including one-on-one interviews when he announced he was seeking the leadership of the BC Conservatives and at the end of last year.

An MLA for almost two decades, Rustad held cabinet posts in BC Liberal governments but was never a major player. Over the past year and a half since Rustad joined the BC Conservatives, he has led the party as it has moved from the fringes to one that has a real chance of forming government.

The success has brought attacks. Rustad’s opponents have been working to define him as a “career politician” who wants to cut health care, education and other public services. They point to his tolerance of extreme views among Conservative candidates and his willingness to sit down with controversial interviewer Jordan Peterson.

That may be why the Angus Reid Institute reports that “half of British Columbians say John Rustad holds views that are ‘too extreme’ for him to be premier [and] more than two-in-five undecided voters (44 per cent) say his views are too extreme.”

Profiles in other media have been detailed and humanizing. Through them one can learn that Rustad’s wife, Kim, is a survivor of cervical cancer and that the couple did not have children. He instead dotes on his nieces and nephews. He and Kim keep a parrot as a pet.

I hoped to speak with Rustad as well. Ahead of an election that his party may well win, we have questions for him. Some are personal, filling in details of Rustad’s background, but most are about his party’s policies.

They include:

Final voting day is Oct. 19.


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