Former BC Conservatives MLAs to sit as Independents

It would appear the BC Conservatives may be slowly imploding after the party came up short in the provincial election last October.

Since the election loss, one of their losing candidates says he’s taking legal action against Elections BC, and an MLA was kicked out of caucus after mocking Residential School Survivors.

After MLA Dallas Brodie was fired by Leader John Rustad on Friday, in response, two other Conservative MLAs — Jordan Kealy of Peace River North and Tara Armstrong of Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream — announced they were leaving the party.

Those three MLAs spoke in front of the media on Monday, announcing they will sit as Independents in the provincial Legislature.

Kealy had said Friday that he’d be setting up a new party, but Brodie told reporters outside the legislature Monday that for now they’ll be sitting as Independents, and although there are “whispers” of others leaving the party, she won’t give names.

Armstrong said Rustad “caved to the woke liberals who have infiltrated the party.”

The upheaval started when Rustad asked Brodie to remove a social media post last month, where she said “zero” child burials had been confirmed at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Armstrong said no one was surprised when New Democrat Premier David Eby attacked Brodie for telling “the truth” about Kamloops, but “Rustad’s cowardly decision stabbed her in the back [and] revealed just how corrupt he has become.”

Kealy told 1130 NewsRadio last week that the move to leave the party was a “cumulative effect.”

He said he wasn’t happy with how Brodie was treated, saying it’s been difficult to “communicate across a different perspective.”

That comment also came after five BC Conservative MLAs voted against party lines on a BC NDP motion to condemn U.S. President Donald Trump last week.

Speaking to 1130 NewsRadio on Sunday, Ian Bushfield, the co-host of the PolitiCoast podcast, said that if the Independents had formed a new party, “they’re going to be bigger than the BC Greens.”

“It will really change the dynamic in the B.C. Legislature. I think it’s almost guaranteed they form a caucus and a party just to get the money that the Legislature offers to official parties. Being an independent is very difficult. If you were forming caucus and get some extra money, you can hire researchers and do a better job for your constituents,” Bushfield explained.

So, what changes for the voter?

“It’s not clear what’s really going to differentiate this new group from the BC Conservatives, aside from maybe tone, ” Bushfield added.

“There’s always going to be a line. If you’re going to have a party, if you allow extremism to go too rampant, you’re going to lose some other thing of your party, and I think we were already seeing tensions boil publically with a few MLAs, like Á’a:líya Warbus — the Indigenous Conservative MLA — really calling out Brodie and those who are supporting her and then a tension between Warbus and Brodie’s camps and that wasn’t going to be tenable for too long.

“It seemed like either Rustad was going to lose Warbus, or he was going to lose Brodie, and I think he did the calculation, and he figured there are probably fewer on Brodie’s side.”

Bushfield points out that with all the angst, the near future looks bleak for the BC Conservatives.

“Maybe the Conservatives collapse like BC United did, or maybe the NDP is just laughing through to the next majority government,” Bushfield said.

With files from Angelyna Mintz and Srushti Gangdev.