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Kelowna News

JONESIE: Dayleen is back and she hasn't changed a bit

October 03, 2014 - 8:23 AM

Remember Dayleen Van Ryswyk? When last we left her, she was spending a minute counting her votes as an independent candidate in the 2013 provincial election. You may remember she was booted as an NDP candidate for—let’s call them troublesome—remarks she made about First Nations in this country among other identifiable groups that upset her.

That’s when I encountered her for the first time. I wanted to interview her and clear the air. I thought this poor woman made a few somewhat anonymous idle comments a few years earlier, now dirty politics chewed her up and spit her out. I thought she deserved an opportunity to clear the air and not be branded a racist.

To my surprise, she wanted to keep preaching her ignorance and, well, things just went downhill in my interview.

Well, she’s back and worse than ever. She’s backing her busload of bad logic into the municipal campaign this November. I was going to leave this alone, hoping she wasn’t going to use the campaign to spread her fertilizer and embarrass this city once again. Despite my wishful thinking, that’s exactly what she intends to do.

She has a page on her candidate website with her views on what she calls ‘race-based law.’ And she suddenly reappeared locally to share her muddled thinking about local First Nations.

I say local First Nations because DVR has taken her show on the road. She's spent her days since the provincial campaign ended in May 2013 slandering natives across the country in comments on news stories and Facebook groups outside of Kelowna. She found comfort from a few dozen like-minded people and joined a group called End Race-Based Law. Dayleen, it appears, hopes to be some kind of leader of this group.

I wonder what her hat will look like.

And let me be clear. The reason you should cast your vote elsewhere isn’t just because of her opinions but because of her easy willingness, her desire to bend facts and logic and reason to arrive at her opinions. And worse still, she is trying to organize and spread to others and this campaign gives her an easy outlet.

So I am curious how this is going to play out. Are people going to ignore her or are they going to challenge her? We’ll find out soon enough.

— Marshall Jones is the editor of Infonews.ca.

News from © iNFOnews, 2014
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