“Team Rustad” has prevailed at the B.C. Conservatives’ first annual general meeting since storming into the province’s mainstream political scene in last year’s election and becoming the official Opposition.
Saturday’s meeting came amid divisions within the party that Leader John Rustad depicted as a strength not a weakness, in his speech to about 800 delegates.
“So I have our MLAs being able to stand up and speak, you know, even if it may be something that I disagree with, because freedom of speech has to be at the core of what we are as democracy,” Rustad told delegates in Nanaimo, B.C.
He later told reporters that if everybody was “singing Kumbaya and all the same, then you’re not a true party” and that you need to be able to look at differences “as a strength of who we are as a party.”
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The leader firmly put his stamp on the party by …