Division grows in BC Conservative caucus as MLA under fire for residential school posts says critics 'belong in the NDP'

The divide within the BC Conservative caucus appears to be growing as an MLA under fire for posts she made about residential schools says critics from her party "belong in the NDP."

Among those Vancouver-Quilchena MLA Dallas Brodie accused of siding with their political rivals was House Leader and Chilliwack-Cultus Lake MLA Á’a:líya Warbus, who is herself indigenous.

"Not one message that was sent to me contained vicious comments about indigenous people," Brodie said in an interview with former professor Frances Widdowson, claiming that "99%" of those who reached out were on her side.

She argued that "the most vociferous hatred or anger I received has been from within my own party."

"I guess there's a person in our party who's indigenous," Brodie continued, referring to Warbus. "She was super angry and went to town and joined the NDP to call me out."

She went on to argue that it was of utmost importance to promote the truth, "not his truth, her truth, my grandmother's truth ... it's gotta be the truth."

"They need to decide whether they're going to be in favour of truth, or social pressure," she said of those in power, suggesting that those in her party who she deemed to have chosen the latter "belong in the NDP."

When asked on Thursday about the situation, BC Conservative leader John Rustad made it clear he doesn't support "any of our members going out and attacking other members."

"What I encourage all of our members to do is to understand that we need to be a big tent party," he said, "where we have differences and issues, that we deal with them internally, but at the end of the day, we need also to make sure that people have the ability to be able to express that."

Per the Vancouver Sun, Warbus said it was important to "address the division within the caucus and get on the same page as a team."

"If we cannot do that," she added, "then I do not know why I came here and sacrificed my time to be a political representative."

In her original post on X, Brodie wrote that "the number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero, adding, "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.

Rustad was quick to ask her to remove the posts, but she refused.

Warbus responded not long after with a post of her own. While it didn't name Brodie explicitly, it addressed concerns related to the sentiment of her comments.

"Physical evidence is one aspect you can hyper focus on," Warbus wrote, "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."