On Jan. 22nd, OneBC, the newly founded far-right party, planned on coming to the University of British Columbia. But their plans were ruined when they were met by a demonstration of one thousand people which forced them off campus and onto a bus with their tails between their legs. This is a fantastic victory.
OneBC, and their only MLA Dallas Brodie, has been making waves ever since she was expelled from John Rustad’s Conservative party in March 2025. Typical of all far-right politicians who scapegoat minorities, Brodie has latched onto the question of residential schools, which she paints as being lovely institutions where nobody was harmed. Lately, OneBC has been coming to campuses with the aim of antagonizing Indigenous students and then filming these interactions as part of a new documentary.
But OneBC is not just an enemy of Indigenous people. Their program is chock full of attacks on working class people including abolishing rent controls and taking away education workers’ right to strike, all while giving tax cuts to billionaires.
The far right can only be fought by building a mass movement against them. This is why the RCP chapter at UBC made a public call to organize a counter-protest. We were very happy to see other organizations such as the People’s University UBC also call for people to demonstrate against OneBC.
In the end, the sizable crowd that turned up showed that students at UBC are sick of these far-right hooligans who are constantly antagonizing Indigenous people. The mood of the protest was electric. As hundreds of people turned up and started chanting at OneBC, these goons started to push students, trying to start a conflict.
This is why we made the call for the crowd to push these people off of campus. And this call was taken up enthusiastically as most people there understood what needed to be done. The further we pushed the OneBC people away, the bigger the crowd against them grew. Being outnumbered 80-to-one, the small group of OneBC instigators were completely dwarfed by the counter-protest. This, in and of itself, was a big victory.
This also represents an important lesson in how to defeat the far right. In order to keep the momentum up and draw all of the necessary lessons from this experience, the RCP will be organizing a UBC Defense Committee Townhall. Everyone is welcome to come and discuss how we can continue the fight against the far-right if they ever rear their head again on campus.
All working-class people and students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, have an interest in fighting against the OneBC riff-raff.
Right-wing demagogues like Dallas Brodie are a product of the crisis of capitalism, and the utter failure of the BCNDP to make our lives better. OneBC’s program would make working-class people’s lives much worse—but they hide it by trying to divide working-class people using culture war issues and pointing at “mass immigration” as the source of working-class problems. However, when no party puts forward a program explaining how to fight the ills brought on us by capitalism, these demagogues can gain a foothold—just like Trump has in America.
Therefore, in our fight against the far right, we need to counter them not only physically by mass mobilization, but by putting forward a bold socialist program. This is how we can channel all the existing anger in society, and direct it against the capitalist system which produced these OneBC thugs in the first place.
