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BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
170. John Rustad: Are the BC Conservatives Ready to Govern?
Aaron speaks with BC Conservative Leader John Rustad on climate change, his interview with Jordan Peterson, whether he would fire Bonnie Henry and his solutions for housing, taxes, and immigration. John Rustad critiques the current NDP government's spending, healthcare failures, and drug policies.
Do you feel that you are covered fairly in the media?
John Rustad:We've got a government, quite frankly, that has gone on an unbelievable spending spree. These guys are completely incompetent, but that's to be expected. Ndp math is always that way.
Aaron Pete:Almost exactly two years ago, kevin Falcon removed you from the Liberal caucus. Can you reflect on that period, because obviously a lot's transpired since then?
John Rustad:It's like anything Once you introduce a tax, it's almost impossible to get rid of, and governments are always desperate for money when something isn't working. Bring it to an end, get rid of it.
Aaron Pete:You've been involved in government for many years. Do you have any regrets? Things you would have done differently had you known what you know now. That just stands out.
John Rustad:I'm not worried about what has gone on so much in the past. I'm not worried about, you know, what has gone on so much in the past. I'm worried about making sure that we do everything we can to build that future for people in British Columbia.
Aaron Pete:Do you believe in man-made climate change?
John Rustad:David Eby believes very strongly that he can solve the weather problems by taxing you higher. He can stop there being wildfires by taxing.
Aaron Pete:Would you fire Bonnie Henry? Today's episode is made possible in part by support from Enbridge, fueling quality of life in British Columbia for over 65 years. John, it is an honour to sit down with you today. I'm very grateful that you were able to find the time to come out and meet with us today. I'm wondering if you could perhaps first start by introducing yourself.
John Rustad:Sure Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on today. I think it's a great honour for me as well to be able to be here. So I'm John Rustad, I'm the MLA for Nijako Lakes and I am the leader of the Conservative Party of British Columbia.
Aaron Pete:Would you mind first just telling us a little bit about your background and who you are?
John Rustad:Well, I guess that depends on how far back you want to go. Let's go to the beginning. I've spent most of my life pre-politics in the forest sector. In one aspect or another, I've done everything from tree planting to timber supply analysis, from fighting fires to watershed analysis and development plans. So I've done a lot in terms of engagement in forestry, including, you know, working as a dangerous snag faller, doing a whole bunch of various things.
John Rustad:In my time before politics, I ran my own company for a number of years, western Geographic Information Systems, where I had an office in Houston, bc, and an office in Prince George. And then, but ultimately in the year 2000, I sat down with my wife and I was so unhappy with where the province was going that I said what do you think about moving to Calgary? It would be 15% right on the bottom line in terms of profitability for the work I was doing. We had a long talk about it and ultimately my whole family was in Prince George, her parents were in Prince George, I've got a woodlot license and I was involved in some other deals at the time, and so I thought, okay, I don't want to have to be chased out of the province. So that left me two options either live with it or get involved and try to change it.
John Rustad:And so politics was never an ambition of mine. But I decided, okay, so if somebody's got to step up to the plate and try to make some changes, so I decided I would get involved in politics. So I became a school trustee in 2002 and discovered I actually enjoy politics, which was strange for me because I had a huge phobia of public speaking, that whole side of things. And then I ran for provincial politics in 2005, and I've been representing my area since then. Since 2005. First riding was called Prince George Almanica and then in 2009, that changed as my riding shifted further west and I now represent the riding on the Chaco Lakes. During that time of being in provincial politics, I also was the Minister for Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation for just over four years, and I've had a very short stint as Minister of Forest, lands and Natural Resource Operations.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. Would you mind walking us through your record, because I think it's interesting that all of the major party leaders do have a record being in government and I'm wondering if you could reflect on that.
John Rustad:Sure, Well, being in government is quite a different experience. It's nothing quite like it. You know, you have your ministry, you have the various things you're doing, as well as you're on committees you're doing. You know the work through there and then, of course, sitting around the cabinet table making decisions. And I'll never forget the decision we made around Site C, for example, and one of the comments I made because I was the Minister for Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation at the time was the fact that this project will forever change. The landscape will ever change, for the nations impacted their opportunity for hunting and fishing their traditional way in that area.
John Rustad:However, you have to weigh these things out based on what is in the best interest of all British Columbians, and so, even though there were those issues, we had to weigh out the fact that it's the right thing to do for us as a province. Now, the balloon budget there's lots we can talk about associated with that. But the other thing that's really unique is when you get these opportunities, people say, oh, what are you proud about? Or what's the thing that really sticks out in your mind in terms of the work that you do as a minister? And I thought about it and I thought, you know there are so many things I mean I signed 435 agreements with First Nations and there's so many of those things that were important but the one that really stuck out in my mind was an agreement that was signed with one of the chiefs associated with the natural gas pipelines out to the West Coast and the chief was in tears signing the agreement and I thought, oh my gosh, what have we done like?
John Rustad:This isn't right. And the chief said no, no, you don't understand. The week before, five people, five youth, had attempted suicide and one, unfortunately, had tragically died. And he looked at this from a perspective of how this was making a difference for people and building that future and building that hope. And I think that really stuck to me. It really was an emotional sort of attachment for me in terms of what a difference that these agreements can actually make.
Aaron Pete:Fantastic. August 18th 2022, almost exactly two years ago Kevin Falcon removed you from the Liberal caucus. Can you reflect on that period, Because obviously a lot's transpired since caucus? Can you reflect on that period, Because obviously a lot's transpired since then? Can you reflect on that time?
John Rustad:Sure. So what led up to that? After Kevin had won the leadership race and asked me to carry on with being the critic for forest lands and natural resource operations. So I was going through doing that work, but there was an issue that came up federally called the Farm Emissions Reduction Strategy, which talked about reducing or eliminating the use of nitrogen-based fertilizer as well as excuse the expression, but stopping cows from farting and belching, because somehow that was changing the weather and this would have had a very significant impact on my riding, because 35% of the economic activity in my riding is agriculture, particularly cow-calf operations.
John Rustad:So I tried to have a conversation within the existing party I was in the BC Liberals at the time, now, of course, the College United Party and that was in April, and then in May I tried again, june, I tried again, and it's supposed to be a planning session in July and that got cancelled. And so I started thinking about this and I thought, okay, well, I better start actually putting some information out there and trying to generate a conversation. So I did a retweet of a Patrick Moore tweet which questioned the role of CO2 and talked a little bit about the Great Barrier Reef From that. That was on a Sunday and I didn't really think anything about it, right? So on the Wednesday I was actually taking the day off because the next day was my birthday and my phone lit up and I was like, okay, they can wait, right, it's a day off, I'm not going to worry about it. So that night, of course, I went through messages and Kevin Falcon was obviously upset. He was mad that I hadn't been in touch with them, and I get it. Nobody likes to be put off when there's an issue they need to deal with. So I sent him a note and said when would you like to talk? We made arrangements for the next day.
John Rustad:So when I talked to him the next day which was my birthday, actually and I explained the situation to him and he said look, you've got to take down this tweet. And I'd even forgotten about the tweet. I said what tweet? And oh yes, it was the retweet that he was worried about. And he said look, here's the situation. This is a negative impact for my riding. I need to be able to speak out on behalf of my constituents.
John Rustad:And he said you're not allowed to do that. He said you have to follow our party position and our caucus. You know, we had never had a discussion under Kevin Falcon. But he said our caucus is committed to being leaders in fighting climate change, and being leaders, you know, both provincially and internationally, and you're not allowed to come out and say anything different. And I said well, I'm sorry, but I was elected to represent my constituents. That is the job I need to do. He said okay, well, then, you have a choice. He said, and he hung up on me and half an hour later I was kicked out of caucus, and so that was the process. And so I thought well, you know, interesting thing to do on my birthday, I suppose. But that's wild.
