Out of the gate, the Conservative Party of BC’s leadership race feels less like a search for the next premier and more like a purity test to identify the party’s most uncompromising conservative. This right-wing virtue signalling buries the party’s central challenge of broadening its appeal beyond its base.

In a recent poll conducted by Clear Impact Strategy, two-thirds of B.C. Conservative members appear haunted by worries their party could choose a closet liberal who does not lead with conservative principles.

Unsurprisingly, leadership candidates leaned into this fear. Yuri Fulmer, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Harman Bhangu, Bruce Banman and Sheldon Clare marketed themselves as some variation of a “real,” “reliable,” “strong” and “proud conservative” to “repel the centrist shift” “without apology.”

This is navel-gazing at its most parochial — a debate that forgets general-public normies outside of the conservative bubble.

Unsurprisingly, leadership candidates leaned into this fear. Yuri Fulmer, Caroline Elliott, Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Harman Bhangu, Bruce Banman and Sheldon Clare marketed themselves as some variation of a “real,” “reliable,” “strong” and “proud conservative” to “repel the centrist shift” “without apology.”

This is navel-gazing at its most parochial — a debate that forgets general-public normies outside of the conservative bubble.

For starters, conservatism is a broad, amorphous term. More damagingly, this kind of purity spiral encourages both members and leadership candidates to embrace an ideological maximalism focused on scoring cheap conservative cred in two ways.

The first is a candidate’s distance from any association with the defunct BC Liberal Party, despite how that party was the main electoral vehicle for conservative voters in British Columbia for nearly three decades.

The second scrutinizes past alignment with so-called “woke” liberal ideology, from reciting land acknowledgments to supporting sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, resources in schools — an anti-woke version of cancel culture.