MLA wants to scrap B.C.’s Human Rights Code. Some constituents want her gone instead

A B.C. legislator who has sought to scrap the province's Human Rights Code and ban land acknowledgments.

A B.C. legislator who has sought to scrap the province’s Human Rights Code and ban land acknowledgments, and has blamed the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting on “transgender ideology,” is facing a recall campaign from constituents who say she has left them without “coherent” representation.

Tara Armstrong has also been accused of spreading hate by the NDP government and is facing calls to resign from 17 Pride societies, but she said she “knows very well what is important” to her constituents and would continue to represent them.

“I’m going to keep doing all the things I said I would do as MLA, and that includes the issues that I bring up,” she said in the hallways of the legislature.

The legislator for Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream told reporters she was not going to be “intimidated” by who she described as activists who had hijacked the rights code.

“It no longer represents every single British Columbian, and we have to come back to the basics of that and revise that, so that we actually do have the opportunity to represent everybody again,” she said.

Armstrong was elected as a B.C. Conservative in October 2024, founded the OneBC party with fellow MLA Dallas Brodie eight months later, then split from Brodie and OneBC in December.

Now sitting as an Independent, Armstrong unsuccessfully tabled a bill last month to repeal B.C.’s Human Rights Code, which protects against discrimination based on sex, gender, race and disability among other categories.

That was in response to a $750,000 fine imposed by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against former school trustee Barry Neufeld, in a finding that he violated the code by publishing hate speech against LGBTQ+ people.