In The Tyee, Paul Willcocks wrote BC Conservatives Reveal Their Ugly Approach to Democracy. Willcocks is a journalist I have admired for years for his humane but thoroughly professional and balanced commentary. In the article, Tyee’s senior editor grades the BC Conservative Party’s response to an ugly incident on a Kelowna schoolyard.

An old guy, Josef Tesar, apparently with support of his female partner, disrupted a school event involving nine-year-olds. CTV reported on what followed after the man demanded proof of participants’ genders:

Realizing his confusion, [Heidi] Starr tried to explain that her daughter — one of two he believed were boys — was a girl, but she says he dismissed her and insisted they were both either boys or transgender.

“At this time, his wife started yelling that my ex-wife and I — parents of my daughter — and other parents of trans kids were genital mutilators and groomers, and the man himself began demanding to see a certificate proving my daughter was born a girl,” Starr said.

The wretches were widely condemned but their actions were not Willcocks’ prime focus. He faulted Conservative candidate Karin Litzcke and party leader John Rustad, who “pledged BC Conservatives would never back down in fighting to impose its ideas on who can participate in sports.”

Litzcke is campaigning for her third political party in the last four years:

• 2019 federal election, People’s Party, Vancouver East, unelected, fifth place with 1.2%,
• 2020 provincial election, Libertarian, Vancouver-Kingsway, unelected, fourth place with 1.4%,
• 2021 federal election, People’s Party, Vancouver East, unelected, fifth place with 2.8%,
• 2022 Vancouver School Board, Independent, unelected, ranked 30th of 31 candidates,
• June 24, 2023 by-election, Conservative, Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, tbd.

Following eight years on the BC Liberal backbench, Rustad was elevated to cabinet in 2013 by Christy Clark. He served as an ineffective Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation and spent a moment as Minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, until Clark’s government was defeated in 2017. BC Liberal leader Kevin Falcon announced in 2021 that Rustad was booted from caucus for “behaviour that was not supportive of our caucus team and the principles of mutual respect and trust.” One important issue was Rustad’s climate-change denialism.

Paul Willcocks made important points, including:

Conservatives, we are told, are supposed to respect individual rights and be wary of government. BC Conservatives specifically say they want “smaller government.”

But Rustad wants governments to dictate who is eligible to participate in sports, from kids’ leagues to the pros. Presumably his “anti-woke” campaign will bring more and more government control over the lives of individuals, parents, school districts and all of society. Quite an overreach from a “small-government” party. . .

[Conservatives] are dangerous, because their rhetoric, borrowed from U.S. ideologues and autocrats, encourages people to ignore the rule of law. . .

It’s a language of confrontation that rejects the rule of law and the importance of respecting democracy and individual rights.

And it emboldens a fringe group to do whatever they want to impose their ideology on society, with tacit support from people like Rustad and Litzcke.

Rustad and his fellow travellers may not be calling for violence. But they are legitimizing it . . .

The Centre For Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo examined why people hold far-right beliefs:

• People with far right beliefs are characterized by a simplified mindset and tendency to search for order and structure.
• They have a strong desire for group-based dominance and hierarchy, and often see social groups arranged along a superiority-inferiority dimension.
• They perceive the wider authorities as illegitimate.
• Right-wing extremism is usually characterized by ‘anti-democratic opposition towards equality’.
• It is associated with racism, xenophobia, exclusionary nationalism, conspiracy theories, and authoritarianism.

Alabama based civil rights organization Southern Poverty Law Center has a view of male supremacy, an ideology that seems to be a common part of far-right movements:

Male supremacists view women as genetically inferior, manipulative and stupid. . . Adherents of this ideology are fixated on rigid gender roles and vilify any deviation from their strict gender dichotomy, seamlessly weaving together misogyny, transphobia and homophobia.

Male supremacists believe they are the victims of an oppressive feminist system that has unjustly deprived them of their rightful place in society. Many adherents subscribe to antisemitism to explain this phenomenon, believing feminism is a Jewish invention. Male supremacy is a powerful undercurrent for white supremacy, and its tenets undergird much of the contemporary far right.

We won’t see BC Conservatives or their far-right friends holding this sign: