If the time ever comes to crown the absolute worst party leader in B.C. history, there will be very little competition. Glen Clark and Bill Vander Zalm can sleep easy; Kevin Falcon is the winner by a country mile.
Falcon is only party leader in provincial history to blow up his own party 鈥� as he did on Aug. 28, 2024, when he withdrew all his candidates from the race. Including himself.
Worse, that move utterly failed. Although he managed to unite the anti-NDP vote behind the surging BC Conservatives, it wasn't quite enough to put them over the top. The NDP still holds a slim majority in the legislature.
To make matters worse, after Falcon burned down his own party, their successor on the right is also exploding.
Consider just one plot line in the ongoing BC Conservative drama.
In March, MLA Dallas Brodie openly mocked residential school survivors, and Conservative leader John Rustad kicked her out of caucus. Two more MLAs, Tara Armstrong and Jordan Kealy, quit with Brodie in protest.
In June, Brodie and Armstrong started a new party, One BC.
Things went even further awry as Rustad released a memo alleging that Conservative MLAs and staff were being targeted for blackmail by the defectors. One BC fired back, accusing Rustad of stacking the vote for Conservative directors at the party's AGM.
This is just the biggest internal fight among several since last October.
None of these blow-ups are surprising.
In the 2020 provincial election, the BC Conservatives got 1.9 per cent of the vote, and elected zero MLAs. They came into this election stronger, with eight MLAs, most of them former BC Liberals/United members. But they were not ready for prime time. They had few star candidates, and several 鈥� including Brodie 鈥� turned out to have said odious or bizarre things in the past, or to be quite willing to say them again, once in office.
They rose rapidly in the polls during 2024 due to three factors 鈥� voters confused about Falcon's disastrous rebrand of the BC Liberals to BC United, surging support for the federal Conservatives, and a general sense that the NDP hadn't met the mark on housing, crime, and health care during the last four years.
They rose as far and as high as they did only because Kevin Falcon only hates one thing more than losing an election: the thought of the NDP winning one.
Falcon burned BC United to the ground 鈥� destroying one of the most successful, long-reigning provincial parties in Western Canada 鈥� and not only was it not enough to stop a third NDP win, now it's left the centre-right ceded to a party that's falling apart like a Jenga game in an earthquake.
What happens next, aside from numerous high-fives by NDP MLAs?
Someone is eventually going to organize a centre-right opposition in B.C., one with a coherent ideology that can appeal to a good-sized swathe of B.C. voters.
But it's unclear if that party will emerge from the BC Conservatives, the smouldering remains of BC United, or from somewhere else altogether.
