Bruce Banman, the Abbotsford South MLA who helped launch the BC Conservatives alongside John Rustad back in 2023, left the party’s caucus Thursday to sit as an Independent, becoming the sixth MLA to quit since August 14.
Banman said in a statement that “person after person” in his riding has told him the party’s new leader is “unelectable,” warning that Findlay’s Conservatives are narrowing their appeal exactly when they need to broaden it to beat the NDP.
Findlay took over the party leadership in a late-May vote, though she has no seat of her own in the legislature. Abbotsford-Mission MLA Reann Gasper has said she’ll step down to let Findlay run there in a byelection.
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Also read: Why BC Conservative MLAs Turned on John Rustad
Banman is the fifth MLA to leave since Monday alone. The party has fallen to 31 seats from the 44 it won in the 2024 election that made it BC’s official opposition for the first time in decades. Other recent departures include Kamloops Centre’s Peter Milobar and Delta South’s Ian Paton, who plan to form a new party together, along with Richmond’s Teresa Wat and Courtenay-Comox’s Brennan Day.
She fired one of her own hires this week, Apollo Chung, a former Republican Party of Alberta staffer who had been serving as the caucus’s operations director.
The caucus forced Rustad from the leadership in December, after 20 of its 39 members said they’d lost confidence in him. Nine months later, under his successor, a similar dynamic appears to be playing out.
