Indigenous community members in B.C. react to OneBC ousting party leader

Indigenous community members in British Columbia say they are celebrating after OneBC said it had removed MLA Dallas Brodie as its party leader.

“I felt joyous. I felt so happy that I had to read it a couple of times,” said T'uy't'tanat-Cease Wyss, a Skwxwu7mesh and Sto:lo Indigenous ethnobotanist and interdisciplinary artist.

Brodie is known for her views on unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School that historians have described as denialist, and her introduction of bills in the legislature like the Land Acknowledgement Prohibition Act.

OneBC, the party formed after a split from the Conservative Party of B.C., says Brodie has been "removed" by the party's board of directors. 

Tara Armstrong, the party's only other elected member in the B.C. Legislature, says she's lost confidence in Brodie's leadership, and the party's website no longer includes any mention of Brodie.

“It's a pitiful thing that anybody walks around and says disgraceful things about people's deaths and especially children,” said Wyss.

“My mother's [a residential school survivor] no longer with us, but she would have been so outraged and angry and hurt to hear the things that Dallas Brodie and her minions say about Indigenous people.”

In a Facebook post, Wade Grant, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Quadra, who is a member of the Musqueam Nation, called Brodie’s removal “a welcome Christmas gift to all residential school survivors and their families."

"She's my MLA ... to disrespect my elders, my ancestors, and continue to deny what happened to them is something that hurts not only them, but it hurts their family members, including myself," said Grant.

"And for me to have somebody represent me at a provincial level like that, I don't want that sort of thinking in the house, in the legislature, in British Columbia."

Rex Smallboy, a court worker in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside who is from Maskwacis in Alberta, said news that Brodie had been ejected from the party gave him “a lot of relief."

“The first thing I thought is how racist that you got to be to get kicked out of your own racist party,” said Smallboy.

“That kind of blew me away."

While Brodie has been removed from OneBC, she continues to be the MLA for Vancouver-Quilchena, amid calls for her to resign or be recalled under the Recall and Initiative Act.