Just over a year ago, John Rustad joined the BC Conservatives after being ousted from the BC Liberals for tweeting against party lines on the climate. Now, he’s paying it forward, punishing Dallas Brodie, his own (now former) MLA, who had the gall to make a factually true statement about residential schools.
And if other conservative parties don’t figure out how to avoid capitulating on this and related issues, they can expect to find themselves looking just as spineless, hypocritical and dismissive of truth.
For now, Brodie remains the highest-profile victim of tone-policing on the conservative side of the aisle. Her error? Doing her job. As her party’s justice critic and a lawyer by trade, she naturally saw fit to criticize the province’s law society for choosing last September to keep a factually incorrect statement about an “unmarked burial site” at the Kamloops residential school in its mandatory training module on the subject; she also saw fit to criticize the society’s treatment of the lawyer behind the attempted correction.
In 2021, the Kamloops residential school became nationally infamous for being the site of 215 child graves … only, zero bodies or graves have actually been found on the site. The 215 “graves” were merely anomalies detected by ground-penetrating radar. Without actual confirmation, it’s impossible to know whether they’re hunks of clay, roots, stones or bones, or something else.
Brodie made that very point on X in late February: “The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero. Zero. No one should be afraid of the truth. Not lawyers, their governing bodies, or anyone else.” She concluded by saying she’d press the NDP attorney general on the issue.
It was no surprise that the left lost its mind over this tweet; it was a surprise, however, that the Conservative leader joined them. Anxious that the post might be misinterpreted as a statement about residential schools in general, even though it clearly mentioned one specific school, Rustad asked that Brodie take down her tweet. She refused.
Meanwhile, Brodie’s caucus colleague, house leader A’aliyah Warbus, berated Brodie for “questioning the narratives of people who lived and survived these atrocities” and “taking us backward in reconciliation.”
“Inform yourself, get the latest facts, research, AND talk to survivors,” wrote Warbus on X.
The last straw was laid a week later, when Brodie appeared on a podcast with political scientist Frances Widdowson, a critic of Indigenous policy, to recount the ordeal. She emphasized the need for objective truth, “not his truth, her truth, my grandmother’s truth, or, you know, this whole thing about my truth, your truth,” the last words spoken in a high childlike pitch. “This stuff has to stop. It’s got to be the truth.”
Rustad fired Brodie the next Friday, justifying the move based on “her decision to publicly mock and belittle testimony from former residential school students, including by mimicking individuals recounting stories of abuses — including child sex abuse,” emboldening the members of the party who no longer tolerate factual statements.
Now, Brodie’s delivery could have been more polished. But if you listen to her 10 minutes of total speaking time on the podcast, she states elsewhere that she’s aware of and doesn’t contest the realities of residential schools. Her qualm is with the fact that no bodies have been found at the Kamloops residential school, and yet, there is strong pressure — in legal circles, and now in the BC Conservative party itself — to perpetuate the falsity that graves have been found there.
What Rustad did was latch onto a four-second clip, interpret it as a mockery of sexual abuse and use it as an excuse to fire a pesky MLA. Comical treatment by a guy who was kicked from his party for posting, despite believing in climate change, that the “case for CO2 being the control knob of global temperature gets weaker every day,” and who told the Vancouver Sun in December, “I’m trying to do politics differently by allowing our MLAs to be able to have differences.”
At very least, Brodie said something. Elsewhere in the conservative world, we don’t even see that much.
In Alberta, the United Conservative Party in charge of the province is still doling out grants to organizations on the basis of ethnicity — Indigenous and other minorities — to combat the vague notion of systemic racism promoted by the federal government, which often involves merely handing out government money to certain identity groups. Most recently, it’s opened a new courthouse with smudging capacity, effectively doubling the courtroom as a place of religious ceremony. No real pushback has followed.
In Ontario, also conservative-governed, the education system remains on near autopilot, with curriculum updates eroding away the western canon while integrating more materials to satisfy decolonial activists. The curriculum across all grades has been updated to bring in more discussions of Indigenous history and, in the sciences, “Indigenous knowledge” — which isn’t necessarily a problem in theory, but in practice is often presented with one-dimentional, rosy lens as the moral foil to immoral and irrational western culture and science. It doesn’t appear the government caucus is remotely interested in the issue.
Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Conservatives are promising to allow Indigenous groups to receive federal tax revenue for projects on their reserve land without attempting to change the status quo on the duty to consult. That would mean less tax revenue for the feds, with the same capacity of Indigenous groups to stall projects.
It also remains unclear whether the Conservatives plan to maintain the Liberal Indigenous procurement requirement that all government departments spend five per cent of their contracting funds on Indigenous businesses. Same for expensive funding deals, such as the revenue-sharing agreement between the feds and the Musqueam over the Vancouver International Airport.
How the federal Conservatives expect to build massive new infrastructure projects without untangling the Gordian knot that is Indigenous consultation, we don’t know.
The ultimate vulnerability of any conservative party in Canada is policy related to Indigenous issues, which currently cost the federal government nearly as much as the military. These issues have made vast gains in the past decade, with land-cessation agreements being signed away by the federal Liberals. And it’s been promoted at the cost of general Canadian heritage.
Part of why that happened was because opposition conservatives, sometimes government conservatives, couldn’t bring themselves to ask where the limit was. Brodie could see this, but couldn’t even get away with pointing out a fact.
National Post