What happened when an anti-vax social media influencer turned her attention to the fire-ravaged town of Lytton, B.C.
Leesa van Peteghen was grateful when a woman from Vancouver contacted her and offered to give her some money to buy gas.
Van Peteghen, who lived in Lytton, B.C., before it burned down last month, has been travelling between communities housing evacuees and offering volunteer support where she can.
It was only after Van Peteghen accepted about $680 that she found out that friends from Lytton were worried the woman wasn't being transparent with her fundraising efforts - and that she was making social media videos packed with speculative claims about the fire's origin.
Van Peteghen said she was taken aback and confused. She didn't want to be in the middle of a contentious situation. Lytton had been through enough.
I am just grateful that people are helping as much as they are," she said. I am not happy with the added stress and drama that is being put on Lytton."
One month after a fire that tore through Lytton, destroying nearly the entire town, the community is dealing with confusion about where to go for support. It's a problem some community members say could be abated if the provincial and federal governments had a more co-ordinated effort to give the displaced people the help they need.
Instead they're dealing with a patchwork of support systems that can be hard to navigate and vary in trustworthiness - a GoFundMe page here, a community-run resource centre there.
The cracks in the system were laid bare when one person who stepped up, apparently to help Lytton, turned out to be a polarizing figure.
The woman who reached out to Van Peteghen was Susan Standfield, a Vancouver woman who films daily videos on Facebook and Instagram promoting ideas that the Canadian and B.C. governments are using disasters such as COVID-19 to control the population for the benefit of big businesses. She sells T-shirts with political messages on them, including one T-shirt with a six-point yellow star that reads COVID Caust." It has been decried by the Jewish community for comparing COVID-19 restrictions to the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Ever since the beginning of July, the woman has turned a substantial portion of her attention toward Lytton.
To Standfield, it's a place she wants to continue talking about on her channels - professing multiple times that she plans to stay involved" in the community at least for the summer to uncover what she claims is malice. In her videos, she makes unfounded claims about the fire's origin.
The fire was used with intent and malice to destroy the community in order to facilitate economic development, to re-engineer the economy for bigger stakeholders," she said in one video.
In an interview with the Star, Standfield says she truly believes that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan are at least partly responsible for the Lytton fire, and that these beliefs are based on conversations she had with people in the community. Some of those conversations were about how quickly and violently the fire spread through town, and others made accusations that the fire was intentionally set. She said she thinks heat weapons were used to start the fire.
In fact, there is no evidence for a conspiracy being responsible for the Lytton fire. Many in the community would like to know more about the fire's origin, believing it was started by a spark from CN rail tracks. CN has denied being involved.
The cause of the Lytton fire is still under investigation by the RCMP, wildfire service, and Transportation Safety Board. Factors that almost certainly contributed to the fire include record-high temperatures in the week proceeding the fire, and 50-kilometre-an-hour winds that quickly swept the fire through town. Standfield said she agrees it's possible these factors played a role.
Standfield has also been raising money from the fan base of people who watch her videos and read her social media content. That's what caught the attention of Adam Smolcic, a man running a small non-profit that raises money to buy trailers for those who have lost their homes.
I started getting phone calls from people in the community that I've been helping who were concerned about her," Smolcic said. They saw that Standfield was asking for donations for Lytton, including to rehouse people, but she wasn't saying exactly where the money went.
Some people were under the false impression she was raising money for Smolcic's charity, because she once posted a picture of him on her channels. Smolcic said that was not the case.
Immediately, red flags were going off," he said.
Smolcic made some videos accusing Standfield of misleading Lytton folks and encouraging people not to interact with her. That resulted in dozens of Facebook comments from community members questioning why Standfield was in Lytton. Smolcic also called the RCMP to ask them to look into her activities.
The RCMP confirmed this week there was a complaint made against Standfield with the RCMP in Coquitlam, and that officers were investigating.
Standfield said she has done nothing wrong, and that Smolcic's claims amount to defamation.
She posts videos asking for donations to be made to her by e-transfer to her Gmail account. It's the same account she uses to sell T-shirts, and to raise funds for other causes, such as legal challenges of other anti-maskers. She says she doesn't have to show any of her accounting, because she's running a private business, not a charity.
What I do really isn't anybody's business, financially," she told the Star. I'm not a charity. I'm not a public entity, I am a private corporation."
Standfield told the Star she would have liked to keep fundraising in Lytton and sending money to community members, but that she will likely stop now because of the situation with Smolcic and the fact that the community doesn't seem to trust her.
Patrick Michell, chief of the Kanaka Bar Band in the area, said determining the legitimacy of fundraisers in and around Lytton has been a huge challenge for a small community.
Like anyone impacted directly by the Lytton catastrophe, I am concerned about scams, wasted donations, profiteering, and perhaps most importantly, ensuring sustainable supports given the time it is going to take to get the Lytton 1,200 home," he said.
He asked that potential donors do not rush to donate to the first fundraiser they see, but to check with the community or donate to well-known non-profit entities.
A spokesperson for the RCMP said that, after crises such as the Lytton fire, they recommend people donate to official channels and registered non-profits such as the Red Cross.
Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @alex_mckeen