CKNW Editorial
for March 28, 2001

Several thoughts today.

They’ve got the Prime Minister dead to rights. There is now no question but that his shares in the golf club, while transferred, had not been paid for. It was a large amount of money and the only way the purchaser could pay Mr Chretien off was if the golf course could be sold. The only way the course had any value is if the hotel next door could have its value enhanced. Mr Chretien, in forcing the Business Development Bank to loan money to the hotel, was making it possible for the buyer of his shares to find another buyer so Mr Chretien could be paid off. The loan was indeed a forced one -–without the influence not of the Member of Parliament Chretien, for as MP he had no power, but of Prime Minister Chretien, the loan would never have been made, the hotel would have failed, the golf club would have gone into bankruptcy and Mr Chretien would have lost $300,000. It ain't rocket science, folks, and in fact it makes the stuff Sinclair Stevens did in the 80s, for which he was forced out of office by the Liberals, pale into insignificance.

Despite the inability of Stockwell Day to properly frame the issue, it boils down to two simple questions.

1.did Mr Prince, at the time Mr Chretien lobbied Mr Beaudoin, the head of the BDC for money for the inn, still owe Mr Chretien $300,000 on his share purchase? To that, the answer is clearly yes.

2.Did this loan not only enhance the value of the hotel but also the value of the golf course?

The answer again is yes.

To which might be added a third question, was this added value to the hotel and consequent raising the value of the golf course shares something that Mr Chretien knew or ought to have known would increase the chances he would get his money from Mr Prince?

Surely, any person faced with these plain facts would have to conclude that when Mr Chretien lobbied, heavily, the president of the BDC that it was very much in his, that is to say Chretien’s interest, that the loan be made.

What is even more worrying than the fact that our Prime Minister used his influence to secure a loan so as to protect his investment, is that he seems not to understand that this was wrong. He also seems not to understand that having an ethics counselor report to him is like not having one at all. In fact, Mr Howard Wilson has behaved throughout not as a man in charge of making sure that Mr Chretien behaves ethically, but rather as his mouthpiece. Can an Order of Canada be far behind?

No doubt Jean Chretien will brazen it through. One can only wonder how the old rat pack of Brian Tobin, Don Boudria and Sheila Copps would have behaved if Brian Mulroney had been caught in this sort of compromising mess. Now, of course, they’re just three ass-kissing Liberal sycophants.

On another matter, BC Hydro is much in the news these days. It seems very likely that in the coming years the corporation will have to buy electricity to meet domestic demands. Quite apart from the mockery this makes of their $200 rebate and the $300 million they’re supposed to give the government next year, it brings firmly into focus its antediluvian attitude. My three guests at 9:00 yesterday demonstrate this. There are ways to get electricity without building new dams or firing up fossil fueled plants … or going nuclear. The combined use of wood fuel, wind power and tidal power could make sure that we not only wouldn’t want for fuel in the next few years but that we could safely export power to places like California who so badly need it.

The problem is BC Hydro’s mindset. Oh, they’ll talk the talk. All sorts of encouraging platitudes will fall from the lips of their flacks. But they won’t walk the walk. And they won’t do that until their political masters make them. This will clearly need a change of government and even then you can’t be certain that the Liberals will be any different.

The good news, perhaps, is that they may have to. Market forces may make it obligatory that Hydro find new sources of energy other than Site "C" – which would be an environmental nightmare, nuclear power which is hugely expensive and, not to put too fine a point on it, not very saleable a proposition to the public, or more fossil fueled plants.

Finally, it’s now very clear that Mr Paul Ramsey’s budget of ten days ago is even phonier than the NDP election budget of 1996. Without going past the unallowed for debt to Carrier Lumber, the unrealistic dividend of $300 million from BC Hydro and the equally unrealistic $75 million dividend from ICBC it’s clear that this budget, far from being balanced is in the red. I suspect that if one were to look at the amounts budgeted for doctors, nurses and health employees against what is likely to happen you would find this budget is, in reality, close to a billion dollars in the red.

It’s the old story, folks … fool me once, shame on you … fool me twice, shame on me.