As British Columbians await the final results of the election that propelled the Conservative Party of B.C. from the margins to within inches of power, voices both inside and outside the party see it as a reflection of polarization in modern political culture.
Speaking on Mo Amir's VANCOLOUR podcast, Conservative Party of B.C. executive director Angelo Isidorou said the party pursued two goals.
One was to send a message to the "status quo" and "elites" by creating "a right-wing alternative in the province to supplant the current centre-right right -- that's done -- and to be a viable alternative to the (B.C.NDP)," Isidorou said. "I think at 45 seats, we have sent that message. I have been, we have been, gas-lit for two years in being told, 'you're all evil right-wingers, no one is going to like you.'"
Isidorou added that one of big mistakes made by the B.C. NDP Leader David Eby was "this presumption and this hubris that only these disgusting, vile lepers would ever consider voting for such an evil party and now you have 900,000 people that I guess are part of that vile, evil leper party."
Isidorou added that he also wanted to re-define the conservative coalition in B.C.
"I, as a 27-year-old, hate the stereotype that conservatives are old white guys in suits and we have created something totally new," he said. "This (party) is a coalition of, if anything, rural voters for sure, Indo-Canadians in Surrey, Chinese-Canadians in Richmond, 18-to-34-year- and 35-to-55-year-old people that are working."
When Amir asked Isidorou whether he sees his party as a right-wing party rather than a centre-of-right party, Isidorou questioned the existence of such a political space.
"I don't think centrism exists," he said. "There is such a clear binary in society and it may be because of our political culture."
Politics, he added, "is just a mirror to what's going on with people" in pointing to the effects of social media and algorithms that have created "echo chambers" that "validate and reward" anger and suppress anything that is positive.
Kareem Allam, a partner with Fairview Strategy and Isidorou's co-panelist, agreed with Isidorou's assessment and said the Conservative Party of B.C. is something entirely different from previous versions.
"Angelo is right — the Conservative Party is not old, white guys in suits," Allam said. "Those guys vote NDP now. That's what we saw in all the polling."
But if Allam acknowledged the polarization, he ultimately warned against it because governance requires a level of pragmatism.
"All these feelings...all this anger is going to require us to build institutions that pull people together and not othering each other."
Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West, who appeared with Isidorou and Allam on the same podcast, also warned against excessive polarization.
"If we continue to go on this trajectory, we are going to be very divided to the point of maybe being irreparably divided."
Isidorou agreed that governing rather than campaigning requires compromise. "If you don't compromise, you turn into stone and wither away," he said.
Gregory Millard, who teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, said the Conservative Party of B.C. is not a recognizable part of the older model of Canadian conservatism.
"If people have in mind a kind of sober, serious, fiscally prudent, management party, I'm not sure that's what we see with this iteration of the B.C. Conservatives."
While Rustad himself has governing experience, the same cannot be said about the party itself.
"It's a strange entity, because if you zoomed back 18 months, you would not have said this party has the profile of a governing party. It's a party that has a lot of MLAs now...who we would not have expected to see running for a governing party, but rather we have expected to see running for a marginal party."
But Millard also sees the party's "surprising slate" as "symptomatic" of conservative parties today.
"I'll say that the collapse of B.C United might illustrate the fact that you are not a viable conservative party today in terms of the energy of the activists on the ground and the donations that you need in order to be fully viable, unless you are a comfortable home for people that believe in conspiracy theories, people that are profoundly about our institutions of knowledge and our institutions of government and so on."
A comparable argument has also come from UBC political scientist Stewart Prest.
“The (provincial Conservatives) have really felt quite comfortable being the voice of what are sometimes referred to the ‘Skeptics of Modernity,'" he said earlier this year.
Millard stressed that the Conservatives cannot be reduced to that element.
"But I'm saying that that element feels very comfortable in the (Conservative Party of B.C.)," he said. "I think the problem B.C. United confronted was, they were trying to be a party of the right while not accommodating climate change deniers and people that have eccentric opinions on other matters, this kind of internet conservatism."
West, meanwhile, framed the evolution of the Conservatives as part of a broader political re-alignment seen across the western world.
"B.C. is just catching up to a phenomenon that we have seen globally," he said. "Did anybody think you would see the day, where the B.C. NDP is winning the west side of Vancouver? They represent some of the wealthiest postal codes in the province. Conversely, North Surrey is pretty working class and the Conservatives made huge in-roads in that area."
That re-alignment has included the emergence of parties, whose platforms include anti-immigration policies, often aimed at immigrants from predominately Muslim countries. But Millard explicitly warned against including the Conservative Party of B.C. in that category.
"Those parties are associated with a kind of nativisim that objects to immigration and so on," he said. "I don't know that is characteristic of the (Conservative Party of B.C.) as such," he said. "Somebody like Brent Chapman, you could argue does echo that kind of stuff with extremist rhetoric and exclusionary rhetoric. What I am talking about is the wider North American conservative ecosystem that is not exclusively concerned with immigration and exclusionary politics in that sense."
Chapman made several anti-Muslim statements almost a decade ago for which he apologized.
But Millard does think that "there is a significant element of the B.C. Conservative Party that is anti-institution" and "maybe tips towards an exclusionary politics on issues around SOGI and gender" among related issues.
Millard added that this type of anti-institutionalism — which can be destructive when it goes too far — has a long history in B.C. and unlike the Conservatives, B.C. United ultimately, did not tap into it.
"They misread where the grassroots energy is on the right today in North America," he said.
Black Press Media reached out to Isidorou for additional comment and will update this story accordingly.
