Before our next federal election comes in the next year or so, and even before November’s pivotal US presidential vote, British Columbians will go to the polls next month, and if the ugliness already being seen out here on the so-called Left Coast is any indication, reporters could be in for a bumpy ride. Those at one media outlet are already under vicious attack from Conservative party operatives online. BC politics have always been a special brand of Looney Tunes, but recent events have taken the crazy to a new level. Disarray on the right has been the order of the day so far, but now Conservatives are firing back, and they’re aiming directly at the media. The BC Liberal Party, which held power from 2001-17, changed its name last year to BC United, which prompted plenty of puns for its similarity to that of a Major League Soccer team. Never very liberal, the party turned out in the end to not be very united, either. Perhaps sensing a Conservative wave washing over the country, its MPs one by one fled a sinking ship for the BC Conservative Party, which has not even won a seat since 1975. BC United leader Kevin Falcon, a long-time cabinet minister for the Liberals, had been all but abandoned by the time he took the unprecedented step of pulling the plug on his party’s campaign late last month.

Under leader John Rustad, the BC Conservatives have since surged in polling that shows them in a dead heat with the NDP, which enjoys a 2-1 majority in the legislature. The polls show voter dissatisfaction with the NDP over housing, health care and rising crime brought by a long-running opioid crisis. NDP leader David Eby took over as premier two years ago after John Horgan resigned for health reasons, and he has generally impressed voters, especially for his quick wit. A lawyer who spent most of his career working with the poor on Vancouver’s drug-infested Downtown East Side and also headed the BC Civil Liberties Association for four years, Eby joked recently that describing the BC Conservatives as a clown car was unfair to clowns. “Clowns try to make life better for people,” he deadpanned. “They laugh, they try to entertain people.”

A forestry consultant in northern BC before going into politics in 2005, Rustad was a Liberal cabinet minister from 2013-17 before joining the BC Conservatives after Falcon kicked him out of caucus in 2022 over his record of climate change denial. Rustad and Eby have traded “increasingly sharp attacks on social issues that some believe are akin to US-style culture wars,” noted CBC News recently. Eby has attacked the BC Conservatives over abortion, race and gender identity, noted the CBC, adding that Rustad declined its request for an interview and instead accused Eby on social media of lying and “using the oldest, dirtiest campaign tricks in the book.”

Rustad has come under particular scrutiny by The Tyee, a long-publishing progressive Vancouver website which last week noted that his “distrust of accepted climate science was on full display during an almost two-hour interview with Jordan Peterson.” A recent deep dive by The Tyee on Rustad’s record noted that he has pushed for nuclear energy, questioned Indigenous rights, challenged trans health care and promised to both crack down on protests and review BC’s public school curriculum, which he claims has been “corrupted” by environmentalism and social justice issues. “Citing rising incidents of antisemitism,” noted The Tyee, “Rustad said he wouldn’t tolerate ‘protests where people are calling for the destruction of the Jewish people and the genocide of Jewish people.’” The Tyee, which recently marked its 20th birthday, renewed its scrutiny of Rustad’s record with a column this week that described him as “an old-school climate change denier.” It has made Rustad the subject of incessant coverage in the past few weeks, recently unpacking his pledge to review BC’s textbooks and also fact-checking his claims about trans people, roundly debunking them. The Tyee has given Eby nowhere near the same scrutiny and instead ran a friendly interview with him late last month.

Perhaps taking a page out of federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s playbook of attacking the media, which was pioneered by Donald Trump in his campaign for US president in 2016, Rustad’s team has launched a startling counter-attack. The bizarre opening salvo came after Andrew MacLeod, The Tyee’s legislative correspondent, sent a question to Rustad’s media relations staff recently asking whether Eby’s claim during a press conference that Rustad had “committed to ban books on climate science from our classrooms” was correct. “Any comment or an interview with Mr. Rustad would be welcome,” he added. Instead of answering MacLeod’s question, BC Conservative Party campaign spokesperson Anthony Koch posted it on X, adding: “Look at this top quality ‘journalism’ from the folks over at the totally not left-wing rag Tyee. What would we do without them?” The Tyee’s senior editor Paul Willcocks penned a response that included a screen shot of the tweet, which is nowhere to be found online, protesting that MacLeod was only doing his job. “He was not accepting Eby’s claim without checking it and he wanted to hear what the Conservatives had to say,” wrote Willcocks, a former publisher of the Victoria Times Colonist. “It’s what reporters who are committed to fairness and accuracy do.”

A Montréaler who was spokesman for Poilievre during the party’s 2022 leadership race, Koch was listed among a dozen key influencers in the conservative movement last year by the National Post, which noted that he “sometimes gets into trouble for speaking his mind on X.” One of his most infamous “hot takes” came when Koch quipped in a tweet which has since been deleted that “the average MP is a moron with the political instincts of a goat.” The Post called Koch “a trusted voice in Poilievre’s inner circle [who] continues to shape the media narrative.”

The attacks on The Tyee got more vitriolic last week when Chris Sankey, the BC Conservative candidate in North Coast-Haida Gwaii, posted on X a similar direct response to a question emailed to him by reporter Jen St. Denis. She asked Sankey why he shared on X a 2022 video attack on Justin Trudeau by a far-right German politician and asked him what he admires about her views, which have been described as “racist” and “hateful” by Poilievre. “There is no admiration in that tweet whatsoever,” Sankey posted on X. “The tweet is exactly what it states. Nothing more, nothing less. Nice of you to try to make something out of nothing, but I have zero interest in the tyee and anything the tyee is remotely associated with.” Sankey called the question “dirty tricks garbage,” adding: “Jen, my best to you in your attempt at failed journalism.” He also posted St. Denis’ email, which included her personal phone number, something Willcocks said The Tyee “would never do.”

Sankey then posted a second attack on St. Denis. “We cannot allow individuals like Jen to do this to our society,” he wrote. “This is the kind of reckless behaviour that has destroyed and divided our country. We all need to call these people out and call out their nonsense.” Sankey went on a lengthy and bizarre diatribe about how the NDP “uses the likes of Jen to act as their truth tellers … and gives these individuals and organizations a free pass to destroy Western civilization.”

If anyone needs to be called out for their nonsense, it is not journalists at The Tyee but instead boorish Conservatives like Sankey and Koch. Their behaviour continues a distressing record of amateurish pronouncements which not only threatens to ruin their chances at the polls but, if it continues, to confine them to the dustbin of history.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated that the BC Conservatives won two seats in the last provincial election. In fact, the party has not won a seat since 1975. Canadian Dimension regrets the error.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.