Fired Findlay staffer alleges racism after a leak captured him slamming ‘white people’

PENTICTON — Apollo Chung, the fired former staffer of Kerry-Lynne Findlay who made denigrating comments about “white people,” is now claiming he too was the victim of personal attacks on the basis of his race.Chung, Findlay’s short-lived caucus director of operations and a key figure in her leadership campaign, gave the allegation to PressProgress on Thursday, a day after Findlay accepted Delaney’s resignation as chief of staff and named Reann Gasper to the job.“With Chris’ departure as Chief of Staff, it is time to speak openly about my time working with him,” Chung said in a statement to the left-leaning outlet.“During my short time as Director of Operations and Stakeholder Relations, I was repeatedly subjected to racial remarks and questionable conduct from Chris Delaney that I found demeaning, inappropriate and unacceptable. These were not isolated interactions. At the time, I let it go and stayed focused on the job. I have since filed a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal regarding this conduct.”PressProgress reporter Rumneek Johal wrote the outlet reviewed the tribunal complaint. In an interview, Chung told PressProgress Delaney repeatedly used a “racialized slur,” including in a July incident described in that filing, and “often made stereotypes about Asian people.”The story does not name the slur..CKNW host and former BC Liberal MLA Jas Johal recirculated the piece Thursday afternoon and asked what kind of team Findlay had built.“Seriously, what kind of team did Kerry-Lynne Findlay put together? What a blood mess,” he wrote.Later he added that no Conservative MLA had walked out Thursday, which made it “a perfect day” for Chung’s complaint..Findlay and the Conservative Party of BC did not respond to PressProgress. Delaney did not answer multiple requests. Chung lasted in the job until August 26. That morning Findlay posted that she had directed her chief of staff — Delaney — to terminate the director of operations “effective immediately.” She did not name him and did not give a reason..Johal and CBC legislative reporter Katie DeRosa identified the official as Chung within minutes. .The Western Standard listened to the three source files. The dominant voice talks about getting government as “the main prize,” puts a floor of “half a million dollars for me” on the table, and then talks about forcing fundraisers “so we can steal everything.”The same voice then turns on the party’s own workers.“I don’t know what the f**k is wrong with the conservative underlings. They’re weird. F**king white people are, like, crazy.”.Chung now calls those files “disturbing, selective edited voice clips” and “doctored recordings.” Multiple individuals from within the Findlay leadership campaign who spoke to Western Standard off the record said the language and tone in the Chung clips were "not surprising," "not unusual," and that they fit within a broader pattern of behaviour for him in terms of saying "weird, unusual, and inappropriate" things.Chung did not, in the published interview, deny that the voice is his.Instead, he offered a fundraising explanation, saying his side “needed money badly" to compete with the large war chest built up by the Caroline Elliott campaign.“When you do fundraising and you talk with fundraisers and stuff like that, you kind of exaggerate,” he told PressProgress. Elliott’s leadership campaign, he added, had raised about $2.2 million. “That’s what we established, and we needed money. We needed money badly. It was just like, we needed half a million. We have conversations about fundraising all the time, and it’s not unusual to talk about. It’s really, really hard to make money, and I have no access to that money.”.The recordings do not sound like a leadership-race budget meeting, however. The sequence and timing of events also do not neatly align with Chung's or support explanation to Press Progress."I can’t do it, I can’t do it now because of Chris, right? I can’t do it with Chris Delaney there, right?” Apollo said in one clip.Findlay won the Conservative leadership on May 30. Delaney became chief of staff on June 10. Chung sat in the caucus operations chair after that vote. The clip about "stealing everything," therefore, is unlikely to be about beating Elliott on fundraising or in the leadership race — she had already been beaten by the time Delaney had entered the scene.It appears PressProgress — deeply linked to the Broadbent Institute and the federal far-left New Democratic Party — failed to properly reconstruct the timeline in their article and, instead, took Chung at his word..Those same individuals from the Findlay campaign who spoke to Western Standard said they had no knowledge of who Delaney was until he was appointed BC Conservative chief of staff well after the leadership race had been won by Findlay.Chung also appears to refer to Findlay as "the leader" in the leaked audio clips, suggesting the leadership campaign had already concluded at the time of the surreptitious recording.“I don’t walk away from money. We have the leader in our hands. I’m not walking away. Minimum, I want half a million dollars for me," said the voice identified as Chung's.A few beats later: “We need to basically force all of them to make a fundraiser for us. And so we can steal everything. Like whenever we win something we just go in there.”Then: “That’s the objective, right? To monetize this whole thing. It’s about basically like going into their place, it’s just stealing non-stop. Like I used to do this all the time with the leader… How do I monetize it? How do I monetize it, right? And I don’t want people to interfere with it.”.On friction between himself and the now-departed BC Conservative chief of staff, Chung told PressProgress he and Delaney never got along.“There was significant friction between us from the beginning and in the period leading up to my departure. It was widely known we did not like each other.”Delaney left Wednesday after a recording leaked of a voice attributed to him, in which the voice goes on a minutes-long rant about "Natives" and their apparent inability to produce enough pemmican to survive the winter. .That evening the outgoing Delaney issued a two-page personal statement on Conservative Party of BC letterhead. He said he resigned to keep from becoming a "distraction" in Abbotsford-Mission..Delany added that the by-election would decide whether BC remains “a sovereign and free province with equal rights for all citizens” or descends into “a monstrous hybrid of ‘soft’ tyranny and dictatorship with remnants of a past democracy.”Then he turned on the MLAs who had already walked.“But the enemies of BC and the enemies of democracy, like those who have walked away in previous days, are determined to prevaricate, misrepresent, mischaracterize, and outright lie to try to stop Kerry-Lynne from standing in their way of delivering BC into their hands.”.Many are questioning Findlay's judgment following the departures of both men this week.Chung’s résumé is only part of the reason. He did constituency work in an NDP office for Vancouver-False Creek MLA Brenda Bailey, then served as executive director of the Republican Party of Alberta.He told PressProgress he left the NDP because he no longer shared its values, moved to Alberta after Mark Carney won the federal election, and helped sovereigntist organizers because he “felt that they were really treated unfairly” and knows how to build a party. He also said he has been “a target” inside the Conservative Party of BC.Chung added that he will be filing a BC Human Rights Complaint against Delaney — ironic, as some have pointed out, because some BC Conservative and Independent MLAs had spent much of the last spring session debating whether that body should even exist..Thursday’s complaints from the Press Progress article land just as Findlay is trying to win the September 26 Abbotsford-Mission byelection Gasper vacated for her. BC Premier David Eby was noncommittal on Thursday when asked about the byelection and the possibility of a calling a future snap election for the whole province, not ruling out the possibility and stating on-the-record: "the leader of the Conservatives is a huge mess.".The BC legislature returns October 5.

Fired Findlay staffer alleges racism after a leak captured him slamming ‘white people’

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