Petition to oust Okanagan Conservative MLA won’t force a byelection

There really is only one way for constituents to remove a MLA from office and an online petition isn't it. Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream MLA Tara Armstrong decided to leave the BC Conservative Party and sit as an Independent in support of fellow MLA Dallas Brodie who was removed from the party for denying the experiences of residential school survivors and mocking them on a podcast. Constituent Nikki Sinclair started the petition yesterday, March 11, in an effort to get Armstrong to resign. “Elected representatives are meant to reflect the collective choices and beliefs of their constituents. The abrupt departure of our MLA from the Conservative Party skews this representation and shifts the balance of power that was decided by us. It's essential to remember that such decisions impact us and the Party we chose directly. The policies we backed and the party we align ourselves with are now undermined due to this shift by Ms. Armstrong,” Sinclair wrote in the online petition. The petition is a call for Armstrong to resign, but it won’t be able to strong arm her into doing so. READ MORE: Okanagan Conservative MLA now representing her riding as an Independent https://infotel.ca/newsitem/okanagan-conservative-mla-now-representing-her-riding-as-an-independent/it108420 There is a method for voters to force an MLA out of office by recalling them. A recall is started by a voter who has to collect signatures from 40 per cent of eligible voters. For a signature to count on a recall petition the signer has to be a registered voter in the MLA’s electoral district, and they had to be registered to vote on the final voting day when the MLA was elected. Since the Recall and Initiative Act came into effect in B.C. in 1995 there have been 30 recall petitions, and all of them have failed. There were 26,000 votes cast in Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream in the provincial election that brought Armstrong into office so any recall petition would need more than 13,000 signatures from eligible voters in the district. Sinclair’s petition only has 68 signatures, and the Recall and Initiative Act says that every signature has to be witnessed by whoever is canvassing for the petition. “In the name of democracy, we demand that Tara Armstrong immediately resign and that a byelection be held so that we, the electorate, can decide who truly represents our voices, our rights, and our community. It must be us, the voters, who get to make this important decision and not our MLA,” Sinclair wrote in the petition. Click here for the petition. https://www.change.org/p/kelowna-lake-country-coldstream-demand-a-byelection-following-mla-s-shift-to-independent To contact a reporter for this story, email Jesse Tomas mailto:jtomas@infonews.ca  or call 250-488-3065 or email the editor mailto:news@infonews.ca . You can also submit photos, videos or news tips to the newsroom mailto:tips@infonews.ca  and be entered to win a monthly prize draw. Find our Journalism Ethics policy here. https://infotel.ca/newsitem/code-of-ethics/it106782 We welcome your comments and opinions on our stories but play nice. We won't censor or delete comments unless they contain off-topic statements or links, unnecessary vulgarity, false facts, spam or obviously fake profiles. If you have any concerns about what you see in comments, email the editor in the link above. SUBSCRIBE to our awesome newsletter here https://infotel.ca/newsletter .