John Rustad:But that was, uh, that was what happened. And then, after that, uh, I started thinking about it and I thought, okay, well, I've got a number of options. Obviously I don't need to be doing this, I could just retire, um. But I started thinking about it and it got back to the same reason why I got involved in politics in the first place, which is I wasn't happy with where things are going.
John Rustad:It's the NDPs that are destroying this province and I thought Falcon and the BC United could not win. They can't win this election, and if they can't win this election, we've got a divided group. We're going to be in real trouble, even going into a 2028 election. So somebody needs to do something about it. And so I had a long talk with my wife and I said you know, look, I can retire this option's up to you. I've been in politics a long time. What would you like me to do? And she said I want you to go after leadership, I want you to carry on with the work that you started. And so I said well, you know what it means. It means I'm not going to be home a lot. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of stress. And she said I fully support you 100%, you need to be doing this. So I said, okay.
John Rustad:So then, in the fall of 2022, sitting as an independent, I actually explored various options. I actually even connected with the old Social Credit Party and I thought, you know, should this be the vehicle that we do in British Columbia? And the people that were in charge of that old party were even farther left than the BC Liberals were and they weren't willing to open it up for membership. So I thought, okay, that's not going anywhere. And that's when I took a serious look at the Conservative Party of British Columbia and ultimately made the decision to join them in February of 2023. The leader stepped down in late February, creating the opportunity for a leadership race, and I took over the leadership of the party at the end of March of 2023.
Aaron Pete:Okay, I want to go a little bit back. Was it at all difficult? You'd served with the BC Liberals for a very long time. Was it at all difficult? You'd served with the BC Liberals for a very long time.
John Rustad:And I'm just wondering was there any hurt feelings, frustration or negativity towards the fact that, like one day, all of a sudden you're not a part of this party that you'd served with for quite a long period of time. Yeah, I'd been a member of the party for over 22 years and obviously served with them, including cabinet positions, for over 18 years and I mean I was ticked right. I was annoyed about getting kicked out, but at the same time you know it's like well, he's doing what he needs to do. I don't harbor any hard feelings or anything like that about the old party. It is what it is, matter of fact in many ways.
John Rustad:Now, today, when I look back at what's happened to that party, I actually pretty bad for them. I mean many of these people I spent many years working together with and you know some of them I still consider friends, even though you know they can, they attack me on a regular basis. But you know, I look at it and I think you know it's. It was a proud institution. That was a coalition government, a coalition party that has completely fallen apart and it it's too bad. But at the same time, people are looking for change. They're looking for something different.
Aaron Pete:I've had Daryl Plekison, who I believe you know, and he's had a similar experience with the BC Liberal Party, and one of the things that stood out to me in my conversations with him was that there's this kind of challenge between having party positions but allowing people to have independent voices who are trying to represent their local community, and that community's experience might be different than what the party's objective is. How do you, as a leader, try and balance those interests?
John Rustad:You know it's interesting Most leaders are threatened by differing opinions or by differing views coming forward, and so, for example, if you go to any riding in this province in this next election and you listen to one of the NDP candidates whether it's one of their MLAs running for re-election or one of the new candidates they'll all be saying the same thing. There'll be no variation, there'll be no differences. And if you listen to the BC United candidates, it'll be the same thing. There'll be no variation. They'll all be saying the same thing.
John Rustad:Both those parties believe that they want to elect people that represent the party to the riding, and they don't allow free votes in the legislature. They don't allow people to speak up against their position, where I just think that's wrong. That's not what democracy should be. And so one of the things I will be doing on day one of this election is asking all of our candidates to take a pledge that their number one priority will always be their riding, speaking on behalf of the riding and voting on behalf of the riding. And the reason for that is we have 93 different regions around this province. It is not possible that all of them would have the same priorities and the same issues.
John Rustad:Now, obviously we need to come together to work together to get things done and uh, but that's what leadership is about working through those differences, working and, but allowing people to be able to have that voice to represent their riding and some of those things you know are going to be big issues that are being, you know, controversial provincially and I fully expect that. You know there'll be free votes. There may be people who vote against what we are proposing to do, and but that's okay. It's okay to have those votes. Now if there's too many, that's obviously a problem because you can't get it done. But the hope is that we can work through and do that and do that in an open way.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, the critics of that kind of approach have commented. Like Kevin Falcon has said, you have people who have wild views and not clamping down on it might have people go. Well, that's a controversial party. When it might just be one person having a personal perspective, how do you kind of balance that?
John Rustad:when it does feel like there's a push on you and your party that like, oh, you might have some people with extreme views, how do you kind of balance that and make sure you know I find it interesting and the NDP like to use that language a lot and, basically, if their perspective is, anybody that doesn't agree with them is an extreme view, so I don't mind that. Okay, when you look at a government that you know has created a crisis in housing and a crisis in affordability, a crisis in health care, that you know believes that you know we should have free drugs and decriminalization as a way to be able to improve society, when it's absolutely destroying lives and families, and they call us, you know, radical. Okay, wait a second here. Let's have a look at the, at the results of what. What's actually going on.
John Rustad:My perspective, though, is is it's okay to have different perspectives? It's okay to have people from from different walks of life, like you, look at the conservative party today in british columbia. We have three indigenous candidates, we've got three, got three black ladies running for us. We have more diversification than I think any party has ever had from right across the whole spectrum, and we've got lots of young people. We've got lots of people with experience. I'm actually really proud of the group that we've put together and, yeah, there's going to be some differing views, and that's okay.
Aaron Pete:Rob Shaw from the ORCA wrote that there is an effort to oust you from the BC Conservative ranks. Can you comment on?
John Rustad:this. Rob Shaw is somewhat misleading in his statement there. We actually did some research in this, and so what's happened is somebody sent out a letter to some of our members talking about, you know, fire John Rustad, and I laughed when I looked at it and I thought, yeah, okay, right, sir, I'm sure this is coming from members. First of all, it's pretty expensive to send out a mail out to different houses, so it's not just going to be a random person doing this. So we actually did some digging, we looked into the website, we looked into the background, and what we discovered is a contractor who is doing work for another political party that is involved in sending this information out, and so we're collecting all that information, including the breach to our membership list, and we'll be turning that over to the appropriate authorities because that's illegal.
Aaron Pete:Wow, okay. Do you feel that you are covered fairly in the media?
John Rustad:Oh my, the media should just love me and say everything that's great, right? I mean, look, the reality is the media has got a tough job to do and many of the media, you know, have a bias, and I get that right In terms of things. I think, quite frankly, that I've been more than fairly covered, you know, certainly over the last six months, eight months a year in terms of it, and some of the media has turned negative against us now and that's to be expected. So I don't have any bone to pick with the media. There was one time where I'd actually called them out because David Eby printed an outright lie about our party saying that we were going to cut spending on healthcare. I mean, it was just an outright lie. They've come on radio and said that we're going to bring back bridge tolls. Like where's that from? That's just another outright lie by the NDP government.
John Rustad:And there was a media outlet, one media outlet in particular, that just carte blanche printed it and used that line and I'm like how could you do that? That's an outright lie. There's no evidence to suggest that all you're doing is supporting a lie from the NDP. And so I called them out on it and they weren't happy about me calling them out on it, but you know I'm going to do that. I learned a long time ago, though, that you don't pick a fight with people that buy ink by the gallon, right? They're going to have their opinion, they're going to say what they're going to say, and that's fine. We're just going to fight. We're going to get our message out. We're going to keep talking about the things that are important. I'm not going to pick a fight with the media, however, when it's something blatant like that that perpetuates a lie, yeah, I'm going to call them out on it.
