PENTICTON — The former Conservative Party of BC candidate for Victoria-Beacon Hill "pulled a Chapman" on Thursday. Interim leader Lorne Doerkson then did the part John Rustad skipped, and pulled the candidate. Doerkson said the Victoria-Beacon Hill contender is no longer a Conservative candidate and, if elected, will not serve in caucus.
The Agou déjà vu
They're calling it "pulling a Chapman" — the process of a Conservative Party of BC candidate being dragged through the mud over offensive comments in the midst of an election cycle.
The candidate in the mud this week is Joachim Agou, the Conservative filing in Victoria-Beacon Hill.
The charge opened Thursday at 11:00 a.m. PDT with Amna Shah, the NDP candidate in Surrey City Centre.
She posted three screenshots, calling them "absolutely horrific racism." She wrote that Agou was "attacking the Pakistani community as 'a sh*thole,' joking about killing protestors, celebrating white supremacist figures," and demanded that interim leader Lorne Doerkson "fire this candidate immediately."
The reason the phrase is "pulling a Chapman" relates to a fortnight in October 2024.
That's when CKNW's Jas Johal posted a 2015 Facebook post in which Chapman, then the Conservative candidate in Surrey South, called Palestinian children "little inbred walking, talking, breathing time bombs."
At the time, Premier David Eby and NDP candidate Haroon Ghaffar told Conservative leader John Rustad to take Chapman off the ballot.
Then-leader Rustad called the posts offensive, said he accepted the apology, and kept Chapman on the ticket. Chapman won Surrey South.
Mo Amir, host of This is VANCOLOUR on CHEK, drew the parallel. He posted at 11:20 a.m. PDT Thursday, before the official statement crossed the wires, that the Conservative Party of BC was deploying Nihaal Singh to Beacon Hill "to shove yet another candidate accused of hateful rhetoric into the janitor's closet."
He wrote that Singh had "earned his Medal of Hate Valour serving as Brent Chapman's human shield in 2024."
Thursday brought the same charge with a different ending. Interim leader Lorne Doerkson issued a statement datelined Vancouver:
"There is no excuse for this. I will not tolerate it. The candidate in Victoria-Beacon Hill is no longer a Conservative candidate. If elected, he will not serve in the Caucus." The release does not name Joachim Agou. Nor does it use the word "fired" or state that Elections BC has removed him from the candidate list.
Agou remains the official Conservative candidate on record in Victoria-Beacon Hill. Nominations closed October 3, and Elections BC files confirmed his candidacy as of Wednesday.
Chapman is not on a Conservative ballot for 2026. He joined OneBC on September 22, 2025, but did not submit his nomination papers and so will not be running on October 24.
Math is hard
Ravi Parmar, the NDP candidate in Langford-Highlands, quote-posted a Conservative tax graphic Thursday, calling it a $2.5 billion cut "mostly for millionaires," with no plan to pay for it.
The actual promise is a higher basic personal exemption capped at about $1,000 a person. X added a community note to Parmar's post regarding the claim's objective falsehood.
The graphic Parmar quoted states a new Conservative government will cut a family's taxes by $2,000 a year and never raise them.
The Surrey-datelined release raises the basic personal exemption from $13,216 to $32,000. The party says this amounts to up to $1,000 a year for an individual worker and $2,000 for the average couple—about $167 a month.
It states a full-time minimum-wage worker would pay no provincial income tax, and those earning more than roughly $40,000 would receive the full $1,000.
Under this plan, a millionaire does not receive a larger dollar cut, as the benefit caps out once the exemption is used.
Parmar wrote: "This is actually a $2.5 billion tax cut, mostly benefiting millionaires, with no clear plan to pay for it. Lorne can't have it both ways. When the money doesn't add up, health care and other services are on the chopping block."
The assertion that it mostly benefits millionaires is his claim. The party's release does not include a total cost for the cut. Speaking at Sabzi Mandi, Global News reporter Ben O'Hara-Byrne estimated a preliminary figure of about $2.5 billion for the exemption. That is a reporter's calculation, rather than a Conservative costing, and it certainly does not establish that the money would come out of health care.
As for Parmar's claims and the math itself, to put into plain English, the basic personal exemption is the first slice of income the province does not tax. Today, that slice is $13,216. The Conservative promise increases it to $32,000.
The way this works is remarkably simple: the province stops taxing that portion of income. Because the credit is non-refundable, it only reduces the tax a worker already owes.
BC calculates the credit at the lowest provincial tax rate. For 2026, that rate is 5.6%. By the math (though not explicitly stated in the release) $18,784 multiplied by 5.6% is approximately $1,050. That accounts for the party's $1,000 figure.
A worker currently earning under $13,216 pays no provincial income tax and would receive no new benefit. A worker earning between the old exemption limit and $32,000 pays less, and could pay nothing — this aligns with the minimum-wage example in the release.
A worker earning more than roughly $40,000 receives the full credit of about $1,000, at which point the benefit stops.
Consider the two incomes Parmar places in the same sentence.
Looking solely at the exemption at the 5.6% rate (excluding the BC tax reduction and all other credits) the math breaks down as follows: a worker making $30,000 currently pays provincial tax on the slice of income between $13,216 and $30,000. That slice is $16,784. At 5.6%, the tax is roughly $940. The new exemption would cover the entire $30,000, dropping that bill to zero. The relief totals about $940, or 3.1% of their income, eliminating their provincial income tax entirely in this scenario.
A worker making $1 million already uses the full existing credit. The new proposal adds the extra $18,784 exemption. At 5.6%, that equals approximately $1,050 in relief. That is about 0.1% of their income. The remaining $968,000 is still taxed.
As such, the benefit for an individual making $40,000 per year is roughly 31 times greater than it would be for someone earning $1 million per year.
A Kamloops hostage spoof
It's not just provincial election candidates who are suffering from the consequences of bad humour.
A Pivot Kamloops council candidate is defending a video showing him on his knees with his hands behind his back while a masked man in a tactical vest holds a baseball bat. The clip resurfaced just days before the Kamloops civic vote.
Dennis Giesbrecht originally posted the video in July. Nelly Dever, the slate's mayoral candidate, said she did not know about it beforehand and did not sign off.
"I personally didn't approve of the post. I thought it was in poor taste," Dever said. She added the team discussed it, Giesbrecht realized the joke had fallen flat, and he took it down after about a day.
In the clip, Giesbrecht says, "I am Dennis Giesbrecht of Pivot Kamloops — I'm doing this of my own free will," before praising city council, the budget, and predicting a landslide for the incumbents. He then looks up and asks, "Is that good?" iNFOnews, which obtained a copy after the deletion, noted the video also includes the line, "My family is safe."
Giesbrecht told Castanet Kamloops on Thursday the video was a jab at how city hall likes to control the narrative.
"If we can't have a sense of humour once in a while, then we're in bigger trouble than we let on," he said.
He rejected comparisons to an ISIS video and alleged the clip's reappearance is a coordinated effort to damage the Pivot slate. Castanet did not report a police file.
Pivot's public pledge is to restore civility and decorum at city hall. The civic vote is Saturday.