JÄGER: Leadership candidates fail to see the forest through the trees — and voters are stumped

I should preface this by making it very clear that professionally as a journalist — and personally as a political transient — I do not have a horse in this race. These are simply my observations as an unbiased observer.

Just four days after taking to the stage for their second debate — the first with all candidates present — BC Conservative leadership hopefuls will meet yet again to try and convince members they're the right person for the job.

Before looking ahead, though, let's reflect on Friday night's smackdown.

Things started off calmly, with candidates Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Yuri Fulmerm Peter Milobar, Iain Black, and Caroline Elliott articulating their vision for the province to an attentive audience. Then came the chance to rebut, and all hell broke loose.

During a particularly rowdy Question Period on Monday, Speaker Raj Chouhan jokingly suggested he and his colleagues should "put a tent outside and have a free-for-all."

Had one of the moderators made the same suggestion on Friday, I reckon it would have been met with cheers from those both on and off the stage.

Don't get me wrong, debates are supposed to be lively and full of disagreement, but what seemed out of the ordinary was the lengths to which candidates were going to attack their opponents' character.

Let me sum it up for you in six words: "I'm a conservative, you're a liberal."

That term has effectively turned into a slur during the course of this leadership race. Up until two years ago, the BC Liberals were the closest thing in the province to conservatives, but now some have deemed the party as much of an ideological rival as the BC NDP.

"Anybody who has spent 20 years getting political experience in this province on the right has a history with the BC Liberals," one candidate told me. "It's just a fact."

The truth is, yes, the BC Conservatives' rise was fuelled by grassroots support, but they likely wouldn't be the official opposition were it not for the countless people who served with and for the BC Liberals.

All but Findlay and Fulmer can be explicitly tied to the now-defunct party. Milobar and Black were MLAs under the BC Liberal banner, and Elliott was the party's vice president. Her brother-in-law, Kevin Falcon, still holds the keys to the name.

Even the two outsiders had "liberal" aspects of their past brought up and scrutinized. One was lambasted for daring to include a land acknowledgement on his company's website, another was accused of supporting the claim that Canada's residential school system amounted to "genocide."

Before long, every candidate was subjecting the other to an ideological purity test — and none were passing.

Nonetheless, each proclaimed loud and proud that they, and they alone, were the "true conservative."

To quote Queen Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "[Thou] dost protest too much, methinks."

Throughout the evening, clips circulated on Twitter. Instead of answers to questions posed by the moderators, however, most highlighted rebuttals to attacks from other candidates.

I struggle to see how any of this matters to voters. To govern effectively one must work alongside those with whom they disagree, and be able to put small differences aside for the greater good.

If the new leader of the BC Conservatives maintains their "holier than thou" attitude after May 30, the party is in trouble. There's already a growing movement to resurrect a BC Liberal Party, and making voters feel like they don't have a home in the official opposition will only increase their desire for an alternative.

The question potential leaders need to ask themselves is, is it worth winning the battle to lose the war? There's not much use in being crowned Conservative king or queen if the kingdom over which you rule is engaged in civil war, now is there.

That brings us to tonight.

If their teams paid attention to any of the comments on the last debate across social media, I reckon we're in for a much more peaceful affair where policy takes precedence over personal attacks.

My message to the candidates is this: British Columbians of all political stripes are curious to hear what you would do if you become leader of the official opposition. Very few of us care what your opponents were doing years ago.

People change, they grow. Nobody has the exact same set of beliefs now as they did half a decade ago — and if they do, they're as ideologically possessed as those they claim to be against...