VANCOUVER — Whether it's the freedom to consume fentanyl and fall asleep on the sidewalk, the freedom to smoke crack in a playground tunnel slide, or the freedom to sue immigrant aestheticians for not waxing your balls, British Columbians place an immense and unique value on freedom.Perhaps this is why “freedom” has sat at the centre of the BC Conservative leadership race since the first contenders threw their hats in the ring.While one side of the political spectrum treats “freedom” as the inalienable right to turn playgrounds into open-air drug markets, the five remaining BC Conservative contenders — Iain Black, Caroline Elliott, Peter Milobar, Kerry-Lynne Findlay and Yuri Fulmer — have spent the entire race fighting over who gets to redefine it.Findlay has, from the beginning, portrayed herself as the pre-eminent “freedom candidate” running on “More Freedom, Less Government!” .Fulmer has gone bigger, in his own mind anyways, rolling out an ambitious “BC Freedom Charter” packed with property rights, parental rights, protections against compelled speech and digital IDs, and the sacred freedom to roam Crown land in an RV..Black offers a far more traditional ‘small government’ approach to the ‘freedom question,’ dangling a 20% provincial income tax cut, deregulation to unlock housing and jobs, and the classic promise to keep government out of your bedroom, your wallet, and your faith..Milobar, the only sitting MLA in the race, has kept his pitch many parts managerial and no parts manifesto: repeal DRIPA to restore property-rights certainty and investor confidence, slash red tape for private-sector growth, and restore fiscal discipline so British Columbians can actually afford the freedom to get ahead..Elliott has taken the culture war route, vowing to rip SOGI, critical race theory, and decolonization out of classrooms, end mandatory land acknowledgements, reverse the NDP’s “soft-on-drugs” experiment, and empower police to put individuals in involuntary care under the Mental Health Act. Nothing screams “freedom” quite like “involuntary care.”.How ironclad are these promises? And, if we’re being honest, do they truly deliver more freedom or less of it?These pledges invite even bigger questions about what freedom actually means once you hold the levers of power.Is banning something — even something as performative and ridiculous as mandatory land acknowledgements — really commensurate with freedom? Or is it simply the state swapping one compelled orthodoxy for another, just with the “correct” ideology now in charge?And when it comes to supervised consumption sites, is closing them an act of liberation for addicts, neighbours, and taxpayers or will it inevitably run headlong into the Supreme Court’s landmark 2011 Portland Hotel Society ruling, which held that denying access to supervised injection could breach Charter rights to “security of the person?”A future BC Conservative premier, no matter how whip smart or well intentioned, be damned: the courts show no sign of reversing course.While the BC Conservative leadership candidates trip over each other to sound the toughest on the Eby government’s so-called “safe supply” program, a small group of 30-somethings calling themselves the Drug User Liberation Front are just down the street in the BC Supreme Court mounting a Charter challenge for the effective right to sell tested cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth..The average BC Conservative likely doesn’t imagine smoking or selling cocaine, fentanyl, and crystal meth in public when they picture “freedom.” Yet five minutes on East Hastings Street will disabuse anyone of the notion that this isn’t precisely how a great many British Columbians define it.Plenty will scoff: “But how many fentanyl and crystal meth smokers even vote?” The current NDP government provides the answer. They’re evidently more engaged than most BC Conservatives would like to believe.Conservative leadership candidates would therefore be wise to craft a clear and coherent vision of freedom that doesn’t drift too far from the decidedly libertarian — some would say degenerate — version many British Columbians cherish. That includes, quite possibly, a silent faction within their own party.After May 30, a future BC Conservative premier may discover that the courts — and more importantly, the electorate — hold dear a very different definition of freedom than they do.
