JONESIE: We need to talk about MLA Amelia Boultbee

OPINION

For the past few months, I have been talking to some people about troubling communications and experiences with their MLA.

I had noticed, as I am sure nearly anyone who has participated in an online or other political forum in the Penticton-Summerland riding has, that Amelia Boultbee doesn’t behave like most MLAs.

I’ve never seen one so willingly wade into the mudslinging of social media to find and vigorously return criticism from their constituents from their prime position, day or night.

I asked around town and found plenty of people willing to talk about being bullied by Amelia Boultbee, before or after she was elected. But almost without exception, all but the most ardent and public enemies refused to talk without anonymity.

“As much as I don’t like bullies I am also really scared of her,” one source told me. “I don’t have the emotional energy to be harassed for days and weeks on end.”

“I wouldn’t put it past her to make things up about me,” another said. “She can be emotionally violent.”

Some described what they felt were warnings, trumped up allegations and threats, particularly against critics. They almost seemed far-fetched if it weren’t for the sheer number of them and if many weren’t right there in public.

Then the funniest thing happened.

I wrote an editorial criticizing Amelia Boultbee. She responded by:

• Withdrawing cooperation with reporters until this photo from her own open social media accounts was removed from this story, which ran three months earlier
• In a lengthy uninterrupted chain of texts, called me “a troll” “obnoxious” “stupid” “sexist pig” and “nuts”
• Threatened to “get the female parliamentarians involved” and “get all the women’s groups involved”
• Made a formal complaint to my employer, telling clearly demonstrable lies
• Complained a second time, repeating those lies
• Repeated those lies in public multiple times
• Threatened to sue me and my employer through her lawyer
• Enlisted her new party, the governing BCNDP, to complain to my employer

One more time: An MLA threatened to sue a news editor for a column that hasn’t been published, after trying to get him fired.

Or perhaps her strategy had a finer point. Both Boultbee and her lawyer, Michael Welsh, revealed that they think because Boultbee complained to my employer about me, I’m in a conflict of interest — and cannot write or report on her anymore.

“It is clearly part of some vendetta on your part for my client rightfully contacting your employer over your sexist and unprofessional approach to past reporting on her. As such it is malicious in nature,” Welsh wrote.

Interesting notion, I guess. I wonder if they informed Premier David Eby that to be rid of Vaughn Palmer or Mike Smyth, all he needs to do is find a complaint to file. Ta-da!

It’s certainly effective, it’s delayed me by more than a month. So, fine. Now this column has to kind of be part legal document.

I also have to keep some powder dry to help, you know, not get bankrupted by our elected representative on the way to the courthouse.

Boultbee is trying to make out like I have a “personal vendetta” which is a weird take since I have never met her, briefly spoke to her on the phone, called her office once, have sent her precisely two emails and 11 texts, the first of which was March 30, 2026.

In June 2025 I wrote a column showing to that point, I was pretty supportive.

Here’s how that changed five months later.

We were working on a story about a Penticton man who was yelling racial slurs at ESL students but no one would tell us his name. It sounded like something Boultbee might know. She had been helpful before, we thought we’d give it a shot. She gave my reporter a name — Wayne Llewellyn. We pursued the lead for several hours before concluding there’s no evidence connecting him to this and he doesn’t even live near the ESL classroom.

So if he isn’t the guy, who did the MLA just throw under our bus? Llewellyn was a former board member of the BC Conservative constituency association who resigned after the party installed councillor Boultbee as the nominee over their candidate, Roger Harrington. They raised a bit of hell over that for months including a heated public argument with Boultbee at an open house around that time.

Let me repeat: A news reporter asked Amelia Boultbee — the MLA, a lawyer (non-practicing) — to ID a local racist of some profile and she named a political enemy she knew was irrelevant.

That got my attention.

I started looking at some past controversies in a new light. Like threatening to sue an unaffiliated rival in the middle of an election over some campaign signs even ElectionsBC couldn’t care less about. I’d never seen that before.

“I was warned this might happen,” Tracy St. Claire wrote on her Facebook page Sept. 26, 2024, sharing the legal demand from the same Michael Welsh. “I will not be bullied or intimidated by Amelia Boultbee or her lawyer.”

It put then-current conflicts in new light as well. Boultbee continued and continues to spar with her former colleagues on Penticton City Council, seemingly unaware of why they cut her out of communications. She publicly battled John Rustad, her former boss, and won the public relations game. He lost his job but he had a version of that story no one paid attention to.

Boultbee left caucus. She later got kicked out of the party for siding with the NDP (I’d bet a double-double this was specifically to target another reporter, (if you know you know)), then she sat as an independent before last week committing to the NDP she once vowed to unseat.

As if that wasn’t enough conflict and controversy for one week, she lit out aggressively at past supporters. Here she is on X.com threatening to reveal information about Dan Ashton, her predecessor in office. I’m told Dan was at one point a mentor to her, taught her the ropes — took her in his private plane.

(For the record, Isodoru was the BC Conservative campaign manager and a political operative, she’s talking about oppo research from one of her former parties.)

But those are only the conflicts that made headlines.

