BREAKING: Findlay’s executive director relieved after mailbox standoff

PENTICTON - Conservative Party of BC executive director Elaine Allan has been relieved of her position, a source inside the party told the Western Standard.The source named president Mauro Francis and vice-president Pavneet Singh as the officers who made the call. Francis and Singh are the two most senior members of the party board following the departure of Angelo Isidorou and Aisha Estey. The March 2025 constitution puts day-to-day operations under the management committee and gives the president supervision of headquarters. The source did not say a full board vote was taken.Allan is the closest organizational ally Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay has had in the party office since former executive director Angelo Isidorou left at the end of July. CKNW host Jas Johal flagged the rupture Wednesday evening, reporting a standoff between Allan — whom he called Findlay’s “bestie” — and the board, and saying board members had lost access to their emails..“Internal strife, external departures, or as they say at BCC, Wednesday,” Johal wrote.The Western Standard has obtained a letter Allan sent Francis answering written concerns he put to her before the removal. In it she treats the situation as a precautionary suspension of herself and a staffer identified only as Amanda..Allan writes that around August 16 she and others “became aware of activity involving accounts associated with Angelo and Phil after their departure.” Angelo is Isidorou, who announced on July 29 he was leaving on “amicable and mutual terms.” Phil is Philip Dippenaar, the party’s managing director, who left in the same wave. Both men, she writes, “remain identified in BCGO as administrators who would receive system warnings relating to certain access or extraction of data.” The programmers had recommended they be stripped of those rights.It did not make sense to her that Isidorou or Dippenaar themselves would be pulling data they had been able to reach until shortly before they left. That raised a concern their accounts had been hacked, that unauthorized people were inside the systems, and that party information was at risk.“My reaction was to take steps to immediately protect the Party’s information,” she writes. “I asked Amanda to preserve information that appeared to have been deleted or was at risk of disappearing. The purpose was preservation. I did not instruct Amanda to read the contents of anyone’s mailbox, nor did I ask her to search anyone’s personal correspondence. She did not read anything. Nor did I.”The material, she says, sits on one external hard drive plus printed files. Copies were not placed on a personal computer, personal email, iCloud or any other cloud service. She says she has not sent, forwarded, shown or otherwise provided the downloaded material to any other person or organization, and that she has not reviewed the contents of the downloaded mailboxes. Which mailboxes were exported, she writes, should be established from Google Workspace audit logs and from Amanda’s own account rather than from memory..Separately, on Thursday, August 20 — the same day Francis was installed as president and Singh as vice-president, after Aisha Estey and Sharon White left the board — Allan says she asked Amanda to go through existing party files for operational documents the rebuilt office needed: nomination papers, candidate application forms, riding-association materials and similar records. During that work, she writes, an email addressed to Isidorou that had arrived on August 21 “was accidentally opened.” Amanda flagged it and forwarded it because she was worried about having opened it. Allan says that was not an instruction to review Isidorou’s mail.The other half of the fight was the keys.Francis had asked for unrestricted super-admin access. Allan writes that when she told him there was “no contract in place,” she was not denying that the president or the board has authority. She says she had not been given documentation or an access protocol defining the scope of unrestricted technical access to systems that hold member records, donor information, employee information and HR files. She makes the same point about the bylaws. She was not claiming a bylaw barred him. She could not find a policy that said who should have that access.“To protect both of us from a security breach, I wanted the issue clarified rather than making that determination myself.”She cites section 34 of British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act, which requires an organization to make reasonable security arrangements to protect personal information against unauthorized access, collection, use, disclosure, copying, modification or disposal. She says she was not arguing that PIPA bars a president from access. Her “overriding concern was to stabilize the Party’s information systems in view of repeated unauthorized access and interference with our sensitive data.”.Francis, on her telling, asked why the stated basis for holding him off appeared to change. Allan says the underlying concern did not. She was trying to handle governance authority, system permissions, privacy obligations and data security at once, “and I accept that I did not always articulate those distinctions clearly while events were unfolding.”She also denies imposing a blanket ban on the president talking to staff. Her concern, she writes, was that while access questions were unresolved, requests about data, passwords and administrator permissions needed to be coordinated so staff were not taking conflicting orders. If something she said was heard as a total communications freeze, “that was not my intention.”Allan has been a party member since 2020. She is the former federal Conservative candidate in Vancouver Centre and vice-chair of the Conservative Electors Association, the municipal vehicle whose advisory board Findlay chairs. Isidorou’s departure left the party office to be rebuilt under a leader who still does not have a seat.“In hindsight, I should have immediately called you and explained what we were seeing and what I was doing,” she writes to Francis. “That would have avoided a great deal of misunderstanding, and I accept that I should have done that.”She says there was no intention “to obtain anyone’s private information, read anyone’s emails or use the material for any purpose.” She was trying to protect party data “at a time when I genuinely believed it might be disappearing.” She closes by offering to sit down and “resolve it quickly and fairly and get back to the work we both want to be doing for the Party.”The letter does not say whether Francis took possession of the drive. It does not name the committee she said was reviewing the events. It does not say whether Findlay directed, approved or even knew of the export. The source who described the removal did not say what becomes of Amanda, or of the hard drive.Francis, Singh, Findlay, Allan and the Conservative Party of BC had not issued a public statement at the time of publication.

BREAKING: Findlay’s executive director relieved after mailbox standoff

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