BC Conservatives replace president in latest shakeup

PENTICTON — Conservative Party of BC president Aisha Estey and vice-president Sharon White left the party board Wednesday, with Mauro Francis named the new president and Pavneet Singh the new vice-president..CKNW host Jas Johal reported the departures and replacements Wednesday night, asking at what point Findlay owns the resulting chaos. Findlay later posted thanks to both outgoing officers and congratulations to Francis and Singh..Estey, a personal-injury lawyer, had been the public face of the board through the party’s 2024 breakthrough, the December 2025 ouster of John Rustad and the subsequent leadership contest. She chaired the process that delivered Findlay a narrow 51% to 49% victory over Caroline Elliott on the fourth and final ballotWhite, a King’s Counsel and real-estate lawyer, is a former president of the BC Liberal Party and served on the leadership election organizing committee. Their simultaneous exit, without a public explanation from either woman, is the latest sign that the Rustad-era organizational core has been displaced.Francis is executive director of the South Vancouver Community Policing Centre and was the Conservative candidate in Burnaby North-Seymour in the 2025 federal election. He publicly endorsed Elliott during the provincial leadership race and sat in the orbit of her well-staffed campaign. Singh, a Kelowna businessman already serving as a director-at-large, is a former BC United candidate who stepped aside in 2024 to avoid splitting the vote against Tara Armstrong. He was the lone management-committee member who declined to sign the letter demanding Rustad’s resignation..Some party figures are treating Francis’s elevation as a gesture toward the Elliott camp after a race that left the party nearly split down the middle. Findlay took 30.5% on the first ballot to Elliott’s 25.8%, then absorbed enough second- and third-choice support to finish just 182 points ahead of Elliott on the final count. The closeness, and the subsequent staff and caucus overhaul, has kept the leadership fracture live.A widely circulated rumour in Conservative circles held that businessman Yuri Fulmer, who finished fourth on the first ballot with 13%, was being discussed as a possible president — a unity appointment for a candidate who had pitched a “big blue tent” and even struck a short-lived accord with OneBC. That did not materialize. Francis, not Fulmer, now holds the chair.The board change follows a summer of attrition. Executive director Angelo Isidorou stepped down at the end of July. Findlay installed a caucus leadership team dominated by her own endorsers at the end of June. Kamloops-Centre MLA Peter Milobar, a leadership also-ran, left to sit as an Independent on August 14, saying his values no longer aligned with the new direction. He was the seventh Conservative MLA to leave or be removed since the 2024 election..Findlay’s public line remains that the party is united and growing. Her Wednesday night message praised Estey’s work building the organization and said Francis and Singh bring “great energy and commitment.” Critics, including Johal, argue the pattern from caucus to staff to board now belongs to the leader who won a razor-thin mandate.Whether Francis’s appointment actually closes the Elliott file is another question. Elliott’s campaign had assembled a high-profile federal-conservative war room and finished within two points of the winner.Installing one of her backers as president may soothe some donors and organizers. It does not reverse the staff purge, the caucus reordering, or the departures that have already thinned the official opposition.The board still has to govern a party that remains Official Opposition with 37 seats, no leader in the legislature, and a membership that ballooned past 41,000 during the leadership vote. Estey and White oversaw that growth. Francis and Singh now inherit the machine — and the leftover rupture.

BC Conservatives replace president in latest shakeup

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