The LNG Canada facility under construction in Kitimat, British Columbia
Climate Goals Face B.C. Election Backlash in Home of Greenpeace – B.C. Conservatives Have Upended Race With Focus on Unlocking Natural Resource Development
An unlikely political upstart in Canada’s third-largest province, expelled from his previous party for climate science skepticism, is within striking distance of winning power with promises to ditch environmental targets and unleash natural-resources development.
The surge in support for John Rustad’s Conservative Party of British Columbia ahead of the Oct. 19 election may have been helped by the popularity of the unaffiliated federal Conservatives. Victory would add to the roster of right-leaning premiers at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in Ottawa.
A Conservative government in BC might mark a bigger shift than anywhere else in the country. The province is famous for environmentalism — Vancouver is the birthplace of Greenpeace and home to Canada’s most famous climate activist, David Suzuki. David Eby, the current premier, unsuccessfully opposed the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline, and back in 2008 the province brought in one of North America’s first carbon taxes.
Although polls favor Eby’s left-leaning New Democratic Party, it’s close, and a spread between pollsters suggests the result remains unpredictable.
The public has endured inflation and strained local services, slower growth in an economy dragged by higher interest rates and lower exports, and a government that’s gone from surplus to a record C$9 billion ($6.5 billion) deficit. British Columbia, once rated AAA by S&P Global Ratings, has suffered three credit rating downgrades in three years.
Conservatives Have Surged in BC Polls
British Columbia’s Conservatives vault official opposition in election surprise
Source: Research Co.
The ruling NDP — whose origins lie in labor unions — is parrying criticism of its own mixed seven-year record in office. It’s running on blunting the cost of living with subsidies, tying the minimum wage to inflation, taxing home speculation, blocking Airbnb Inc.-style short-term rentals and using hydrocarbon revenues for a “clean economy transition fund.”
Rustad’s rise is also a stunning tale of revenge. The longtime representative of Nechako Lakes — a district 600 miles north of Vancouver in BC’s deep interior — was kicked out of the BC Liberal Party in 2022 on his birthday after sharing a social media post questioning carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. He took over the BC Conservative Party, then a marginal force in provincial politics. Before long it had leapfrogged his old party in the polls.
Acrimonious talks to merge the two groups failed, and by August the previously formidable Liberals — which had rebranded as BC United — gave up, withdrawing from the election in an effort to unite voters against the NDP.
Unlocking Natural Resources
In an interview with Bloomberg, Rustad said he won’t cut social, health or education spending — a majority of the budget. He’s also promising tax cuts and plans to deepen the deficit to more than C$10 billion in his first year.
His plan to balance BC’s budget over eight years is based on an optimistic 5.4% average GDP growth rate to 2030 — more than double the average rate of the past five years — fueled by axing CleanBC, the NDP plan to cut BC’s emissions 40% by 2030. Rustad said that would save as much as C$2.5 billion in government spending, then bring in billions in extra revenue by unlocking industrial projects.
Foremost among them is LNG Canada, a new liquefied natural gas project in the remote north that the federal government said may be worth C$40 billion — possibly the largest private investment in the country’s history. There’s a plan to double its size, but it’s proving tricky to power with BC’s zero-emission hydroelectricity instead of fossil fuels, because it would need a new transmission line, with one previous cost estimate at C$3 billion.
Not a problem if looser rules let them burn gas.
“In British Columbia, we could stop everything we do, and by next year the increases from China and India will swamp anything that we’ve done,” Rustad told Bloomberg. “So my perspective is we need to make sure we’re looking after people. And so for a changing climate, we need to be able to adapt to it.”
When he appeared on climate-skeptic Canadian influencer Jordan Peterson’s podcast, Rustad said: “How is it that we’ve convinced carbon-based beings that carbon is a problem?”
John Rustad Photographer: Ethan Cairns/Bloomberg
Rustad also talked up billions in extra revenue from streamlining mine permits — one of BC’s oldest industries and more prominent in the remoter parts of the province he hails from.
Asked about BC’s rural vote, Rustad says: “There’s no question, the NDP completely ignored it.”
Rustad also wants to ditch BC’s carbon tax to cut costs for businesses and consumers. That’s also the top rallying cry for federal Conservatives, who are trying to force a “carbon tax election” to topple Trudeau. Provincial carbon taxes are federally back-stopped, so to banish the tax Rustad would need the Conservative Party of Canada to take power.
“The top-of-mind issues that people are frustrated about are inflation and the cost of living, housing and health care,” Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia, said in an interview. “And what we’ve seen is that the federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has been able to connect those public concerns with the carbon tax. It’s given them something that they can focus their frustrations on.”
