The word “ woke ” — which has now lost any real or useful meaning since its origins in African American vernacular English — has become commonplace in right-wing campaigns and is being applied (seemingly quite effectively) to target anything and everything. In B.C.
, the leader of the insurgent Conservative Party of BC, John Rustad, has raged against “ woke ideology ,” targeting trans people and sexuality and gender orientation education resources in schools (also known as SOGI 123 ). When Rustad made comparisons between SOGI and residential schools last year, he was criticized and asked to apologize by politicians across the spectrum. MLA Ravi Parmar, from the governing BC NDP, called Rustad’s comparisons “disgraceful” in a now-deleted tweet.
Ravi Parmar, the NDP MLA for Langford-Juan de Fuca, denounced BC Conservative leader John Rustad’s commentary on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as ‘disgraceful’ in a now-deleted post on X. On a CBC Early Edition panel, Green MLA Adam Olsen denounced Rustad’s comments as “astonishing” and “inappropriate.” And Elenore Sturko, then MLA for the Opposition party BC United who recently joined the B.
C. Conservatives, called Rustad’s comments “ incredibly insulting ” at the time. And then Bruce Banman, the B.
C. Conservative MLA for Abbotsford South, summed up the criticism of Rustad’s comments as symptoms of a “hypersensitive, woke, far-left cancel culture” that he and his colleagues a.
