Second and third BC Conservative MLAs jump ship Friday; is the party sinking?

The party that was just a couple dozen votes away from forming the B.C. government in the last election could be crumbling.

Just hours after BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad expelled Vancouver MLA Dallas Brodie for comments about residential schools, two more MLAs have up and left.

Peace River North MLA Jordan Kealy announced Friday afternoon he was leaving the party.

Just a couple hours later, Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream Tara Armstrong also announced she was leaving.

Kealy says he left because he was disgusted by Rustad’s treatment of Brodie.

“I know that when I see a teammate, whether or not her beliefs are different, when I see her getting bullied by six other people, I’m not going to sit idle,” he told 1130 NewsRadio.

“I’m not going to let somebody get abused that way.”

Prior to Armstrong’s announcement, Kealy said he thinks he’s far from the last who’ll decide to jump ship.

“There are definitely more Conservatives that are going to come, and I believe that when they see something that’s stable and safe, that we will see a lot more embrace that,” he said.

“It finally got time for this kind of change to happen. I didn’t want this to happen, but I will not be bullied.”

In addition, sources have told us that more resignations are coming.

Kealy says this could be the start of a new party but it isn’t clear what that will look like.

“I’m not going to say something that I really don’t know the right answer to,” he said. “So right now, I think when it comes to going in on Monday, I will be talking to the Speaker’s office about forming a separate caucus, and we’ll start from there.”

He says he is open to joining forces with Brodie. That would be significant, as you only need two seats for official party status in the legislature.

University of the Fraser Valley political science professor Hamish Telford says it isn’t surprising that MLAs are jumping ship.

“There was irreconcilable tension in this party that emerged over the last couple of weeks, and much longer really, between different factions,” Telford said.

“It was going to always end with one faction or the other leaving.”

He says this latest news is vindication for BC United Leader Kevin Falcon.

“This was precisely what he was trying to avoid in his negotiations with the BC Conservatives, that there was a faction that he could not accommodate,” he said.

“But John Rustad is faced with exactly the same problem, and has handled it in the same way that Kevin Falcon would have handled it.”

Telford says this is ironic.

“They came up one seat or two behind a majority themselves, and they bragged about having united the right for this and the province showing that conservatives are something they wanted.

The situation is reminiscent of Rustad’s own journey; he was kicked out of the BC United Party in 2023 and later crossed the floor to become leader of the Conservatives.

At the time, he was the party’s only MLA. Several others followed in the months before the election and in the wake of the fall of the BC United.