After the RCMP “facilitated” a group of people off UBC’s Vancouver campus last week, both the OneBC Party and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) are criticizing the university’s leadership.
OneBC leader and MLA Dallas Brodie is demanding an apology for how police treated her party, and the UBCIC is calling on the university to prohibit the group from entering the campus again.
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Brodie — who has disputed accounts of unmarked graves at residential schools — arrived at UBC Thursday for what the university called a “protest event” in front of its Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.
They were met by a large group of counter-protesters, who can be seen on social media videos jeering at the OneBC group.
Brodie says in a social media video that although the event generally “went really well,“ she was later assaulted multiple times by a “mob.”
Among her group were Frances Widdowson and Jim McMurtry, who have denied that Indigenous children are buried at the Kamloops Residential School.
Brodie claims that her group’s presence was not organized as an event and that she and her accompaniment were “harassed, threatened, and assaulted.”
She claims that RCMP officers were present during the harassment that occurred, but did not intervene.
“At no point did police or campus security take meaningful action to stop the assaults against us,” Brodie claimed in an open letter addressed to the university’s leadership and UBC’s RCMP Detachment.
“We were forced to barricade ourselves inside a building and call 911 because police were nowhere to be seen.”
Later, the police ordered the OneBC group to leave the premises for their own safety, without issuing a trespass notice.
During the altercations, Widdowson, who is a former Mount Royal University professor, was seen physically carried away by three RCMP officers.
Brodie is demanding that UBC’s leadership apologize to her group.
Additionally, she is calling on the police to explain why no “arrangements” were made to “control the violent mass.”
Meanwhile, the UBCIC is criticizing the university for allowing “Residential School denialism” to propagate on campus.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, who speaks on behalf of the UBCIC, says that white supremacy, racism, and misinformation should not be permitted in public institutions.
“Academic institutions should be places of ethical inquiry, research, legitimate debate and knowledge production, not racism, bad faith arguments and hateful rhetoric,” he said in an open letter addressed to UBC president Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon.
He compares the incident with the events that happened on Dec. 2, 2025, at the University of Victoria (UVIC), when Brodie and two party members “held a similar unsanctioned event.”
“We call on UBC to have the courage to name these events for what they are, to call out racism,” Phillip added.
—With files from the Canadian Press