Even the climate-conscious NDP has pivoted away from defending the carbon tax to pledging they would repeal it for consumers — but unlike the Conservatives, they would shift the burden to corporate “polluters.”
In his plan to speed up business, Rustad has also taken issue with BC’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act because it causes “friction”. It requires government to seek Indigenous people’s “free, prior and informed consent” to implement measures that may affect BC’s more than 200 Indigenous communities.
Rustad’s Conservatives include Indigenous candidates, and he talks about supporting economic reconciliation — the material, financial side of redressing Canada’s colonial injustices. But some First Nations leaders have called his platform “dangerous” for pitting British Columbians against each other.
Relentless Controversies
Rustad’s biggest weak point may be the controversial things said my members of his team, leading to relentless stories since they’ve been thrust into the spotlight.
Despite his dry, phlegmatic style, the same goes for Rustad himself. He’s said he regretted getting the “so-called” Covid-19 vaccine, and a clip showed him seeming to go along with an activist’s concept of “Nuremberg 2.0” — trials for officials who oversaw pandemic health measures. Rustad apologized and said he “misunderstood” the question.
Rival party staffers gave out BC Conservative-branded tinfoil hats after a candidate’s shared posts described 5G wireless signals as a weapon, according to local media. She was ousted, but another candidate who claimed vaccines can cause a type of AIDS remains part of the caucus.
Another apologized last week for posts including one in 2015 calling Palestinians “inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs.”
In communities like Metro Vancouver, some of the most diverse in North America, that kind of thing may jeopardize Rustad’s path to power.
But Rustad is also being cheered on by what Harrison described as an “accidental collection of voters who share frustration with the cost of living, the cost of housing, emergency room closures” — which could span from suburban families who judge the economy isn’t working for them to BC’s wealthiest, including billionaire Lululemon Athletica Inc founder Chip Wilson.
If Rustad pulls it off, his unorthodox strategy to turn one of Canada’s progressive strongholds conservative will reverberate with those fighting federal politics in the nation’s capital 3,000 miles away.
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“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
President Donald Trump said Thursday that changes are coming to his aggressive immigration policies after complaints from farmers and business owners.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday morning. “In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”
Later Thursday, Trump made it clear that businesses need workers.
“Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers – they’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that,” the president said.
He added: “We can’t take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don’t have, maybe, what they’re supposed to have.”
Just how Trump may change his approach to immigration enforcement remains unclear, but he said he wants to help farmers and business owners.
“You go into a farm and you look and people, they’ve been there for 20 or 25 years and they work great and the owner of the farm loves them and you’re supposed to throw them out. You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, the murderers from prisons and everything else,” Trump said.
Trump said changes would be coming soon, but gave little detail on how policies could change.
“So we’re going to have an order on that pretty soon – we can’t do that to our farmers and leisure too, hotels, we’re going to have to use a lot of common sense on that.”
In a later post on Truth Social, Trump said illegal immigration had destroyed American institutions.
“Biden let 21 Million Unvetted, Illegal Aliens flood into the Country from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists. This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” the president wrote. “They have stolen American Jobs, consumed BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in Free Welfare, and turned once idyllic Communities, like Springfield, Ohio, into Third World Nightmares.”
He added that deportations would continue: “I campaigned on, and received a Historic Mandate for, the largest Mass Deportation Program in American History. Polling shows overwhelming Public Support for getting the Illegals out, and that is exactly what we will do. As Commander-in-Chief, I will always protect and defend the Heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, whose work has already resulted in the Most Secure Border in American History. Anyone who assaults or attacks an ICE or Border Agent will do hard time in jail. Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you. Saving America is not negotiable!”
For years, Canada’s political class sold us on the idea that carbon taxes were clever policy. Not just a tool to cut emissions, but a fair one – tax the polluters, then cycle the money back to regular folks, especially those with thinner wallets.
It wasn’t a perfect system. The focus-group-tested line embraced for years by the Trudeau Liberals made no sense at all: we’re taxing you so we can put more money back in your pocketbooks. What the hell? If you care so much about my taxes being low, just cut them already. Somehow, it took years and years of this line being repeated for its internal contradiction to become evident to all.
Yet, even many strategic conservative minds could see the thinking had internal logic. You could sell it at a town hall. As an editorial team member at an influential news organization when B.C. got its carbon tax in 2008, I bought into the concept too.
And now? That whole model has been thrown overboard, by the very parties had long defended it with a straight face and an arch tone. In both Ottawa and Victoria in 2025, progressive governments facing political survival abandoned the idea of climate policy as a matter of fairness, opting instead for tactical concessions meant to blunt the momentum of their foes.
The result: lower-income Canadians who had grown accustomed to carbon tax rebates as a dependable backstop are waking up to find the support gone. And higher earners? They just got a tidy little gift from the state.