Aaron Pete:One other interesting aspect that recently happened is you got to speak with Jordan Peterson and I'm super impressed. That seems like an honor. I've listened to him. He influenced me starting this show. I think that he's a really good influence for people who want to pull up their bootstraps and get to work and start to make a difference in their community. You can disagree with some of his perspectives, but I think it's important that we hear from voices and I believe he's a true intellectual. That's a good example. What was that experience?
John Rustad:like. There's no question. He is one of the top intellectuals in the country Controversial, he's taken some controversial positions. Some people really dislike him, some people really love him, and anybody that puts themselves out there is going to have that kind of a reaction, because you can't be in the middle of the road trying to get everybody to like you and do what he's doing. So it was quite unique. I've actually met him twice now. That was the first time, of course, doing an interview with him, and I thought you know he's a really interesting individual. I would love to spend some more time actually talking to him about a wide range of things, because he's a deep thinker, he loves to challenge you and you know he's obviously also got a perspective in terms of where society is going as well. So I'm actually really looking forward to that interview coming out. I think it'll be very interesting. People will really enjoy it when they see it.
John Rustad:Hopefully that'll be out before too long.
Aaron Pete:Yes, I'm very excited for that. Affordability is, of course, a topic constantly in the news. How will you approach housing in this regard? Affordability and, of course, a topic constantly in the news. How will you approach housing?
John Rustad:in this regard. Affordability and housing obviously are very much tied together. And look, I mean inflation for just food, for example, just in the last couple of years, has gone up like 23%. I mean, has your wages gone up by 23%? No, and so that means that's a direct hit to people's bottom line, and today close to half the people in this province are just are literally struggling to put food on the table and make their ends meet, and so affordability is a huge, huge issue. Government is not going to solve the problem by taxing you more money. They can't solve the problem by saying we're going to offer you help by taking money from you.
John Rustad:There was an old I don't you're too young to probably remember a fellow named Paul Harvey.
John Rustad:Paul Harvey was a broadcaster back in the 80s and 90s and he had us this segment that he'd call, and now the rest of the story, and one of the lines he used in there that I thought was quite interesting, was government giving you help is like giving yourself a blood transfusion from your right arm to your left arm. Only when government does it, they manage to spill half of it, and so this is the challenge. So what we need to do with government. We actually need to be looking at significant tax reductions and tax relief for people to be able to help with affordability. It's one of the reasons why we want to get rid of the carbon tax. It's one of the reasons why we want to get rid of the carbon tax and I say this line many, many times, which is David Eby believes very strongly that he can solve the weather problems by taxing you higher. He can stop there being wildfires by taxing you more. He can stop there being floods by taxing you more and, I'm sorry, taxing people into poverty will not change the weather.
Aaron Pete:How do you respond to the fact that you were part of the BC Liberals that introduced the carbon tax?
John Rustad:Well, the carbon tax originally was supposed to be revenue neutral and at the time I bought into it for that purpose. But also I looked at it from a perspective of if we're going to be going down a road of carbon pricing. It has the potential to mean significant investments in things like forestry and better forest management, and I thought this could be very beneficial for my riding. Of course, it's now just become a cash cow. It stopped being revenue neutral. Actually, I think it was stopped being revenue neutral when Kevin Falcon was finance minister.
John Rustad:However, you know I'm going to look back at it and I think no, that was actually not the right thing to do. It's like anything Once you introduce a tax, it's almost impossible to get rid of, and governments are always desperate for money, so they will always be looking at a way to be able to enhance and use taxes. So at the time I thought, okay, I can see how I can make this work, but certainly the end result has not turned out the way I hoped it would, and so when something isn't working, bring it to an end, get rid of it. It doesn't make any sense.
Aaron Pete:How do you bring down taxes while manag ing the?
John Rustad:budget An $8 billion deficit. I mean, look, we've got a government, quite frankly, that has gone on an unbelievable spending spree. Even their own ministers could not explain where they were spending money, because they were just shoveling it out of the back of a truck so fast. I mean, it's that crazy what this government has done. These guys are completely incompetent, but that's to be expected. Ndp math is always that way. They can never figure out exactly how to do things. They just shovel it out the door and hope for results.
John Rustad:So, yeah, there's going to have to be a, you know, a very, very specific look at how we address some of that gap, some of that NDV spending.
John Rustad:The biggest thing we need to be doing is actually getting our economy going, and so we should talk about, you know, those sorts of things in terms of how we do that, because we need to be able to generate revenue, but we can't do that with taxation. We need to be able to do it through economic activity and through growth. So part of what we need to do, of course, is working towards reducing that deficit, but we also need to be doing significant tax relief. We can't go to people and say we're going to continue to tax you into poverty so that we can address that misspending. We're going to have to make some tough decisions, but that has to come from a place of how do we help people with their day-to-day lives? How do we make sure that the person that's struggling to put food on the table, we can make their life just a little bit easier by doing that relief. And another big piece of affordability as well is wages. Wages have to actually go up in this province.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. When David Eby was on the podcast, one of the questions I had for him was that the government's credit rating has significantly gone down since they've been in power, and I asked him how do you respond to this? This is obviously not good and his response was basically we're investing in infrastructure, and infrastructure investments are good investments that are going to benefit our community and our province over the long term. So it's worth getting a reduced credit rating score if it means these benefits, these jobs and these investments into our province into the future. How do you respond to that?
John Rustad:Well, I think that's just a pure line of BS and polyspin, because the reality is it's not just infrastructure spending, it's massive credit card spending. They are spending a tremendous amount on their operating budget, not just on the capital budget, and that means what the difference there is? Most people don't distinguish the difference between it. If I'm building a new hospital, that is an investment in the future, that is a capital investment. If I'm paying for the largest number of spin doctors in my advertising in my premier's budget, that is operating, that's the credit card, and what he's doing is he's ringing up operating. That's the credit card, and what he's doing is he's ringing up that bill on the credit card side, spending on all these government services that, quite frankly, are not helping people and are creating huge problems. That's where the biggest problem is.
John Rustad:Yes, of course we've got to spend on on capital, on on infrastructure. We need that. We need the new hospitals, we need to hire, expand highway one, right Highway 1 in terms of the three-leaning or even four-leaning. There's many things that have to get done and that means we're going to have to take on some debt, but the key is to get the other spending under control within government and also to look at generating those additional revenues. If you're spending money that is going to help generate revenue generate new revenue, generate resource revenue, generate investment revenue generate whether it's tech investment, whatever that may be that's not a bad thing as long as it's not a subsidy. But if you're spending money just because you want to put out lots of spin, like this government is doing, yeah, you know what? I think our tax dollars could be spent better.
Aaron Pete:BC United leader, kevin Falcon, has proposed addressing income tax and doing huge tax cuts. What's your response to that?
John Rustad:We do need to do some tax relief. There's no question in my mind. But when I look at a leader that says I'm going to cut $5 billion out of income taxes and I'm going to cut $3 billion out of income taxes and I'm going to cut $3 billion out of gas taxes and I'm going to balance the budget, which is an $8 billion, and I suspect it would cost $10 billion by March, target by, and I'm going to do this in four years, so he's going to be cutting $18 billion out of the budget. The budget is $85 billion. That's a 20% to 25% reduction.
John Rustad:85% of the spending on our budget is healthcare, education and social programs. So exactly where is that money going to come from? And so I mean it's being completely unrealistic. And I get it right. I mean it's a party that's in fourth place. They're trying to figure out how to be relevant. We're going to be making sure that you know, from our perspective, we're going to have some very targeted tax relief that's going to be very meaningful for people on their affordability and their day-to-day lives.
Aaron Pete:Interesting Going back to housing. How do we address this crisis?
