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Blogger goes topless in Kelowna City Hall for interview on toplessness

B.C. blogger goes topless in interview with Kelowna mayor. (Screengrab/YouTube)

A gutsy B.C. columnist brought her chat about exposed breasts with the mayor of Kelowna straight to the point in a video interview this week when she took off her top mid-interview.

"So I can go topless here in Kelowna," Lori Welbourne said straight-faced during her interview for On The Rocks Talk Radio, moments after handing mayor Walter Gray the microphone and pulling down her halter top.

"Evidently," he replied.

Welbourne, a columnist for Vancouver's newspaper The Province, goes on to discuss with the mayor — without putting her shirt back on — why woman don't appear in public topless more often, although it's been legal in Canada since 1996, and why it might be considered inappropriate. And then she asks him if he has any piercings.

The mayor told CBC he was only playing a long with a joke interview, but the video still has some Kelowna residents closing the top button on their starched shirts and saying he was out of line, according to CBC.

[ Related: Topless blogger keeps Kelowna mayor abreast of equality issue ]

Welbourne conducted the interview in advance of Go Topless Day on August 25, a day that advocates gender equality, including a woman's right to take off her shirt if she wants to.

In a column about the issue, Welbourne wrote she remembered her family visiting Vancouver's nude beach when she was a child, and she's always been interested in prudish views of nudity.

She wrote that she doesn't plan to walk around B.C. topless but she's glad that she has that choice.