Who is Laurie Throness? A brief overview of Chilliwack's new school trustee, an ex-MLA

If you are new to the area, have a short memory or weren't paying attention from 2013 to 2020, a quick refresher

Laurie Throness won the Chilliwack School Board byelection on the weekend to replace Heather Maahs who stepped down from the board after winning the provincial election to become MLA for Chilliwack North.

Most people reading this will remember his years as MLA for the riding of Chilliwack-Hope, which became Chilliwack-Kent, but here's a refresher on his background and what he's all about.

Throness first emerged as a public figure in the Fraser Valley as a provincial candidate for the BC Liberals in a 2012 byelection. He lost to Gwen O'Mahony of the NDP in a vote with a very low turnout and a right-wing split as John Martin finished third for the BC Conservatives.

Throness then went on to win the Chilliwack-Hope seat in the 2013 general election. He won re-election in 2017 and lasted as a BC Liberal right up until the last minute of the 2020 election when he swung and missed for his third social conservative strike.

Getting kicked out of the BC Liberal party for being too conservative at that time was a little like being kicked out of church for praying too much. The party was always referred to as a coalition but it leaned more and more to the right up until its relegation to opposition status in 2017, descended even further after that until it tapped out in favour of the far right BC Conservatives in the lead-up to the 2024 election. 

Roots in church and state

Throness’s father was an evangelical pastor. As of March 2024, his brother was still a pastor at the largest congregation in the city, Chilliwack Alliance Church. Forty years ago Throness began as executive assistant to former Socred MLA Harvey Schroeder. Ten years later. In 1994, he worked for long-time Chilliwack Reform/Allliance/Conservative MP Chuck Strahl. With the federal Liberals in power, Throness joined the office of the Opposition Leader providing policy research and advice to three leaders: Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper.

Needless to say, his blood bleeds blue and he has worked for the most social conservative of the conservative politicians around.

Demise as a BC Liberal

Throness’s first strike as a BC Liberal was when he doubled down on Chillliwack school board trustee Neufeld’s anti-SOGI comments. Throness defended the vocal homophobe as a “good man” who “loves children” and who “deserves to be treated with respect and kindness.” Neufeld was a pariah in mainstream circles at that point, even conservative ones.

Throness’s second strike was his support for conversion therapy, the pseudo-scientific attempt to turn gay people straight. When he and nine fellow BC Liberals, including party leader Andrew Wilkinson, paid for a full-page Thanksgiving ad in The Light Magazine, a far-right Christian publication, they were called out on it. The magazine runs homophobic and transphobic content, including pro-conversion therapy stories.

Wilkinson and the other BC Liberals rightly apologized for the misstep.

Throness doubled down. 

“Biblical Christians follow their Lord in their sexual practice,” he told CTV News in July 2020. “They don’t attack other people, they don’t condemn other people, because Jesus did not condemn other people. They withdraw from sex outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. That has nothing to do with intolerance, it has everything to do with following their conscience and following their Lord.”

To say “Biblical Christians” withdraw from sex outside of heterosexual marriage is, of course, patently laughable. Tell that to all the high profile evangelical leaders caught in sex scandals over the last decades, or the countless number of children raped by church leaders over the last few hundred years.

But Wilkinson held his nose and kept the two-time election winner in caucus.

Strike three, however, came in the bottom of the ninth inning during the 2020 election campaign when Throness went one step too far even for a conservative political party in the Bible belt. Just days before the Oct. 24, 2020 general election, Wilkinson was publicly standing by Throness as a candidate despite the conversion therapy talk and despite an open letter urging his removal as a candidate, signed by 38 prominent individuals, including Louis De Jaeger, president of the Chilliwack Métis Association, and Chilliwack school board chair Willow Reichelt. At a campaign stop in Hope on Oct. 2, 2020, Wilkinson said Throness would stay as a candidate.

“All of our candidates, including our Chilliwack candidates, are obliged to agree that there cannot be any discrimination in this province, period,” Wilkinson said.

Twelve days later on Oct. 14, 2020, Throness couldn’t help himself.

The NDP campaigned on a promise of making prescription contraception more available. Throness compared that to eugenics, the abhorrent historical practice of attempting to "improve" the genetic stock of a population.

"It contains a whiff of the old eugenics thing where, you know, poor people shouldn't have babies," he said. "And so, we can't force them to have contraception, so we'll give it to them for free. And maybe they'll have fewer babies so there will be fewer poor people in the future. And to me, that contains an odour that I don't like."

Strike three. You’re. out.

“Yesterday Mr. Laurie Throness made statements that are not in keeping with the value of the BC Liberal Party or my own values,” Wilkinson said on Oct. 15, 2020, nine days before the election. It was too late to remove him so Throness stayed on the ballot as an independent, but he lost his seat to NDP candidate Kelli Paddon.

After all that, it is worth noting, nearly 7,000 people cast a ballot for Throness out of a vote total of 22,702, which shows there was and remains a Trump-style devotion by religious ideologues to their leaders no matter how outrageous their beliefs, no matter how bigoted and ignorant their comments are, and even no matter how much they damage their own party.

And the Chilliwack School Board byelection on March 1 showed that this type of anachronistic thinking is still rampant.

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