Posts shared by BC Conservative MLA Dallas Brodie regarding the Kamloops residential school have divided the party, with some supporting her stance and others calling on her to retract.
When asked by leader John Rustad to take the posts down, the Vancouver-Quilchena representative refused, arguing that she was simply "standing for truth."
"The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero," her original post on X read. "Zero. No one should be afraid of the truth. Not lawyers, their governing bodies, or anyone else."
She was referring to attorney James Heller, who has received a considerable amount of backlash over his decision to sue the Law Society of British Columbia — a group to which he belongs — for libel after it repeated the claim that there were, in fact, mass graves at the Kamloops residential school.
"As a former defence lawyer, I experienced why facts matter," Brodie wrote in a follow-up post. "False or unsubstantiated claims could have put innocent clients of mine behind bars. Can we trust our legal system if lawyers are no longer free to insist upon the facts?"
She went on to note that she would "engage Minister Sharma and the Law Society over these mandatory indigenous course materials and the apparent mistreatment of the lawyers who requested corrections to them."
Rustad was quick to ask her to remove it.
"When the tweet was first put up, I was concerned that it might be misinterpreted," he told reporters in Victoria on Monday. "I asked her to take it down because of that concern."
Rustad made it clear that it "doesn't change the fact that there hasn't been anything found at these sites," nor the fact that what took place there was horrific.
"In Canada more than 4,000 children did not return home," he lamented. "Those children died in residential schools, and tragically as part of this, they decided at the time not to send the deceased home for burial. They buried them on sites, so just about every residential school in the country has a cemetery, has children who passed."
Chilliwack-Cultus Lake MLA Á'a:líya Warbus came out against those who focus on whether burials at residential schools are confirmed or not, though she did not name Brodie.
"Physical evidence is one aspect you can hyper focus on," she wrote in a post on X, "and yes, you will be called a denier — because what is the end goal of your argument? It does not change what happened in these schools and the results we see with our own eyes today, suicide, poverty, addiction, children in care and the incarcerated."
Former BC Conservative candidate Bryan Breguet called Rustad a "coward" for asking Brodie to retract the post, and praised her for refusing.
Brodie maintained that she believed she was doing the right thing.
"The stand I'm taking is rooted in the need for truth," she said, "and I don't think standing for truth takes away anything from the severity of what happened at the residential schools."