Outgoing Penticton-Summerland MLA Amelia Boultbee has announced she unknowingly had an affair with another politician.

Boultbee, in a post to X on Wednesday, said she felt compelled to “address a matter from quite some time ago.”

She was elected to the legislature in October 2024.

“I was briefly romantically involved with a fellow politician who told me, and the people around us, that he was not married,” Boultbee said.

“Neither of us had any professional reporting relationship to the other. He wore no ring and kept no photos of a spouse, and the people closest to him told the same story: his marriage had ended long before we met. I had no reason to doubt it.”

Boultbee said the colleague’s wife then contacted her.

“I was humiliated, angry, and devastated,” she said.

“We spoke at length. She was gracious and forgiving to me, and I’m deeply grateful to her. We share the experience of being deceived by the same man, and I wish her nothing but peace.”

Boultbee said she has nothing to apologize for “beyond trusting a man who lied to me, and many women have shared this experience.”

“I believe deception this fundamental should carry real consequences, and that our laws haven’t caught up to that.”

At the end of the post, she said she would not be commenting further and said her privacy, and the man’s, should be respected.

Since announcing she would not be running for re-election, Boultbee has been shooting from the hip on social media and getting into numerous spats with others on X.

When an anonymous poster accused her on Monday of ruining another MLA’s marriage, she responded that the other politician “ruined his own marriage.”

“Can we take control from the men please? They’ve done a bad job and it’s time women do this,” she said in another unrelated post on X on Wednesday.

“Let’s not wait anymore. I’ve had it with men being in charge. They do basically all the raping, crimes, wars, and bad governments statistically and they’re insufferable when women have any power.”

Boultbee, a former city councillor, was elected as a BC Conservative but left the party in a dispute with then-leader John Rustad. After sitting as an independent for several months, she joined the NDP.

Tina Lee is now running for the NDP in the riding in the upcoming election.