From high-profile global child abduction case to B.C. mayor’s chair?

For a woman who followed her abducted daughter all the way to the English Channel, maybe winning a municipal election doesn’t seem like such a daunting task.

Tasha Brown is one of five candidates running for mayor of the City of Nanaimo.

Brown, 49, is known in the community as one of the mothers of a girl who was taken away by her biological mother in 2016, sparking an international police investigation. The girl, Kaydance Etchells, was finally located in 2019 travelling in an inflatable dinghy in the English Channel with her biological mother, brother and grandparents, and the case ended up going before the courts on the Channel Island of Jersey. Brown went there for the court case and was distressed to find that her five-year-old no longer remembered her. She didn’t want to traumatize her daughter “in the name of justice or revenge,” though she hasn’t given up on working with her ex toward a co-parenting arrangement.

“It’s been a horrible many years, but it has solidified my identity as far as I know who I am to the core — my strengths, what I can get past, what I can learn,” Brown said. “It’s heightened all of that for me.”

She’s taken on international bureaucracy, she said. She’s fought the system. She’s accomplished what seemed impossible, and it’s given her the confidence to try for the position of mayor.

It was the issue of crime and public safety that prodded her toward civic politics. Brown read about an incident in downtown Nanaimo in which a woman was mugged and knocked to the ground, and said she couldn’t be “a silent bystander” any longer.

Full Article: https://www.grandforksgazette.ca/news/from-high-profile-global-child-abduction-case-to-b-c-mayors-chair/

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