John Rustad:Yeah, well, you know it's interesting. David Eby's approach is saying that the private sector has no role in housing. Well, wait a second here. The government does not have the money to deal with housing. I mean, he's completely unrealistic and it's just his socialistic perspective that he thinks government should be running everything and he's an authoritarian boot. I mean, two generations ago we would have called that a communist, but most people don't think about that terms anymore. But it is. He's a hardcore socialist. He wants government to have their fingers in anything and everything that's happening.
John Rustad:My perspective is we have become so restrictive and so problematic that investors, people that, whether it's mom and pop that want to build an extra unit or whether it is a developer that wants to put in 1,000 units of housing, they are not looking at working in British Columbia, they're looking at leaving British Columbia. Housing starts, for example, in this province, are in decline. They're not increasing, even though we have a massive shortage in terms of housing. So we need to be looking at how do we change that scenario. How do we drive the investment that's needed to create the housing? So there's a number of things we're going to do. First of all, we want to work with communities to look at changing the official community plans so that we do pre-zoning for densification, so that people, when they're buying into a neighborhood, they know what that densification is going to be, they know what they're buying into and when somebody wants to come by and build multiple family units, or maybe apartments and rental units, that zoning is already in place for it and so you don't have to go through years of rezoning process. You can go through a few months to get your permits and move forward.
John Rustad:As a government, we have to come to the table with money for water and sewer. Those are the two critical things for doing any kind of development, and so we're going to make sure that we come to the table and help with that. So we need to reduce that permitting time, that structure that's in place. We need to reduce that permitting time, that structure that's in place. We need to come to the table with money for water and sewer. We actually need to look at our building code. There are many things in our building code that are just adding cost to new housing, that are not adding value to a house, and so we want to make sure that we have good quality, livable, affordable homes being built, not homes that are built based on ideology. So there's some changes that are needed there. There's changes within our government structure as well that need to be looked at, including how we make sure BC Hydro can be more responsive to being a hookup. I mean, when you're making a project, you can't be waiting a year and a half for BC Hydro to deliver power. You've got to be able to have these things happen in a timely way.
John Rustad:So there's a lot of things that need to be done, but I think the biggest problem is when I go to developers and I say, how do we build more housing? We need to double housing starts in the province. How do we do that? They look at me and say we don't have the people. We don't have the people to actually build that many homes, and so we need to be looking at immigration as well, and so I actually think, as a province, we need to take control of our own immigration, just like Quebec does. Instead of those decisions being made 3,000 miles away, let's make them here in British Columbia, and let's also look at the skill sets that immigrants have coming in. Let's look at how we pre-qualify those people from their institutions that they get the training from or their experience, so when they come in they can start working right away in the province. And let's get people in that we need to fill these positions. I mean we need everything from truck drivers to teachers, from doctors to carpenters, I mean, and everything in between. And so let's make sure, as we're looking at immigration, that we're fitting those needs so that we can deal with the fact that we need to be able to bring more people in to build housing in this province to help deal with this critical shortage that we have.
John Rustad:There's one other component. Sorry for going on a bit of a long rant on this, but a lot of our rental stock in British Columbia was built in the 60s and 70s and there was a federal program that was in place at the time that helped with the rapid depreciation of capital, which allowed investment, allowed to get back to a profit much faster and really encouraged that kind of investment. These are the types of programs we're going to be looking at again so that we can spark that investment in rental housing, because, at the end of the day, right now we've got like what a 0.1% vacancy rate. If that, and when you have more demand than you have supply. That's going to mean significantly higher rents over time. So we need to build out a lot of rental stocks so that we can get a balance back in the market, and that'll help to stabilize or maybe even bring down rental prices.
Aaron Pete:Going back just a little bit to your comments about controlling our own immigration and what that process might look like, do you think that that's a controversial position for BC to start to manage its own immigration process?
John Rustad:Of course it is, but it's the right thing to do. That's why I say, as the Conservative Party it's not about being Conservative or Liberal or NDP or Green for that matter, it's just doing what's right, fighting for the average everyday person. And that's what we need to be focused on just to bring back that common sense change to British Columbia so that we have control of our own destiny and our own future. And there's other things we need to be working on on a national scale as well.
John Rustad:It's easier for British Columbia to trade with the United States than it is with other provinces, and that's wrong. We have no sense of who we are as a country, and so actually I want British Columbia to take the lead in creating a Canada-wide free trade agreement. Let's start figuring out how we actually work as a country and how we can actually support each other in trade of goods and open up our borders like we do, quite frankly, with the United States and other jurisdictions. It would help with the cross-border trade, or cross-the-country trade, and help to actually get a better sense for people that we are this great country because we are the best country in the world, and so British Columbia, I think, can take a lead in terms of creating that opportunity.
Aaron Pete:I agree with you On the housing front. I'd like to ask you about BC Housing. I am a councillor with my community, chihuahua First Nation. We've applied to the Indigenous Housing Fund through BC Housing and we're hoping to hear back in September of this year, and so one of the pieces that I see as a huge benefit for First Nation communities is this massive investment in Indigenous housing. It's technically a federal responsibility, but the investments have never really come to fruition.
Aaron Pete:Cmhc provides funding, but it's very minimal, and then it's on the mortgagee to try and manage that, and these homes were never built to code. They're not required to be built to code because they're on reserve, and so the quality when I joined in september 2022 was horrible. Like nobody had ever invested in maintaining these homes. There was never big investments in making sure they were built to any high quality of standard, and there's been a big change with this indigenous housing fund. Like looking at some of the images of what we're going to be able to potentially build is going to be beautiful units for our members and it's going to allow them to return to their community, but then there's also going to be investments in the operations and maintenance of the units so that they can actually have a high quality of life over the future. We know that Indigenous communities represent a huge population of homeless individuals in British Columbia and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the Indigenous Housing Fund and how BC Housing operates.
John Rustad:So I'm fully in support of the idea of working with Indigenous communities to actually create housing and make sure that that can be done, so it's something that needs to be done. We started doing a little bit of that when I was the minister way back in 2016 in BC, and so, yeah, I'd love to see us be able to do that. When it comes to BC housing, though, I've got some real hard questions that need to be answered. So, for example, we talked about this during the last question period of the spring session. There were three hotels in Prince George which were purchased by a couple of individuals and then flipped to BC Housing for massive profits, and one of them, for example, was bought for $700,000 and, a year and a half later, was sold to BC Housing for over $3 million, and then BC Housing had to shut it down to do renovating it, and BC Housing was already renting the hotel for housing. What happened there? How did that happen? So I've got some real questions about BC Housing and how BC Housing is working in British Columbia, and we're going to be doing some significant investigation into that, but clearly we need to have that mechanism for being able to drive some investment, whether it's for seniors housing, whether it's for housing on reserve, whether it's other sort of opportunities in British Columbia.
John Rustad:But at the end of the day, I also think, like I say, david Eby's perspective is that government needs to be building housing. Government needs to be doing this and I think government has proven time and time again that it's not very efficient about doing things. For example, look at the housing project I think it's in Kitsilano area, where a tout of this is building these affordable houses 395 square feet, putting on rent for $2,700 a month. That's not affordable and it's certainly not a family home. So what has actually BC Housing done? Why is that so expensive? Another project that was built up in the interior turned out to be about $1.1 million per unit. Well, that's not affordable.
John Rustad:So clearly there's something going on with BC housing that doesn't make a lot of sense.
John Rustad:So we need to make sure that the tax dollars that we are spending on housing is spent the most efficiently as possible to get the best value we can, while solving those issues and, like I say, working with First Nations makes a lot of sense.
