Penticton MLA says former BC Conservatives should resign, run in byelection

An Okanagan Conservative MLA isn’t mincing words after three of her counterparts left the party after one of them mocked residential school survivors.

Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie was kicked out of the BC Conservative Party after a series of events that culminated in her mocking residential school survivors on a podcast. The MLA for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream Tara Armstrong and Peace River North MLA Jordan Kealy left the party to support Brodie and her views on residential schools and now all three are independents.

“I think the right thing to do for all three of them is to resign and win their seats in a byelection because when voters go to the polls they’re typically voting for the leader, like they’re voting for John (Rustad) and they’re voting for the Conservative Party banner,” Penticton-Summerland MLA Amelia Boultbee told iNFOnews.ca.

Boultbee also voiced her support for First Nations and residential school survivors in the legislature Wednesday.

Brodie said there were “zero” graves found at the residential school Kamloops since the anomalies found by radar haven’t been dug up and no remains have been exhumed.

“It’s a sad culture war that is really hurting people, whether or not there are graves there in Kamloops. We do know that 4,000 children didn’t come home. We know that, so to cloak it in, ‘oh I’m telling the truth, I’m telling the truth, technically there are no graves,’ you’re inviting a conversation about residential school denialism that I have heard from our First Nations friends and neighbours is deeply wounding,” Boultbee said.

She said the BC Conservatives are going to be stronger now that there aren’t members who are distracting from the policy work the party wants to accomplish.

“This was a long time coming. Dallas has been a massive distraction,” she said. “We’re really concerned about healthcare. People are dying on waiting lists, we’ve got people lined up at the food bank, we’ve got housing crisis, we’ve got a crime crisis. As a team we’re working really hard on being focused on the most pressing issues and she was constantly going off on these tangents that were embarrassing to us.”

Boultbee said that Armstrong’s problems began long before she decided to leave the party to sit as an Independent. She said Armstrong hasn’t been to public events in her riding, has been unavailable to constituents, and is receiving complaints. She’s also been mostly unavailable to the media since her campaign began.

“I can tell you firsthand she’s done no work on her critic role. I don’t know whether it was because she was so unhappy and wanted to leave or whether she’s got a work ethic problem but Tara’s got bigger issues on her hands and she does owe her constituents an explanation,” Boultbee said.

As far as the petition demanding Armstrong resign, Boultbee said her constituents are more than justified. 

“Can you imagine donating thousands of dollars, knocking on doors, all the volunteers, all the hard work on the premise that you’re a BC Conservative, just to publicly leave the party only a couple of months in?” Boultbee said.

“I can imagine that Tara’s constituents feel very much like the rug’s been pulled out from underneath them.”