Eager to attribute any and every negative political occurrence to the Alberta independence movement, Calgary columnist Don Braid wrote a piece in the National Post where he said: “Leader Kerry-Lynne Findlay’s dalliance with Alberta separatists is a key reason for the nine MLA defections that led to the party's epic collapse.”

The only tie between Alberta independence activists and the B.C. Conservative Party was the short tenure of a staffer calling himself Apollo Chung who had previously been the executive director for the now scandal-ridden Republican Party of Alberta. It wasn’t so much Chung’s past employment that caused grief for Findlay as it was some candid recordings alleged to be of Chung that exposed what appears to be a very unprincipled political operator.

The party should never have hired such an odious man, and in doing so they gave themselves even more grief than they already had, but the Chung episode is little more than a footnote in the collapse of the B.C. Conservatives.

The B.C. Conservative Party has been in a process of self-destruction and infighting for over a year. Internal pressure pushed leader John Rustad into resignation, and a divisive leadership race riddled with Eastern Canadian political operators created massive rifts in the party. Findlay narrowly won the leadership race in May 2026 and walked into a caucus that had already lost cohesion. She has found herself incapable of building unity.

Nine MLAs have left the B.C. Conservative caucus just in the last few weeks. Departing MLAs cited a myriad of reasons for their exits, but it was only the most recent two who mentioned Chung, and his episode was but one within larger lists of reasons given. Braid’s treating Chung’s hire as “the key reason” for an 18-month disintegration is an Alberta-centric projection and is making a huge stretch in trying to tie Alberta’s referendum to a struggling B.C. opposition party. Alberta separatists are no more responsible for Findlay’s woes than they are for weather patterns in Kelowna.