John Rustad:Matter of fact, I was actually talking with some hereditary chiefs up in the interior about the idea of returning some land from the province back to the First Nations, using that for some housing, but also putting in some services to deal with people who are addicted or who might want to return to the First Nation to receive treatment in a cultural way and reconnecting with their culture and their families, and so that's a great idea to be able to do things like that, and those are the types of things that we want to do. Having a federal partner would be nice. Obviously, and quite frankly I can tell you as the previous minister for that file, the federal government does not step up to the plate at the same financial level as it does in other provinces, and so we're going to be going after them for additional resources, certainly for those types of projects.
Aaron Pete:There's two prongs to having, I think, a healthy economy. One is reducing taxes so that people have more money in their pockets so they can actually go out and spend and invest and do things in their communities. The other piece is growing the economy. That's usually the best strategy. What are your thoughts on how we encourage entrepreneurship and how we increase businesses in our region?
John Rustad:Well, the first thing we have to do is simply get stuff done. I like to use a different word, but I'll try not to use that word on television. But we just need to get things done in this province. And what I mean by that is if you go across the border of the United States, it can be three months to build a warehouse. You try to do that here. You're two to three years to do that in British Columbia.
John Rustad:You can't afford that kind of timely delays and those kind of bureaucratic processes, so we need to clean that up significantly in British Columbia. We need to get to a place where we're a single project, a single permit. It's a big piece of how you can get investment in BC and have people have confidence to be able to spend the dollars here. And all of that, of course, is from one perspective. We need good paying jobs in this province. So, for example, there are 17 mines in British Columbia that are permitted or about to be permitted. We need the minerals, obviously, if we're going to expand out what we need to do for electrification, and so 17 new mines, that represents a $38 billion investment. We'll generate between 20,000 and 30,000 jobs at an average wage and benefit of $138,000 a year and we'll add close to $800 billion to British Columbia's GDP over the life of those mines.
John Rustad:Let's just get these things going Like. Enough of the studies and critical mental strategies and all the rest of this kind of garbage that just basically adds bureaucratic process and cost. Let's just get these projects out the door and happening. The same goes with our natural gas. We need to be doing more to export natural gas in this province and I know some people say you know that's controversial, we shouldn't be doing that. There's a billion people in the world today without electricity. There's probably somewhere between four and six hundred million people in the world that have just enough electricity to run a refrigerator. That's it, and their governments want a quality of life for their people. We have the resources. We should be exporting those resources because it's obviously a cleaner fuel than many of the other sources that are being used, and let's take advantage of it and let's reinvest those dollars in providing a quality of life that we want to see for people in British Columbia. So we're going to make significant changes to make sure that there's opportunities for being able to do that in British Columbia as well.
Aaron Pete:Healthcare. We have staff shortages. We have an aging population and increased cancer rates. What do we do?
John Rustad:You know, this is a massive crisis, and I remember, back in 2006, gordon Campbell said the issue of dementia alone will likely bankrupt the health care system, and I thought about that and I thought, okay, so what did we do to fix that? Well, we didn't. That was the problem. We put more spending in, we did some adjustments, we tried to make sure that we curbed spending on it Doctor shortages, for example. Where's the root of the doctor shortages? Well, that actually comes back from the 1990s, when the NDP government decided their way to curb health spending was to reduce the number of doctors that we had, and so a lot of the younger doctors left the system, which then meant, as the doctors that we had started aging out. We didn't have that next generation of doctors in place, so that drove the doctor shortage that we have today Nursing shortage. That was a decision that was made in 2012. When we reallocated our resources in universities to focus on the immediate needs we had, we reduced the number of nurses that were being trained. Well, now we have a shortage of nurses.
John Rustad:So these unintended consequences for what at the time seemed like good policy, but have created the problems that we have today, and so there's a whole bunch of things that need to be done, but I think the most important piece is to recognize that the system we have is failing and that it is in a crisis and we need to change the model. You can't solve the problem just spending more and expecting a different result. We actually have to look at models around the world that are much more successful than us. We are the second highest per capita spending on healthcare, yet we are some of the lowest outcomes in many of the measures on healthcare, and so let's look at the models that are successful, the models, for example, in Europe, whether it's in the Scandinavian countries or even Australia, switzerland. These types of models are universal healthcare, like we have today. They're single payer, government pays for everything, but they buy system from funding the system to funding patients, and so the government then purchased services based on the needs for patients, whether it's from government or non-government agencies. You put in place guarantees in terms of wait time, particularly for things like cancer, so that if we cannot deliver those services in BC and we should do everything we can to make sure we do that but if we can't be able to deliver those services, then we'll purchase that space that's needed, whether it's in another province or even in another country, to make sure that we're meeting the needs of patients. We're putting patients at the center of healthcare, and so it's a shift in terms of how we do things, but it allows us to better utilize professionals. It allows us to have a better balance. It allows us to make sure the system is very responsive to the patient, as opposed to the system itself.
John Rustad:Two other quick things I'll just mention. On that, government actually argued in court. They essentially argued that the system was more important than patient suffering, and that, to me, is completely wrong. The whole healthcare system should be focused on patients and dealing with that. Today, we have almost as many people dying waiting on a or on a waiting list for diagnostic services and surgery as we do that are dying from the opioid crisis, and yet nobody's even talking about that, and to me, that's completely unacceptable. It is a symptom of a system that has failed.
Aaron Pete:What case is that? And yet nobody's even talking about that, and to me that's completely unacceptable.
John Rustad:It is a symptom of a system that has failed. What case is that? Or like, where were they arguing that? That was a case that the province it was in September, I think, August, September of 2022. In court, that's what the province had essentially argued, and the worst part about it is the judge agreed with the province. Anyway, that's something we need to fix and change, of course.
John Rustad:But you know, if you've got a surgeon that is more than capable of doing 20, 30, or maybe 40 hours of surgery a week and the system's only giving them eight hours a week, that's it. And so you look at that and you think, wait a second, how is it that that is what the system is? And so you look at that and you think, wait a second, how is it that that is what the system is? And so this doctor will go in and I'm talking particularly about somebody who was the top vascular surgeon in BC, working out of Vancouver, generally since retired. He would go in, start a shift for 8 o'clock in the morning there would often be delays sometimes as late as 9 or even 9.30. He would be working through a schedule over the course of course the day and at 1.30 in the afternoon, an administrator would come in and say you're going to be done by four. Right, that's all the time you have available. You have to be done by four.
John Rustad:And so he would then wrap up the surgery he was working on and look at the next surgery and say now, if there are any complications, can I get this done by four? And if the answer was no, that was the end of his day, because it's all about the system, not the patient. So these are the types of things that have to change within our healthcare, and there's other components as well as part of this. For example, Germany has twice the population of Canada, yet Canada has 10 times as many administrators as Germany. Close to 40% of our nurses today are administrators. There's just so much bureaucracy that's being built up in our healthcare system. We need to clean that up so that we can be far more efficient and once again focused on making sure that we deliver for patients.
Aaron Pete:Can you talk about your plan for guaranteed wait times?
John Rustad:Sure Well, the guaranteed wait times. As I mentioned, the key is having the money, following the patient and purchasing the services where needed to be able to make sure that we can meet those wait times. As I mentioned, the key is having the money, following the patient and purchasing the services where needed to be able to make sure that we can meet those wait times that are recommended, particularly for critical things like cancer. I had a couple of people now that have talked to me about their cancer experience and one a person who had very aggressive cancer, needed surgery immediately, was told they'd have to wait two months, which is unacceptable.
John Rustad:You've got another situation where somebody was diagnosed with cancer and the process just kept getting delayed, going through. The cancer kept growing and expanding and got to the place where they said oh, I'm sorry, now it's terminal, there's nothing we can do for you. That's just tragic. Like that should never be happening in our system. And when I talk to families about that, I just you know, when you're in government, how do you apologize to them for a system that has failed them. And it's not the doctor's fault, it's not the nurse's fault, it's not the healthcare professional's fault, it's the system that is failing them, and that's why the system needs to change.
