Laurie Throness resigns from B.C. Liberal Party after comparing free contraception to eugenics

With less than 10 days to the provincial election, Chilliwack-Kent candidate Laurie Throness has stepped down from the B.C. Liberal Party after comparing free contraception to eugenics.

B.C. Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson announced Throness was out at a campaign stop in Coquitlam, saying the opinions of the two-time MLA were not in keeping with party values. 

“I’ve accepted his resignation … we’ll move forward without him,” said Wilkinson. “It’s critical that we all understand that access to contraception is a critical issue in our society.” 

Throness was elected in 2013 and again in 2017 but will now run as an independent.

With the Oct. 24 provincial election looming, the Liberal affiliation will still appear on the ballot beside his name.

Some mail-in ballots casting a vote for the B.C. Liberal Party in Chilliwack-Kent have likely already been submitted, but it’s unclear what happens to them now that the party no longer has a candidate in the riding.  

According to Elections BC, 7,385 mail-in voting packages have been issued in the riding.

Throness made his controversial comments Wednesday evening during an all-candidates forum. Both the NDP and Greens are campaigning on the promise of making prescription contraception more accessible.

Birth control pills, the ring, IUDs and the patch are all methods of contraception. The B.C. NDP and B.C. Green Party both say they will increase access to free prescription contraception if elected. (AccessBC)

“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.”

The chair of Access B.C., a group campaigning for free prescription contraception, said Throness’s comments were misogynistic and show how out of touch he is. 

“I think the only way we can possibly even talk about [eugenics] is to jump in a time machine,” said Teale Phelps Bondaroff.

“When you oppose actions that try and increase access to [contraception], especially in the way Mr. Throness did, you’re basically saying women don’t have the ability to make choices about things that happen to their body, and that’s unacceptable.”

Phelps Bondaroff said Access B.C. met with Throness in August of 2019 to discuss how increasing access to contraception leads to improvements in women’s health and equality and saves governments money. 

Throness’s comments were widely criticized on social media by members of all parties. On Twitter, B.C. Green Party leader Sonia Furstenau called what he said “reprehensible.”

“The evidence is clear that improving access to contraception actually helps address inequality,” she tweeted.

Eugenics is the practice of selective breeding in humans aimed at increasing so-called desirable characteristics while decreasing so-called undesirable traits.

Throness has been criticized in the past for alleged homophobia and for defending an article touting the widely discredited practice of conversion therapy.