OneBC party split over staffer’s ‘disgusting’ views on Jews, says ex-leader Brodie

VICTORIA — British Columbia legislator Dallas Brodie, whose OneBC party has removed her as leader, said the split happened after colleagues tried to stop her from firing a caucus staffer whose views on Jewish people were “disgusting” and antisemitic.

Brodie said she wanted the man removed because she is not a “neo-Nazi,” and it was “obscene” to think that the young man’s views could be in the party.

“I hate antisemitism. It’s the most crushing, most horrible, toxic thing that can come into a society,” Brodie said in an interview on Monday.

Brodie also described unusual behaviour from the caucus staffer, including wearing sunglasses and a surgical mask at public OneBC events, which she said was an apparent attempt to hide his identity.

Brodie said her then chief of staff, Tim Thielmann, and party interim executive director Paul Ratchford had hired the person and tried to protect him when she sought his firing last week.

Thielmann said in a social media post on Monday that he and Ratchford advised Brodie against firing the staffer, who he calls “a 22-year-old brown kid who was being made out to be a ‘white supremacist'” and they instead wanted to “mentor” him.

“We didn’t believe that a leader should run cancellation campaigns against their own staff,” he said.

The person named by Brodie has been accused of being an anonymous online figure who has posted about the hierarchy of races and the “JQ,” an abbreviation of the Jewish question, while Brodie said he also expressed unacceptable views about Jewish people in her presence.

Screenshots dating back months show the online figure also claimed to work for the Trump administration and posted photographs from the White House, as well as posting about the advantages of Canada becoming the 51st state.

The Canadian Press is not naming the person because it could not independently authenticate the screenshots, and could not contact the person named by Brodie, who said she was alerted about the staffer’s online behaviour by a person in her church.

Brodie said she had clashed with the young staffer over a message he wanted to post under her name on social media platform X.

“I think it said the NDP or somebody is anti-civilizational, and that they want the province to be run on drum circles and powwows,” she said.

“It then went on from there, and I said ‘No,’ and then he started back-talking me, and said, ‘You’re gonna go nowhere. You’ll never be in power if you can’t find your inner Trump figure.’ And I was like, excuse me?”

Brodie said the staffer told her she would be a “loser” and a “Mitt Romney” figure, if she did not act differently.

While Thielmann said on social media platform X that the person was a “junior” staffer, he said Brodie adopted the young man’s work on a host of issues, “including immigration and the defence of our ancestors from decolonial oppression narratives.”

“He wrote her incredible speech defending Canada in our bill to remove Truth and Reconciliation Day as a national holiday,” Thielmann said, and had produced a graphic describing Canada as “built, not stolen,” garnering more than two million views.

Thielmann said he fired the person within two hours of Brodie’s instructions.

Ratchford said on social media that the staffer had been using an anonymous account on social media, describing his posts as “edgy conversations that average people do not engage in.”

“Some of which I agree with, and some of which I don’t,” he added.

The party said last week that Brodie was removed as leader after its only other MLA, Tara Armstrong, lost faith in her leadership.

Armstrong posted on social media on Sunday that this came after “the sudden removal of the very people who helped build OneBC,” which left her with “a profound sense of sadness and disbelief.”

Armstrong also cited an “unauthorized data breach” that “placed me in an impossible position as a board member and crossed lines I cannot ignore.”

Brodie said the staffer with antisemitic views was hired in July on Ratchford’s recommendation, and she said that maybe she should have done more diligence in his hiring.

She called Ratchford one of her most trusted friends. “I really believe that he would have protected us from anything like this. So, it’s been a state of shock for me, actually, to realize the depth of this,” Brodie said.

The online figure has locked public access to their profile, but people who track far-right activity have shared numerous screenshots over the past year.

The screenshots include a post showing someone at the White House holding a copy of a text by “Bronze Age Pervert,” an author popular in some far-right circles, who has written favourably about selective breeding of humans.

Wyatt Claypool, who Brodie appointed as her chief of staff before her removal as leader, said on social media that the person Brodie wanted fired is a communications staffer and “a nutcase who loves racist philosophers” including “Bronze Age Pervert.”

The screenshot of the online figure’s posts also show them discussing who should be removed from the United States, saying that they would be “OK” with the removal of anyone “who wasn’t here pre-Civil War,” while arguing that Arab people are white and not “anywhere genetically similar” to Indian people.

Brodie said she spoke to the staffer about these kinds of views, and she could not understand why he held them. She said she told him that he himself could be “re-migrated” under such policies, given his own ethnic heritage, but this did not deter him, because he claimed to be of a “certain type of blood and soil.”

Brodie has recently been referring to herself as OneBC’s interim leader, while Armstrong is calling herself the party’s “house leader.”

If either Armstrong or Brodie leave OneBC, which was formed this year after they both split from the B.C. Conservatives, it would lose official party status in the B.C. legislature, as well as the funding and other advantages that come with that recognition.

Brodie had been ejected from the Conservative caucus by former leader John Rustad for “mocking” former residential school students.

Thielmann had previously worked for the Conservative caucus, before being fired, while Ratchford ran unsuccessfully against Premier David Eby as a candidate in October 2024.

Brodie said she can live with herself if her political career ends, but says she feels betrayed.

“It’s a profound betrayal of me,” she said. “It’s been horrible for me, but I’m just going to keep going, because I do care about British Columbia deeply. But politics is sure a dirty game.”

Ratchford ‘s social media post praised Brodie for “a lot of great work championing critical issues for this province” such as calling for the end of land acknowledgements, the suspension of immigration and 25 per cent across the board tax cuts.

But he also said Brodie had made “some MASSIVE mistakes,” while demonstrating a “complete failure of leadership.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 15, 2025.

Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press