This year in Tara Armstrong: Party collapse, recall campaign and lots of controversy

Few MLAs have gotten as much attention as the Okanagan’s most controversial MLA, Tara Armstrong.

Armstrong’s campaign under the BC Conservatives started out with her declining to participate in all-candidates forums, and refusing many interview requests, like several other BC Conservative candidates.

She won the Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream riding under the BC Conservative banner with 14,000 votes, or 54 per cent.

Armstrong didn’t sit long as a BC Conservative. She quit the party in March after former BC Conservative leader John Rustad ousted MLA Dallas Brodie. Brodie was ousted after mocking residential school survivors, so Armstrong and MLA Jordan Kealy followed her out.

Together, Brodie and Armstrong formed a new party, OneBC, in June. The two MLAs were just enough for OneBC to qualify as a sitting party and get the additional funding that comes with party status.

Armstrong was appointed house leader for OneBC, a title that earned her a 10 per cent pay raise.

As house leader for OneBC, Armstrong put forward numerous bills including one to make a holiday for the Freedom Convoy, eliminate gender-affirming care for youth, and a bill to make migrants pay more for health care. Only the Freedom Convoy holiday bill made it to a first reading.

As OneBC’s leader, Brodie put forward bills to ban First Nations land acknowledgements and get rid of Truth and Reconciliation Day.

In November, some of Armstrong’s constituents started organizing a recall campaign to get her out of office. The campaign is laying the groundwork for a recall petition which can start collecting signatures in April.

If successful, the petition would force a byelection and make Armstrong the first BC MLA to ever be officially recalled.

Not long after the recall campaign began, OneBC released a film promoting residential school denialists focused on the Kamloops Residential School and the 215 suspected graves found there.

Then, for the second time in less than a year, Armstrong found herself no longer a member of a party because OneBC collapsed.

Armstrong and the OneBC board ousted Brodie as leader of the party. Armstrong claimed it was because she lost faith in Brodie’s leadership, but Brodie and OneBC staff said the falling out was about Brodie’s demand to fire a staff member who was a “neo-Nazi”.

The coup was ultimately unsuccessful because Brodie has since clawed back control of OneBC in less than two weeks and at least for now, it appears Armstrong is out.

Regardless of who’s in charge, OneBC is no longer an official sitting party, since a party needs at least two elected members.

It has been an eventful year for Armstrong, and there’s more to come in 2026 with the recall campaign gearing up to file its petition in the spring.

Armstrong has never agreed to an interview with iNFOnews.ca, and didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article.