Aaron Pete:Would you fire?
John Rustad:Bonnie Henry yes, well, sorry, I wouldn't. I don't know if we need to fire her, but we would terminate her contract in whatever form that would be. I look at like Bonnie Henry did the best she could during COVID. When you look back at it, you can really question a lot of decisions she made. It could seem to be driven more by ideology than it did by science. But I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist. You know I can't question that myself.
John Rustad:When you compare the results compared to some other jurisdictions, okay, maybe our results weren't as good as what we're led to believe, but I looked at it particularly from the perspective of not hiring back our healthcare workers. Every other jurisdiction in North America hired back our healthcare workers, as far as I know, every other jurisdiction in the world and yet we didn't. And I asked Bonnie Henry why we weren't doing it, and what she essentially told me was if healthcare workers are not prepared to take a vaccine, then they should probably be thinking about working in a different field. In other words, it was ideologically driven. It was not driven based on health. It was not driven based on risks. Every other jurisdiction did this. We didn't.
John Rustad:To me, that's somebody who's actually causing harm to our system. And that should be the first order of a doctor Do no harm. There's harm being done to our system. And I also look at Dr Bonnie Henry, who went out to Ottawa and made the argument on behalf of David Eby and his government that we should be expanding safe supply, that safe supply should be available in stores, that we should be doubling down on decriminalization. I mean these have been utter failures in our society. Experts are telling me we have the highest level of addicts per capita anywhere in North America and it's particularly acute, of course, with indigenous populations. And I look at that and I think this is not the direction we should be going. And if this is what she believes we should be doing, then I think she needs to find work elsewhere.
Aaron Pete:What would you do differently to address the drug crisis?
John Rustad:Well, first thing we'd do is end decriminalization and safe supply. It has been an utter failure. Decriminalization, you know. So. If you have a bunch of cars that are coming and going from a house and the police suspect that house is a drug dealer, decriminalization means the police can't stop one of those cars and seize the drugs and use it as evidence, because it's decriminalized. Decriminalization means that if you have somebody who is in your doorstep smoking crack, the police can't do anything about it because it is decriminalized. I can't walk down the street drinking a beer, but I can walk down the street smoking a crack pipe. That's not right. And so we have taken the tools away from police to be able to first crack down on the drug dealers, but also to be able to have a civil society, because it's decriminalized. If you go to hospital and the person that's sharing a room with you pulls out a fentanyl pipe and starts smoking fentanyl, there's nothing they can do because it's decriminalized.
Aaron Pete:But that's ended now, right.
John Rustad:No, it hasn't. The TBDB has tried to end it. It's still got to deal with it on the federal side. But this is the problem, right In terms of it. There wasn't this recognition that that was a problem to begin with. So that needs to come to an end and safe supply. You get people that go in and get these drugs. They take it out and they give it to a dealer to get the harder drugs that they want. Well, the dealer then takes those drugs and they find other markets for it and they're finding their way into our schools. They're creating the next generation of addicts. They're even being sold outside of our borders. So these things have been utter failures.
John Rustad:But what the key is, we need to get a focus on treatment and recovery to be able to get people back you know, on on some path to be able to have, you know, be able to be productive in a society and be able to live a better quality of life. So we have to have everything from doctor-prescribed treatment to short-term treatment and recovery to long-term recovery, because there are some people that getting off the addiction can be relatively easy. But you also have to help them with the life skills, get them out of the circle that they're in, get them an opportunity to be able to move on into a different type of life. We actually also need to be looking quite frankly at mandatory treatment. If you have somebody who, for example, is OD'd and is brought back to life, clearly they are, from a mental health perspective, not capable of making a decision that's in their best interest. So, from that perspective, I think we should be able to put them into treatment and try to give them some sort of quality of life.
John Rustad:And I actually think we also need to look at long-term care, and what I mean by that is doctors are telling me the drugs on the streets today, within two to three years, can cause permanent brain damage. There are people today who will never be able to recover, and I think it's inhumane to say that we should allow them to live on streets, that we should allow them to live in the, in the filth and squalor. That is what's going on in many streets across the province, in many communities. I actually think we should be looking at it from respect of let's be humane, let's do everything we can to provide them with at least some quality of life.
Aaron Pete:How do you manage that? There's a few pieces I'm thinking of. One is First Nations, people who have experienced mandatory processes previously but then also say you do this, say we start to allow people to go into treatment centers and require them to do so or force them to in some ways in prisons and stuff like that. And then you start to hear rumblings that some people do not want this or they're not being treated well or respectfully and the inhumane issue arises again. Yes, how do you process when you've got?
Aaron Pete:Because, from speaking to julian summers, who, uh, does a lot of research he's a clinical psychologist he talked about how the bc ndp, from his perspective, committed the money. They had the plan and then he came forward and said well, that you got some problems here. Safe supply hasn't been proven to be very effective. This is an issue and they took away his work, they took away his research and they said we're not talking about that anymore. We've got the plan, we're going to move forward. We're we're moving in this direction. Come hell or high water, don't bother with with your issues, your concerns or wanting to do research on whether or not our plan works. We're going full speed ahead. How do you make sure this doesn't get away from you and people start to pay the consequence, because these are incredibly vulnerable individuals who might not be able to argue for themselves, and you're absolutely right.
John Rustad:That's why, if we're going to do mandatory treatment, it is going to be very rare, because it's only those situations that I just described. And, for example, the other situation I would look at for mandatory care is as a parent. If your child is addicted. Let's say you've got an 11-year-old girl and she's fighting with an addiction and she doesn't want to go into treatment, as a parent, you're going to do everything you can to try to help your child to be able to have a quality of life, and so I think, as a parent, you should be able to send your child into care. I was talking with some people in those. One family a 14-year-old and 11-year-old kid, both of them addicted, both of them in serious trouble with their lives. They took out a second mortgage and spent $20,000 per child to send them south of the border into treatment, and the good news is they're back. They're clean. The first one's off now into university, the second one is graduating from high school and they're clean and they're going about their lives. And as a parent, wouldn't you want to do that for your child? But you can't do that in British Columbia, and so I think we need to be able to have that kind of an opportunity. But we're not talking about mandatory treatment for everybody. Obviously, you know that doesn't work. But where you have those unique situations, I think we need to be able to have some of that option available. But you're right, we have to safeguard against it. We can't use it as an excuse to basically incarcerate or to institutionalize people who are fighting addiction. We need to be able to give them different paths, and everybody's individual, everybody's different their story, the reason they became addicted, the reason they have these challenges all come from a different place, and so we need to be able to customize how we treat people based on who they are and where they are. I think places like, for example, safe injection sites we should actually try to turn those into recovery intake sites. We should find a way to be able to connect people to services.
John Rustad:There's a housing project in Victoria that was to house people who were addicted, people that were very difficult to house, and they built a special room for smoking fentanyl and another room for smoking crack and another room for doing other drugs, and these people would then come out into the common area and they'd still be smoking and the staff there thought well, look, this is endangering me. I don't want to be exposed to this. So they went to WorkSafe, and the WorkSafe solution is well, because it's decriminalized. It's decriminalized, you'll have to wear a gas mask. We can't stop them from doing this, and so the same people that are in this facility.
John Rustad:One of the ladies put up a sign on the wall that said you know, look, if you'd like to explore treatment, here's how we can connect your treatment. Here's some numbers. One of the ministry staff came and took it down and said you're not allowed to do that because that might offend somebody. And the person that put it up was suspended for a day. We need to be doing everything we can to connect people to recovery, not just give people more drugs and keep them high. And the real tragic story is I've heard one story of an individual who came to the conclusion look, I need help, I need to get into recovery, and the answer was well, we'll have space for you in six months. That's unacceptable and that's what we have created under David Eby, and this is a process that they've done in this province.
