A B.C. Conservative Party staffer who called the orange Survivors’ flag — which honours residential school survivors — a “disgrace” and a “fake flag” on social media has been fired.
Lindsay Shepherd, who had worked as a communications officer for the B.C. Conservative caucus, faced widespread criticism after her posts on the social media platform X late last week.
Last Thursday, several NDP, Conservative and Green MLAs raised the Survivors’ flag on the front steps of the legislature in Victoria, ahead of National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30.
The next day, Shepherd wrote on social media: “The Orange Shirt and the Orange Flag perpetuate untruths about Canadian history, such as the grandest lie of all that 215 children’s graves were unearthed in Kamloops.
“It is a disgrace that this fake flag flies in front of the provincial parliament buildings, and it is a disgrace to see the shirt of lies framed prominently and permanently beside the coat of arms so that locals and tourists cannot view our insignia without having their eye drawn and redirected to the Orange shirt,” the post continued.
Shepherd deleted the post shortly after it was posted, but a screengrab was shared by Rohini Arora, NDP MLA for Burnaby East.
Arora said the Conservative caucus did the right thing in firing Shepherd, and credited Conservative MLAs “who stand up to bigotry inside their party.”
“Far-right extremism is tolerated and even welcomed in the B.C. Conservatives – until it becomes public,” she said in a statement.
On Wednesday, Shepherd said on X that B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad had fired her because of the social media post.
“I am a mother of two young children, and I am 32 weeks pregnant — I was about to go on maternity leave,” she wrote.
“I had been an elected board member with the party since 2022,” she added. “It’s very sad that it ended up this way.”
CBC News has reached out to the B.C. Conservative Party for a comment on this story.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, had urged Rustad to fire Shepherd over the comments.
“It’s shocking, it’s absolutely disgusting. It’s astonishing that there can be that level of ignorance in this modern day,” he said.
“Residential school denial is a terrible, racist sickness that is given public expression with impunity in this province and in this country.”
Former B.C. Green MLA Adam Olsen, a negotiator for the Tsartlip First Nation, called the comments “vile.”
“These kinds of attacks on the true history of our province is really troubling. It’s really toxic behaviour,” Olsen said.
“I feel for all our relatives who have the confront these kind of messages and have their entire history questioned in such a mean-spirited way.”
In May of 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation shared that preliminary findings from a ground-penetrating radar survey found some 200 potential unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
That announcement was the beginning of a nationwide movement as First Nations across the country began their own searches of residential school sites and many non-Indigenous Canadians began to comprehend the significance of the harms perpetrated at those institutions.
