Whatever happens on election day, the BC Conservatives have achieved a major breakthrough. A fringe party with no elected MLAs just two years ago, the Conservatives are now poised to form government or become the official Opposition.
As B.C. heads into a new era of Conservative politics, we’re breaking down how the party formed and looking at the board members guiding the revamped party.
Those board members include young right-wing influencers who have built followings on social media, a lawyer who practises personal injury law and several BC Conservative candidates.
BC’s Conservative party was sidelined for five decades
The Conservative Party of BC has been around for a long time. But for decades, the party has been sidelined by other right-wing parties, such as the Social Credit dynasty that dominated B.C. politics from the 1950s to the 1980s.
For 16 years, from 2001 to 2017, B.C. was governed by the BC Liberals, a centre-right, big-tent party not affiliated with the federal Liberals. The B.C. party included some social conservatives but primarily saw itself as business-friendly and fiscally conservative.
After a second consecutive loss in the 2020 election, the BC Liberals elected Kevin Falcon as leader in 2022 and changed their name to BC United.
Common Sense and Aaron Gunn
During the 2022 BC Liberal leadership race, political commentator Aaron Gunn was prevented from running for the party because his views “would be inconsistent with the BC Liberal party’s commitment to reconciliation, diversity and acceptance of all British Columbians,” according to a party statement.
That same year, BC Liberal MLA John Rustad was booted from the party because he reposted a social media post that expressed skepticism about climate change.
Gunn and his supporters formed a new organization called Common Sense BC. According to a November 2022 story in Northern Beat, that year several of Gunn’s supporters were elected to the board of the Conservative Party of BC. Rustad came on board as leader of the party in March 2023.
Gunn is a political commentator whose YouTube videos on subjects like free speech on campus, crime and drug use, pipelines and problems with Canadian health care have racked up millions of views. Gunn interviews experts and people who have been affected by these issues, then presents these subjects from a conservative point of view, often blaming the federal Liberals for problems.
In B.C., Gunn is probably best known for a controversial video he produced called Vancouver Is Dying. The video, which included footage of vulnerable people in the city’s impoverished Downtown Eastside, presented the view that harm reduction measures like prescribing pharmaceutical alternatives to street drugs had caused more drug use, addiction, crime and disorder.
Gunn didn’t run as a BC Conservative candidate in this election and he’s not on the party’s current board. When the next federal election is called, Gunn plans to run as the Conservative candidate for North Island-Powell River.
Who’s on the board now?
Gunn’s Common Sense BC coalition was influential at the party’s 2022 annual general meeting. At that meeting, Ryan Warawa, Connor Gibson, Brandon Fonseca, Sacha Peter, Lindsay Shepherd, Angelo Isidorou, Aisha Estey, Steve Schafer and Reed Ellery were elected to the party’s board. Isidorou, Schafer, Gibson and Estey are also listed on the Common Sense steering committee, according to an archived version of the group’s website, along with Harman Bhangu, Richard Gauvin and Wes Graham.
In 2023, the party held another board election. Today the party’s current board is made up of Aisha Estey (president), Harman Bhangu (vice-president), Robert McRudden (treasurer), Lindsay Shepherd, Tara Armstrong, Rosalyn Bird and Steve Schafer.
Isidorou is currently the party’s executive director. (The Tyee received an updated board list from a current BC Conservative member. The party’s current board president did not respond to an interview request for this story.)
Common Sense BC had an influence on the Conservative platform. In 2022, the platform on Common Sense’s website was the same as the platform on the BC Conservatives’ website.
That platform promised to introduce mandatory treatment for drug users, allow private health-care options, get rid of tent cities, “defend B.C.’s history” and “oppose identity politics.” There were also promises to end B.C.’s carbon tax and replace ICBC with private auto insurance.
Some of those promises, like ending the carbon tax and tent cities, have stayed in the Conservatives’ platform. Others, like “defending B.C.’s history,” have disappeared and reappeared: less than a week before election day, the party released two versions of its education platform on the same day. One platform promised to get rid of any history lesson that “instills guilt” in students based on their “ethnicity, nationality or religion”; the other document made no mention of that promise.
A closer look at the party’s board and executive
Angelo Isidorou
Isidorou became a board member at large in 2022; he is now the party’s executive director.
As a University of British Columbia student and a member of the campus Free Speech Club, Isidorou was involved with inviting the far-right personalities Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux to speak at an event in Vancouver in 2019.