Aaron Pete:As you described, you were the Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation. It's been said that you are pledging to repeal BC's law upholding the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. Could you explain that Sure?
John Rustad:So the DRIPA legislation, which is the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People legislation it's helping to create I guess you could call it reconciliation from a government to a government, but what it is doing is it's creating tremendous amounts of friction from a people to a people, and reconciliation needs to be between people, not just between governments. And so DRIPA has actually got in the way, and so I'll give you some examples. When we had the big wildfires that went through the Merritt area, there's millions of cubic meters of wood that has been damaged or destroyed. That wood needs to be harvested, it needs to be replanted, the sites need to be rehabilitated, and yet they can't get permits because the First Nations are arguing back and forth about whose wood it is and how that should work, and so, instead of doing the right thing, dripa has created actually barriers for doing the right thing. And then you've got people now that are unemployed, and the people are saying, oh my God, how come we can't get this wood? It's their fault. That's not right. That is now creating friction, and we should never be in a situation where we're doing that as a society At the same time. Over in Alberta, they have the wildfires. Three weeks later. They're getting permits, they're going in, they're harvesting, they're getting it planted, they're doing the rehabilitation work. This is the problem that's being created, and so I don't want to create that friction in our society.
John Rustad:So I will repeal DRIPA. We'll keep using the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People as a guiding principle for how we work with First Nations, but it's not going to be locked in in terms of legislation. And what I want to move towards is what I call economic reconciliation with First Nations. I want to look at how we return land to First Nations strategically to create economic opportunities, to get First Nations engaged in building out their future, so we can move First Nations from managing in poverty to managing prosperity, but not by taking from one people to give to another, but by adding to our economy, adding to the opportunities, so that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous can prosper together. That's the only way we can bring about true reconciliation.
John Rustad:And I think you know particularly about the words of Dr Joseph Gosnell, who's since passed and he was the chief architect of the Nishka Treaty, the first modern day treaty in BC, and he said it's long past time that you know, first Nations not only catch up but, if possible, surpass economically Because First Nations have been held up, but, if possible, surpass economically because First Nations have been held back for so long. And I think about that and I think that is what government should be trying to do Everywhere where we have done this in BC, we have seen suicide rates drop, we've seen violence drop, we've seen drug use drop. We've seen First Nations enter and go into a much healthier environment and much more successful for their people in terms of people getting jobs, people buying homes, people being able to look after their kids. So that is where I want to be focused on is creating that success for the people on the ground.
Aaron Pete:Is there any way going back to the DRIPA legislation, that you could just remove the pieces that could have led to that specific issue but uphold the law as a whole?
John Rustad:Not really, because the way it's written and the expectations that are in there, I think, would be too hard to try to tinker with, and so that's why I look at it and I think if something is not working, if it's creating problems, then we just need to say that didn't work, let's remove it and let's go in a direction that can create true opportunity and prosperity, I think, for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.
Aaron Pete:Okay, I'm super pro-economic development, particularly for my community. I know that it's a way that we protect ourselves from different government interests and the goals of a new government changes and then the funding starts to dry up on this and we have to go over here to try and find how we, how we utilize it. So I do agree with the sentiment. The challenge I think I see with that approach is, first, nation communities, and many people don't know this.
Aaron Pete:So many of the loudest critics of drippo or other legislation are frustrated and also don't understand what's going on. Because first nations are like a municipality, in that we have to manage our community members and offer social services that are often applied through through grants and we have to go through that process, but we're responsible for education, housing, um, so many other social services for our members, and so that there needs to be some form of funding still flowing through. Because if we pull from economic development and then try and dedicate it back to these basic social services, well municipalities will already get many of those social services funded, whether it's through their tax base, which First Nations often can't get access to, particularly rural ones, and so I'm just curious as to how we make sure we balance that in a way that First Nations, if they don't have good economic opportunities, if they are in the middle of nowhere, they might not have the same opportunities and so they may be disadvantaged purely based on their relocation, which is what we've kind of seen over the past 50 years.
John Rustad:And so I look at it this way and I get that I mean there obviously needs to be the core funding that's in support of First Nations. That should not change in terms of working with First Nations. But I also look at it from the perspective of each nation has different opportunities and advantages. Some may be, for example, haisla, which would happen to be perfectly located, associated with LNG. However, there's other nations that might have opportunities, whether it's mining, some will have opportunities with forestry, but those are all resource-based. You've got, obviously, lots of nations like your nation which are down here in the valley. Some may be able to be involved in agriculture, some may be involved in land development, some may be involved in industrial development, and so that's why I mean when you look at returning land to First Nations as part of how you deal with title, because that's an important piece that we need to deal with, which we can't ignore our Canadian constitution. So those are the opportunities that we need to look at in terms of working with the nation, saying what are those opportunities? What can we help create by working with First Nations to help realize the vision that they would like to have for their nation and their people? And for some, some that might be tourism. There's a wide range of things that could be done, and you're right, you know some that might be tourism. You know there's a wide range of things that could be done, and you're right.
John Rustad:For some, maybe they don't have any of those opportunities, and so the question becomes okay, what about energy generation, what about other types of potential? And maybe it gets down to maybe we just have to create a fund that gives them opportunity to be able to invest in businesses and build out those opportunities as well. So there's a wide range of things that we can look at. It's not just going to be locked into one type of thing, and you know, for example, a hectare of land on the southern tip of Vancouver Island might create enormous economic opportunities. But you might look at a band, for example, like PACLA, which is way up in the middle of northern BC, that you might look at and say maybe it's going to have to be a very large area that gets involved in to generate economic opportunity. Or maybe there's some other types of thing that you need to explore, and so we need to be able to be flexible in terms of how we do that. But the principle still remains one that I think we should strive to try to achieve.
Aaron Pete:And there's a few examples right, the Declaration Act funding, and then there's the BC Gaming funds that I'm able to access, and then it gives me the freedom to go look for what opportunities I think the nation needs, rather than chasing grants, which I think is important. You're from Prince George. I'm just wondering your thoughts on the Highway of Tears.
John Rustad:So when I was Minister for Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation, I actually put together a gathering of family of missing and murdered Indigenous women, and it was a large gathering. It was a two-day gathering in Prince George and I spent the entire time talking to the family members. One after one. They all came in, they told me the stories, they told me what led to their daughter or sister or brother who went missing, and it was very moving in terms of it.
John Rustad:There's so much work that needs to be done. A biggest part of it is there's often a lot of challenges on reserve, as you probably are aware of, and the problem is nobody's willing to speak up, and so when these things happen in silence, it allows it to just perpetuate and grow. It's one of the reasons why I wear the moose hide pin. So much is because we need to find a way to support and honor women and girls. We need to find a way for men to help, you know, talk to one another about honoring and supporting and ending violence against women and girls, and that is not something that can come down as the province and say this is how we're going to solve it. It's not something you can have with the police, but it's a conversation that we need to be able to support at the community level.
John Rustad:So we actually, coming out of that gathering, where we did in Prince George, we actually started a process, working on a process to support communities, both local as well as regional, to have these conversations in the community, to try to bring about an opportunity for healing and to get this out in the open and make it okay to talk about, make it okay for it to bring it out, because that's the only way we can bring these problems to an end.
John Rustad:And so we started that work and, unfortunately, when the NDP came in, they moved on, they decided not to pursue it. So it's too bad, but that's certainly one of the things that I look at and so I mean, obviously that's connected with the Highway of Tears and what's going on through there. So there's lots of work that needs to be done, you know, at multiple levels, but I think the key there is we need to find ways to be able to support the Indigenous communities, to be able to address some of the internal issues. We need to be there to work with them and, particularly, we need to listen to those families and those stories, because it's very, very powerful.
