John Rustad just taught progressives an important lesson

Brent Chapman, the BC Conservative candidate for the riding of Surrey South, once wrote that Palestinians were “inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs”. More recently, he suggested the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, the 2017 killings at a mosque in Quebec City, and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando may have all been faked. And just last month, while appearing on a podcast, Chapman agreed emphatically with the host when she said the narrative around residential schools — that they were terrible, often lethal places for Indigenous children — was a “massive fraud.” 

In Saturday’s provincial election, he won his riding with almost 60 per cent of the vote. 

He wasn’t the only candidate with a track record of outrageous comments who won, either. John Rustad, the leader of the BC Conservative Party, has his own playlist of preposterous remarks, from talking about kids being forced to eat bugs to suggesting climate policy was really about a pursuing de-population and supporting the idea of a “Nuremberg 2.0” for public health officials and others who tried to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Rustad won his own riding with ease, and he very nearly won the entire election. Depending on how the recounts go in a few ridings, he still might. 

There are important lessons here for progressive politicians. First and foremost, they have to accept that there’s almost nothing a candidate can say or do, short of committing a major crime, that’s actually disqualifying. Donald Trump has proved this over and over again, and he may well end up winning the presidential election in November in spite of his numerous criminal convictions, a growing encyclopedia of scandalous statements and his ongoing flirtations with both immorality and illegality. Compared to him — and everything is compared to him now — even the most wretched behaviour or beliefs by a Canadian politician manages to seem small. 

The NDP, it seems, has yet to figure this out. In 2019 they ran a campaign against Jason Kenney that leaned heavily on his anti-LGBTQ attitude and actions, including the role he played in the late-1980s repeal of a California law that allowed gay men to visit their dying partners in hospitals during the height of the AIDS crisis. “I became president of the pro-life group in my campus and helped to lead an ultimately successful initiative petition, which led to a referendum which overturned the first gay spousal law in North America,” Kenney said in a 2000 speech the NDP released during the campaign. 

It didn’t matter. His United Conservative Party won going away, capturing 63 seats and almost 55 per cent of the popular vote. In 2023, the Alberta NDP tried to run the same campaign against Danielle Smith, one that sought to disqualify her as an option for voters on the basis of things she’d said in the past. Despite having far more material to work with, the result was largely the same. Yes, the NDP increased its vote and seat share, but it still didn’t form government. 

David Eby’s team seemed to be running a carbon copy of that campaign in BC, focusing far more heavily on the verifiably awful and occasionally unhinged things said by BC Conservative candidates than the good things his government would do. And once again, the voters have apparently declined to cooperate with this strategy. 

There are important lessons for the federal Liberals here as well, if they’re able to pay attention to anything other than the prime minister’s fate and future. I’m sure it’s tempting for them to think that if they simply gather enough of the offensive, obnoxious, or outrageous comments that Pierre Poilievre has made over the course of his long political career, Canadians will start to sour on him. If the last decade or so is any indication, they need to disabuse themselves of that — quickly. 

Their dislike of him, after all, isn’t disqualifying. Neither is his fondness for traveling down conspiratorial rabbit holes, enabling and amplifying bad actors, or past examples of him trading in any number of explicit or implied bigotries. Short of calling Terry Fox a loser because he didn’t finish his run, there’s very little Poilievre can say or do on his own that would bring him down. 

If the Liberals want to win — and if New Democrats want to stop losing so often — they need to do more than just disqualify their opponent. They need to meet voters where they are, offer them something of real substance and value, and stop running campaigns that focus so much attention on what the other candidates say and think. As we’ve seen time and time again, that just doesn’t work in our current political climate.