Every time John Rustad leaves his house — which is often, because Rustad has one of the busiest travel schedules of any politician, anywhere in British Columbia — he says goodbye to his wife Kim and his parrot Biardi, in that order.

In return, he gets encouragement from his wife, who has been a driving force in helping him reshape the political landscape of British Columbia as the leader of the BC Conservative party. But he gets melancholy expressions of sorrow from the parrot.

“Whenever I leave, it always says in this sad face, ‘Bye,’” says Rustad.

Rustad and Biardi have a special bond — which is good because African grey parrots can live longer than most people.

“If it stays healthy, it will live to maybe 85 years old,” says Rustad. “So we will have to figure out who to will it to.”

Biardi may well become the first parrot to co-occupy the premier’s office. Rustad is riding a wave of momentum that could seriously challenge BC NDP Leader David Eby on Oct. 19. If successful, it will cap a meteoric political rise for the 61-year-old Prince George native, who says he never really aspired to be a party leader but has chosen to step up in the moment presented to him.

“Politics was never an ambition in life,” he says.

Still, he’s seized the opportunity — a mixture of the brand recognition of the hugely popular federal Conservatives, the mismanagement and collapse of the former BC United and the sudden realignment of the right-wing coalition behind his party.

Some might call it luck. But there’s also the old adage that you also have to be good to be lucky.

“Luck is where opportunity meets preparation,” says Rustad.

Rustad may be the recognizable political name in his family, but it’s his wife Kim who is the driving force.

“She was the one who actually pushed me really hard to do this,” he recounts. “She said, ‘Look you need to do this. I want you to do this.’

“And I said, ‘Well you know what this means? I’m going to be home one day a week if that.’

“And she said, ‘I understand. I want you do this.’”

The estimate has proved prophetic.

For most of this year, Rustad has averaged one day a week at home, at best. Sometimes, he’s gone for weeks at a time, crisscrossing the province to build up a network of 93 local riding associations and candidates.

It has meant a sacrifice for the Rustads, who live on a lake an hour outside of Prince George. They have no kids (shortly after getting married Kim developed cervical cancer) but they do have six nieces and nephews, plus a grand-niece and a grand-nephew.

“We would borrow them and take them on trips, take them down to Disneyland and Mexico and things like that,” says Rustad. “We pretty much spoil them.”

Rustad was running his own timber supply and watershed consulting firm in Prince George in the 1990s prior to entering politics — first as a local school board trustee, then in 2005 as the BC Liberal MLA for Nechako Lakes, and later in ministerial portfolios for Aboriginal relations, forestry and natural resources.

In 2022, he was fired from the Liberal caucus by leader Kevin Falcon over publicly questioning the science of climate change.

While the move has since formed part of the mythos of how Rustad ascended to his current perch, in reality, around that time, he wasn’t even sure he’d continue in politics.

“So 2022 was a tough year for Kim and I,” he says. “My dad passed away in January. My father-in-law passed in Februrary. I had shingles in April. And my mother passed in July. And I was talking to Kim about just retiring, quite frankly — because I thought there was no way Kevin Falcon was going to win and I didn’t want to waste any more time sitting in Opposition with him.”

But again, his wife intervened to prop him back up.

“After getting........

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