Aaron Pete:Three more very brief questions.
John Rustad:I'll give you brief answers, if I can. Sorry, no worries.
Aaron Pete:Shannon Waters from the Narwhal reports that you would walk away from the province's commitment to protect 30% of its land base by 2030. Is this true?
John Rustad:True, perfect. It's a short answer, I mean. Sorry, I'll expand on that. So the goal from this is that this is part of this 2030 agenda from the World Economic Forum, and that side of things, I just think it's ridiculous. I mean, we have more area protected in British Columbia than any other jurisdiction in Canada, if not the world already. But 30% is not just the mountaintops and swamps and lakes. 30% in what they're talking about is they want 30% of every ecosystem. So that's 30% of our farmland, that's 30% of our rangeland, that's 30% of our forest land, that's 30% of everything that we have as a province. And so you look at it and you think, as a province, we're already only producing or only procuring 34% of the food we consume from British Columbia. We should be doing everything we can to double food production, not reduce it, not create more restrictions and problems.
Aaron Pete:How do you still protect biodiversity, though?
John Rustad:So biodiversity is interesting. So, for example, a lot of biodiversity is talked about in terms of our forest landscape. There's obviously much other biodiversity associated with the other landscapes that we have as well, but we have about 60 million hectares of forested landscape, of which two-thirds is already protected. Two-thirds already will never see industrial forest activity. So that's a huge piece already that is helping with biodiversity, with the rest of our forested landscape.
John Rustad:What we need to do is we need to say look, the forest products we produce are necessary. They are the most environmentally sensed or environmentally Consciously done Well, the most environmentally valued products that we could ever think about having. Right, these products are right. They're good for the environment, they're good for us as a society as opposed to using anything else. So how do we make sure we do that sustainably? And I think we have been doing that well in most areas.
John Rustad:There has been some problems, obviously, with it. So we need to have an area that is dedicated towards making sure that we have forest values, both values available but then we also have to have an area that is dedicated toward meeting some of those biodiversity values that are not already captured as part of our protected areas or the areas that will never see industrial activity, and then forest values might be a secondary value that can come out of that. So it's an approach that we're going to take in terms of how we work on our forest to build a, create some stability, but B make sure that we're trying to meet things like biodiversity. But this idea of protecting 30%, like I say, it's an agenda that comes from outside our borders. It makes no sense for British Columbia and I'm not interested in following somebody else's agenda. I want to do what's right for people in British Columbia.
Aaron Pete:Do you believe in man-made climate change?
John Rustad:There's no question. Our climate is changing Absolutely no question whatsoever. I get accused all the time of being climate dire. No, look, climate is changing and man is contributing to that change. There's no question. The issue is what do you do about it? And taxing people into poverty is not the answer. My perspective is that we need to be able to adapt, and that's part of what I talk about with agriculture. It's why we actually have to expand how we manage our water as well, investing in water and storage, in research and the relationship between aquifers and surface and subsurface water. There's so much that needs to be done on those fronts, as well as making sure our infrastructure is more resilient to our changing climate and what could happen. So that's the approach that I believe we should be taking in British Columbia.
Aaron Pete:You've been involved in government for many years. Do you have any regrets? Things you would have done differently had you known what you know now. That just stands out. I do feel like the challenge with politics is so often you're not able to own your mistakes or you're not able to kind of adjust and look back in a different way. Do you have any regrets?
John Rustad:So you know, the interesting thing is there are things I have been involved in that have gone forward because I was part of government, but there was nothing I could do to change it, because that's the way the government process works, right. So, for example, when we brought in the Clean Energy Act I think it was 2008, there was a section in there that banned the use of nuclear power in British Columbia. I thought that was very short-sighted. That's something, quite frankly, that we need to have a conversation about. Where is our future power going to come from? We need to be able to have an open and honest conversation with people in the province. And so I look at it and I think so. Those are mistakes, but it is what was done at the time. It was what was needed to be done at the time.
John Rustad:Like I talked about the carbon tax earlier, I think that was a mistake. I get the reason and the rationale for it, but clearly the damage that has been done since then, like, for example, by 2030, if the carbon tax carries on the way David Eby wants it to the average family of four will have paid close to $27,000 in carbon tax. Like, how is that affordable? That's just not affordable. Right, we can't be taxing people into poverty to try to change the weather. So I look at those sort of things. I mean there's many other things too. I look at stuff that's gone on in education and other things where, in hindsight training for training for nurses you know in hindsight obviously they haven't turned out well, so it'd be great if you could wind back the clock. But it's not so much about you know, I often say people say, well, the pendulum swung too far in one direction. We have to swing it back. People forget that you're also moving forward in time. So it's not an issue of bringing it back, because you'll never bring it back to what was. It's an issue of mapping out where you're going to take it to in the future, because it goes back and forth, but it also goes forward in time and that is what we need to be trying to do. So I'm not worried about what has gone on so much in the past. I'm worried about making sure that we do everything we can to build that future for people in British Columbia.
John Rustad:How can people follow you and the BC Conservative Party? Well, you know, conservativebcca is our website. Obviously, we're very active on Twitter and other social media so people, you know, can sign up there. They can sign up to become a member, obviously, if they want, or they can sign up to receive emails, that side of things. And obviously you know we're less than 60 days or was it 57 days out to the election, so there will be lots of information and stuff that'll be going out to the public as we enter into this final phase of, you know, this election year that we're in. It's going to be a fascinating time, you know.
John Rustad:I'll just maybe close with saying one thing about the Conservative Party. We're actually the oldest party in British Columbia's history. We were founded in 1903, and we governed for many years, but we haven't formed a government since 1927, and we haven't elected anybody since the 1970s. So this is a party that's been in the wilderness for a very long time. But I think people are looking for that change. They're looking and saying we can't solve the problems of today with the same level of thinking that created them. They're looking for change and that's what we are offering for people in British Columbia.
Aaron Pete:It has been a pleasure speaking with you today. I again appreciate you for coming out. I thought this was a very thoughtful conversation. I wish you the best of luck in the upcoming election, but please continue to take care of yourself, because I know it's a long road.
John Rustad:Thank you very much. Actually, I do need to take a little downtime. It has been quite a road, but, as the old saying goes, about politics, you don't lose elections. You run out of time, and so we're putting in every effort we can to make sure we connect with people around the province so that they know who we are and what we stand for.
Aaron Pete:Well, I think processes like this ensure the democratic process continues, because we're able to get to know you a little bit better, so I appreciate you for that.
John Rustad:Thank you. I'm a huge fan, by the way, of direct democracy and we need to be doing some more of that. I've closed with one more thing. Of course, there's huge things we need to do to help get the deficit down and try to get back towards a balanced budget, and that's going to take years, unfortunately, as we grow the economy. But one of the pieces I actually want to put in is a piece of legislation that says there can be no increased taxes or new taxes, except being done by referendum. Let's put the power back into the hands of the people.
Aaron Pete:That's something Alberta has correct.
John Rustad:I don't think they have, oh, actually come to think of it. So I actually moved that forward as a motion last winter in the legislature, last winter in the legislature, and then Alberta actually adopted it as part of their election platform after we had introduced it in BC. So yeah, Very admirable.
Aaron Pete:Thank you again for making the time. I wish you the best of luck as you proceed. Thank you.
John Rustad:Thanks very much for having me on.
Aaron Pete:Today's episode is made possible in part by support from Enbridge, fueling quality of life in British Columbia for over me on. Today's episode is made possible in part by support from Enbridge, fueling quality of life in British Columbia for over 65 years.
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