It was cancelled after critics accused the organizers of “inviting speakers who espouse white nationalism.” Both Southern and Molyneux have told media they do not consider themselves to be white nationalists.
Isidorou then became involved with Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada and was campaign manager for Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson, a social conservative who opposes what she calls the “LGBTQ ideology in schools.”
Isidorou later publicly disavowed the PPC, saying the party had become too focused on candidates he described as “crazies” in a CBC interview. From 2020 to 2021, he hosted a podcast series called Cancel This on a right-wing news site called the Post Millennial.
After leaving the PPC, Isidorou joined the board of the Non-Partisan Association, a centre-right civic political party in Vancouver. He left that party after The Tyee published a story about concerns the party had appointed several board members with far-right views; the story included a photograph of Isidorou making a hand sign in 2017 that has come to be associated with “white power” and which several prominent far-right figures have displayed.
Isidorou has strongly denied that he holds any racist views.
Aisha Estey
Estey, the current president of the board, is a lawyer at KazLaw, a firm that specializes in personal injury law. Her bio on the KazLaw website includes two descriptions of personal injury lawsuits where Estey successfully argued against ICBC’s initial assessment of who was at fault in the motor vehicle accidents and won substantial settlements for her clients.
Harman Bhangu
Bhangu, who has worked as a trucker, is the board’s vice-president and is running as the Conservative candidate for Langley-Abbotsford.
Bhangu’s social media posts showed up in a 200-page opposition research dossier that had been compiled by BC United and leaked to the media. According to the dossier, Bhangu had claimed antifa was responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; commented “there is nothing to be proud of” in response to a picture of the Vancouver Canucks wearing Pride jerseys; and expressed doubt about COVID-19 vaccines.
Bhangu’s nomination was contested by social conservative Kari Simpson, who launched a court challenge claiming that the party’s board had interfered with local riding associations when it came to choosing candidates.
Robert McRudden
McRudden is the treasurer of the party. According to his LinkedIn page, McRudden is the principal of a firm called McRudden Enterprises and he describes himself as a “construction manager with experience building commercial and health-care projects and a reputation for delivering quality on time and budget.”
Lindsay Shepherd
Shepherd was first elected to the party’s board in 2022 and is also on the 2023 board as a director at large.
Shepherd became a public figure in 2017 when she was a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University and showed a TVOntario debate that included controversial University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson to a class. Shepherd was reprimanded by her supervising professor and two other university officials. The university later exonerated Shepherd and apologized, and she was heralded in publications like the National Post as a victim of repressive university policies around free speech.
But she was also criticized for inviting Faith Goldy, a commentator who is open about her white supremacist views, to speak at the Laurier campus. In 2019, she appeared on a podcast hosted by another Canadian white supremacist, Jean-François Gariépy. In her recent social media posts Shepherd has said she doesn’t accept the findings of unmarked graves at residential schools; called for immigration to be reduced by 95 per cent; questioned why a Muslim holiday is included in a children’s book as a holiday celebrated in England; and said white people are being discriminated against in the labour market. She has told The Tyee those views are her own, not the party’s.
Shepherd writes for True North, a right-wing news site. She also wrote the script for a 2024 YouTube documentary called Starvation Policy made by Rebel News commentator Keean Bexte.
Tara Armstrong
Armstrong is the party’s candidate for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream. Armstrong and her mother appeared on the CBC show Dragons’ Den in 2007 and successfully pitched franchising the family business, a private transportation company for seniors called Driving Miss Daisy.
Armstrong’s candidate page says she grew up in Alberta, where she was instilled with “deep conservative roots.”
Rosalyn Bird
Bird is the party’s candidate for Prince George-Valemount and has a military background, serving for 22 years in the Canadian Armed Forces. In an interview with the Rocky Mountain Goat, Bird said her top priority would be representing her rural community’s concerns regarding land use, economic opportunities, education and housing costs.
Steve Schafer
Schafer is hoping to be the federal Conservative candidate for Abbotsford-South Langley. On his candidacy website, he includes border security, opposition to the federal government’s proposed carbon tax and recent changes to reduce the number of temporary foreign workers as his top priorities.
A staunch supporter of Israel, on his Facebook page Schafer has recently said he opposes allowing refugees from Gaza into Canada because of security concerns.
Schafer’s website says he is a management consultant and political strategist.
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Read more: BC Election 2024, BC Politics
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