The betrayal is worse in B.C.
This new chart from economist Ken Peacock tells the story. He shared it last week at the B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
What is shows is that scrapping the carbon tax means the poor are poorer. The treasury is emptier.
What about the rich?
Yup, you guessed it: richer.
Scrubbing the B.C. consumer carbon tax leaves the lowest earning 20 percent of households $830 per year poorer, while the top one-fifth gain $959.
“Climate leader” British Columbia’s approach was supposed to be the gold standard: a revenue-neutral carbon tax, accepted by industry, supported by voters, and engineered to send the right price signal without growing the size of government.
That pact broke somewhere along the way.
Instead of returning the money, the provincial government slowly transformed the tax into a $2 billion annual cash cow. And when Mark Carney won the federal election, B.C. Premier David Eby, boxed in by his own pledge, scrapped the tax like a man dropping ballast from a sinking balloon. Gone. No replacement. No protections for those who need them most.
Filling the gas tank, on the other hand, is noticeably cheaper. Of course, if you can’t afford a car that might not be apparent.
Spare a thought for the climate activists who spent 15 years flogging this policy, only to watch it get tossed aside like a stack of briefing notes on a Friday afternoon.
Who could not conclude that the environmental left has been played. For a political movement that prides itself on idealism, it’s a brutal lesson in realpolitik: when power’s on the line, principles are negotiable.
But here’s the thing: maybe the carbon tax model deserved a rethink. Maybe it’s time for a grown-up look at what actually works
With B.C. now reviewing its CleanBC policies, here’s a basic question: what’s working, and what’s not?
A lot of emission reductions in this province didn’t come from government fiat. They were the result of business-led innovation: more efficient technology, cleaner fuels, and capital discipline.
That, plus a hefty dose of offshoring. We’ve pushed our industrial emissions onto other jurisdictions, then shipped the finished goods back without attaching any climate cost. This contradiction particularly helped to fuel the push to dump carbon pricing as a failed solution.
The progressives’ choice was made once the anti-tax arguments could no longer be refuted: to limit losses it would be necessary to deep six an unpopular strand of the overall carbon strategy. This, to save the rest. That’s why policies like the federal emissions cap haven’t also been abandoned.
To give another example, it’s also why British Columbia’s aviation sector is in a flap over the issue of sustainable aviation fuel. Despite years of aspirational policy, low emissions jet fuel blends remain more scarce than a long-haul cabin upgrade. The policy’s designers correctly anticipated that refiners would never be able to meet the imposed demand, and so as an alternative they provided a complex carbon credit trading scheme that will make the cost of flying more expensive. For those with a choice, nearby airport hubs in the United States where these policies do not apply will become an attractive alternative, while remote communities that have no choice in the matter will simply have to eat the cost. (Needless to say, if emissions reduction is your goal this policy isn’t needed anyways, since the decisions that matter in reducing global aviation emissions aren’t made in B.C. and never will be.)
I’m not showing up to bash those who have been genuinely trying to figure things out, and found themselves in a world of policy that is more complicated and unpredictable than they realized. Simply put, the chapter is closing on an era of energy policy naïveté.
The brutally honest action by Eby and Carney to eject carbon taxes for their own political survival could be read as a signal that it’s now okay to have an honest public conversation. Let’s insist on that. For years now, debate has been constrained in part by a particular form of linguistic tyranny, awash in terminology designed to cow the questioner into silence. “So you have an issue with clean policies, do you? What kind of dirty reprobate are you?” “Only a monster doesn’t want their aviation fuel to be sustainable.” Etc. Now is the moment to move on from that, and widen the field of discourse.
Ditching bad policy is also a signal that just maybe a better approach is to start by embracing a robust sense of the possibilities for energy to improve lives and empower all of the solutions needed for tomorrow’s problems. Because that’s the only way the conversation will ever get real.
Slogans, wildly aspirational goal setting and the habit of refusing to acknowledge how the world really works have been getting us nowhere. Petroleum products will continue to obey Yergin’s Law: oil always gets to market. China and India will grow their economies using reliable energy they can afford, having recently approved the construction of the most new coal power plants in a decade amid energy security concerns. Japan, which has practically worn itself out pleading for natural gas from Canada, isn’t waiting for the help of last-finishing nice guys to guarantee energy security: today, they are buying 8% of their LNG imports from the evil Putin regime.
Meanwhile, we’re in the worst of both worlds: our courageous carbon tax policy that was positioned as trailblazing not just for B.C. residents but for the world as a whole – climate leadership! – is gone, the poorest are puzzling over why things feel even more expensive, and nobody knows what comes next.
Ken-Peacock- B.C. Chamber of Commerce annual gathering in Nanaimo.
