A smalltown politician walks away from provincial politics

Her oldest brother came to the door while the party was winding down, sporting a cowboy hat and boots.

Jackie Tegart had been hosting a party to cap her campaign for re-election to the school board in Ashcroft, a village of roughly 1,600 residents where a handful of votes could sway an election.

The election would end up being declared a tie—which was broken by a coin flip that Tegart lost.

The mood at the party dropped following the result. Most people were getting ready to leave, but Tegart heard a knock at the front door. She opened the door, revealing her brother who had pulled up late.

Tegart had one question for him.

“Did you vote?” she asked.

Her brother grunted and shook his head, insisting that his vote wouldn’t have made a difference and that he may not have even voted for her.

“I said, ‘I wouldn’t have cared who you voted for,’” Tegart said. “I just think it’s really important that democracy is respected and a decision is made by a vote, not by a flip of a coin.”

That loss was an anomaly in a political career that would span nearly half a century and culminate in Victoria, where Tegart served in the legislature for more than a decade. And the decades-old incident provides a glimpse into Tegart’s thought process after the collapse of her party, BC United, in August.

“To have it implode and have your choice or your decision taken away from you, when you have given everything you’ve got to serve, that was distasteful to me and disrespectful,” said Tegart, who represented the BC Liberals, now BC United.

‘She spoke for us’

Tegart grew up in a family that emphasized the importance of community. Her father served on Ashcroft’s city council. Her mother was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary for the Royal Canadian Legion and worked at the local thrift shop. 

When she got older, Tegart got married and started a family. And in the 1970s, she decided to run for school board to have a say on an education system that would impact her four young children. 

Despite that first coin flip loss in the late 1970s, Tegart would prevail in subsequent elections and go on to serve on Ashcroft’s school board for 17 total years, chairing the board for most of her tenure. She was later elected to Ashcroft’s municipal council, where she served three terms before in 2013, she was elected to BC’s legislature as a member of the BC Liberals.

She was re-elected in 2017 and 2020, and served as deputy speaker, education critic, and as her party’s caucus chair. 

Tegart spent most of her time in Victoria advocating for local issues. That focus became more important in 2021 when Lytton burned down during a historic heat dome which saw temperatures near 50 C. 

Denise O’Connor, mayor of Lytton, hailed Tegart for speaking on behalf of the community following the fire. In 2023, Tegart sent a letter to the auditor general, asking the province to launch an investigation into its handling of recovery efforts in the village. The request came a year after she described a ‘veil of silence’ around the Lytton rebuild. 

A report is expected to be released next year.

“She spoke up for us,” O’Connor told The Current. “When she was in the legislature talking about Lytton, she wore her heart on her sleeve.” 

The Lytton inferno was followed by a series of other natural disasters, including the flooding of Merritt during a series of atmospheric rivers that fall and Cache Creek last year. The highways connecting communities in her riding have also been repeatedly severed due to natural disasters, and the emergency rooms of local hospitals have been closed on numerous occasions because of a lack of staff.

Throughout her career, Tegart lobbied the provincial government to improve road access to the Ashcroft terminal and increase emergency room space and capacity at the Nicola Valley Hospital in Merritt. She also oversaw the revitalization of the Fraser Canyon highway, a project that recently saw new signs go up in Lytton and Yale to promote tourism in the corridor. 

As the MLA for one of BC’s most-sprawling ridings, and one in which no single community was home to a majority of residents, Tegart’s attention inevitably turned to concerns that were uniquely rural in nature.

“She’s a small town girl that went to the city to represent us,” said Hope Mayor Victor Smith. (He noted that Tegart was born in Princeton and briefly lived in Hope before moving to Ashcroft.) Smith has collaborated with Tegart for more than a decade and credited her aura and attentiveness as keys to her political longevity.

“She’s a listener, which is a good way to start a conversation,” Smith said. “When she starts, she goes, ‘What’s your problem?’ Instead of telling, she listens.” 

People in rural BC don’t like being told to travel to a big city to get services commonly associated with those kinds of communities, Tegart said. During her second term as MLA, for example, she pushed for a 20-unit senior housing project in Clinton. It allowed Clinton seniors to grow old in their hometown, not somewhere else during their golden years. 

“These are people who work the land and feed us all and they just want to stay home,” said Tegart. 

“I don’t think that because you choose to live rurally you should not have the same things as many other people in BC do.

The party’s over

In September, after BC United leader Kevin Falcon decided his party wouldn’t contest in the upcoming election, Tegart was left with a few choices: run independently, wait for an invite to join another party or abandon her campaign.

Tegart had already been eyeing retirement, but she said she wanted to serve one more term to focus on the Lytton rebuild. (The rebuilding of some structures began in earnest last winter. Since then, a handful of residents have returned to homes, but rebuilding efforts have yet to start across much of the town.)

Soon after Falcon’s bombshell, Tegart announced she wouldn’t seek re-election as Fraser-Nicola MLA, ending a 37-year political career. The rejigging of her Fraser-Nicola riding, which moved Ashcroft to Cariboo-Chilcotin, played a major part in her decision to retire.

“With the new boundaries happening, running independently you need to have money, volunteers… So that was very much part of my decision,” Tegart said. “It’s sad. It’s sad to let it go, and it always is as you transition into new things.”

As she steps away from politics, Tegart said she intends to focus on travelling for the foreseeable future. She has booked a river cruise for some Christmas markets in Germany next month.

As part of that transition, her office has passed on a couple projects for the region’s next MLA, BC Conservative Tony Luck.

She hopes that Luck will continue to advocate for revitalization in the Fraser Canyon corridor, and that a Lillooet-based roads committee, a group that met quarterly with the Ministry of Transportation to discuss road conditions in the region, will continue to be heard.

But her main goal right now is to enjoy her upcoming German Christmas cruise—a trip that has been booked for months, regardless of the election results.

“Win or lose, I was going,” Tegart said. “So I’m going, I’m not one to sit still.”