It’s no secret how she responds to critics on local forums — if she hasn’t deleted them or had them deleted. And if she hasn’t been banned. I’m told one Penticton councillor for certain, maybe two and maybe all of them have blocked her for unwanted communications, often late at night. Mayor Julius Bloomfield publicly castigated her for revealing sensitive information from the one time they did try to include her.

In March, I criticized her take on a local water issue (I still think I will be proven right) and two things happened: Some folks in the community noticed and contacted me about being bullied by their MLA and Amelia Boultbee noticed and raised an allegation of sexism on a three-month-old story. She told a reporter she wouldn’t speak to iNFOnews.ca until the photo was removed.

Seemed strange, certainly a surprise but fair enough. I reached out by text for the first time ever, again having never met this person nor spoken to them in any capacity, to see what’s up.

I get genuine complaints about stories and photos all the time — trust me, they don’t go like this.

Without any input from the complainant, I’m at a loss. The photo she complained about fit the story, it came from her open social media accounts, it was shared and used by others without her complaint, it wasn’t chosen or used to denigrate or sexualize her but still — her photo, her complaint, it was a feature story and it wasn’t required — so I removed it. (The MLA has claimed publicly and to my employer that I continued to use the photo on that and other stories. Websites are wonderful trackers for these things. It’s another. Also, to see her track record for such allegations, here she is claiming sexism against Kelowna-Mission MLA Gavin Dew.)

But she wasn’t done. I was treated to a tirade of insults and threats in 24 nearly uninterrupted texts.

“Welcome to the Bullied By Boultbee Club,” a source told me after hearing of this encounter.

I can’t give you details of what other folks told me about their encounters, but suffice to say many have a similar arc or trajectory to my own. I expect I will have to post this all online at some point.

A week or so ago, I told readers this column was coming, suggested if anyone had similar stories to contact me, but I already had what I needed. I spoke to some outright political enemies like Llewellyn, one of the few who allowed me to use their name. I had already spoken to people who once considered Boultbee a friend or ally, or engaged with her professionally in other capacities, some of them only online. Many have shared public and private messages of her attempts to humiliate, threats, veiled and otherwise — of lawsuits, to expose information — and follow through. One source told me she complained to their employer and their professional association after an online argument.

Sharing their story with me and sharing publicly are different things. Many were scared of what their MLA could do, even in opposition or independent.

“If she backs me into a corner, I will go public only as a measure to protect myself from being fully buried,” one source told me. “That is not my hope.”

One got fed up and sought MLA oversight from a provincial commissioner, arguing they had grounds to investigate Boultbee for “standards of conduct, use of authority and the maintenance of public trust… observed (in) a recurring pattern of behaviour.” The writer’s concern was that without “the moderating influence of caucus discipline or party communications” that voters have little recourse to protect themselves from their MLA.

The commissioner had no jurisdiction to investigate and suggested they write Boultbee directly about their concerns. The writer declined.

Now Boultbee is a member of the NDP government. It took mere days for the party’s communications department to call my employer to pick up her complaint on her behalf.

Six weeks ago, I had most of this information and more nearly ready for publication as a story, not a column, which had its own problem because I’d need to give the MLA a chance to respond and I saw no sign of good faith or anything approaching professional communications.

I called her office hoping to find an intermediary — a board member if she had one, or a lawyer perhaps — for what I anticipated would be sensitive discussions. That conversation with her constituency assistant was a few seconds of standard chit chat, but Boultbee claims I “harassed” her staff. (More bad faith communications, another lie. She also told my boss she reported me to the “Sergeant-at-Arms” for harassment, another lie. They kind of laughed when I asked them about it, said they never heard of such a thing).

Without a board to answer for the MLA’s conduct, I sought contact with her lawyer. She declined to offer it and I opted to change the focus of my story anyway. A week later she embarked on her campaign to shut me up and threatened to sue.

I want to be clear, I’m not saying Boultbee was wrong in all the communications I’ve seen or were described. In plenty of examples I saw, she returned in kind and tenor, like any other online flame war we’ve all been a part of, with the obvious exception, of course, which also happens to be the entire point — on one side of these wars is the MLA.

Custom and convention surely dictate some rules of engagement, not lord your power over the squeaky plebs in the comment section as well as the Premiers office. The BC Law Society might frown a toothless grin on this conduct from practicing members but there’s no code of conduct for provincial politicians — just the one at the ballot box.

There’s a common denominator in these many public and private conflicts, a personal tactic and method antithetical to the cooperation and good will required for good politics let alone good government. Voters need to know about and decide if this Trumpian strategy of frightening, silencing and punishing critics is for them.

It’s still unusual in BC politics, unprecedented in my experience, different, new, worthy of public note but also a growing concern if you count fellow rogue MLAs Dallas Brodie and Tara Armstrong on this pole.

I’m fortunate my employer has backed me 100% in the face of a certain lawsuit by a lawyer and her lawyer. We’re a small, local, independent news outlet so this is no small matter, but they stand by me.

Many of the people I spoke to don’t count themselves so lucky.

I believe it’s vital that we stand up to this level of intimidation of residents, critics and the press because if these are the lengths Amelia Boultbee or a politician will go to punish a news agency for doing its job, what chance does anyone else have against their MLA?

— Marshall Jones is the editor of iNFOnews.ca