Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who served as a federal MP and Minister of National Revenue under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is the new leader of the B.C. Conservative Party.<\/p>\n
\u201cMine is a grand vision of fundamental change,\u201d she said in remarks shortly after the result was announced at the Rocky Mountaineer Station in Vancouver on Saturday evening (May 30). \u201cOur homes, our individual rights, our properties are at stake.\u201d<\/p>\n
Findlay would need to win a byelection to be able to sit as an MLA in the B.C. legislature. She alluded to plans in the works and said she would run \u201cas soon as possible.\u201d This will require someone to step down from a seat, which could theoretically be her husband, Brent Chapman, who represents Surrey South and has had recent health issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrent is a cancer survivor this past year,\u201d she told reporters. \u201cHe\u2019s been through a lot, and it would be, I think, a lot for me to ask him to do that, but we will have those discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Findlay won a nail-biter of a leadership race that took four rounds of voting to put her ahead of her nearest competitor, conservative commentator Caroline Elliott. Findlay won out 51 to Elliott\u2019s 49 per cent.<\/p>\n
Findlay served three terms in Parliament from 2011 to 2025, with a four-year break from 2015 to 2019. In addition to National Revenue, she served as the Associate Minister of National Defence and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice under Harper, and Chief Opposition Whip in Pierre Poilievre\u2019s Official Opposition.<\/p>\n
Three other candidates had made it through to the end of the race: Capilano University Chancellor Yuri Fulmer, Kamloops Centre MLA Peter Milobar and former B.C. Liberal minister Iain Black.<\/p>\n
Voting was held by preferential ballot, with rules stipulating that if no candidate reached 50 per cent of the vote outright, the candidate with the fewest votes was eliminated and their second-place votes redistributed.<\/p>\n
Milobar was the first out on Saturday, with 10.5 per cent, then Fulmer with 13.9 per cent, and finally Iain Black, who had 30 per cent after round three.<\/p>\n
There were audible gasps heard in the room after Findlay\u2019s victory was announced, but these were quickly drowned out with chants of KERRY! KERRY! as the new leader took the stage. Some people got up and left the room before she spoke.<\/p>\n
Findlay contrasted her plans for the province with what she called the NDP\u2019s \u201cradical ideology,\u201d which she says has \u201cdevastated property rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBackroom side agreements, and the NDP\u2019s economic vandalism has to end,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Labour Minister Jennifer Whiteside was on hand at the convention to provide comment. She said Findlay represented the \u201cextreme right,\u201d and has \u201cespoused some very divisive and racist and harmful abuse during the course of this leadership campaign.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whiteside then pointed to comments Findlay made during a campaign debate, suggesting Milobar had a conflict of interest on property rights because his wife is Indigenous.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to see how this division actually brings people together,\u201d Whiteside said.<\/p>\n
A membership surge<\/p>\n
Since the race began at the start of this year, the Conservative Party\u2019s membership ranks swelled from roughly 7,000 to approximately 42,000, though not all of those new members were able to verify their eligibility to vote in the contest in time.<\/p>\n
Party returning officer Sacha Peter took the stage before vote-counting began to explain the process and assure members that votes had been kept in a secure box and no one had yet seen the ballots. Access was logged and audited.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be the first time that your votes cast in a secret ballot will be tabulated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Scrutineers from the campaigns were present when the counts were conducted, he added.<\/p>\n
He also gave the final member counts. By the April 18 cutoff, 41,718 members had joined up and were eligible to verify their identity. Of those, 26,273 did so by the cutoff at the end of the day on May 20.<\/p>\n
About two-thirds were verified without human review, while roughly 9,000 had to be manually adjudicated.<\/p>\n
The final total vote count was 25,695, roughly equal to 98 per cent of verified members.<\/p>\n
Interim leader Trevor Halford opened his speech, also before vote-counting began, by honouring former leader John Rustad, who helped build the party to what it is now, but stepped down in December amid division and infighting.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe didn\u2019t step back, he stepped forward, and he put his party first, and he put this province first,\u201d Halford said.<\/p>\n
Halford also urged unity, seeming to acknowledge the division that led to Rustad stepping down and the animosity between the campaigns and their supporters during the leadership contest.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to leave here as Conservatives, and we will leave here unified,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
B.C. Conservative House Leader \u00c1\u2019a:l\u00edya Warbus called Findlay\u2019s victory a \u201ccelebratory moment\u201d after a \u201ctrying and testing time\u201d for the Conservative Caucus.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything that we did, every ounce of energy we had, we poured into fighting the NDP and taking a look and scrutinizing very closely their initiatives and their legislation,\u201d she said. \u201cAll the while this pressure was building inside our party.\u201d<\/p>\n
-With files from Lauren Collins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kerry-Lynne Findlay, who served as a federal MP and Minister of National Revenue under former Prime Minister Stephen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":705178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194299],"tags":[49,48,163792,87674],"class_list":["post-705177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-surrey","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-lower-mainland","tag-surrey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=705177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/705177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/705178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=705177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=705177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=705177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}