Mr Berardino has a huge experience in litigation, having been involved in many serious cases, some representing the government of BC. And this is where the problem comes.

The cynic would look at the Basi-Virk case and say “no wonder Berardino is reducing the witness list – he doesn’t want to put former Minister Gary Collins on the witness stand and subject him to be cross examined by defense counsel and perhaps embarrass the Campbell government”.

It’s already been alleged that Berardino is pulling his punches because his real client is the Campbell government, not the Crown as prosecutor. It’s in those last few lines where the trouble arises.

The Crown Prosecutors Act provides that special prosecutors be appointed by the Deputy Attorney-General, not the A/G himself but is the average member going to believe that the Attorney-General didn’t have anything to say about this appointment? Remember, I’m not saying that the Attorney-General did interfere, just that for the bloke on the bus who doesn’t trust governments and especially doesn’t trust this one, such an allegation strains credulity to the breaking point.

When that bloke on the bus considers that Mr Berardino often gets work from the government he might well think, however wrongly is not the point, that Berardino might have future business on his mind. So far as I know, there is not a particle of evidence to support such a thought but the point here is that to some it might well appear to be so.

This is especially troubling as the case seems to be moving towards investigation into the government’s role in the awarding of BC Rail to CN.

The Crown Counsel Act was supposed to eliminate the appearance of a conflict of interest in the appointment of Crown Counsel by having the selection left up to the deputy attorney-general, but as I have said, it does no such thing. Under our system the attorney-general is on the one hand there to advise to the Crown and on the other as a partisan politician. To suggest that a partisan Attorney-General does not discuss cases like this with the Assistant Deputy Attorney-General is a tough sell.

There is an answer to this and it comes out of the UK where they have a Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) which is completely outside the government. While it’s true that the Director must be appointed by the government, once he is appointed he can be and is independent of that government. That’s because that traditionally it has been a public service position and not political.

BC already has a way to handle these sensitive appointments – have a multi partisan committee advise the House unanimously then have the House make the appointment with that appointee responsible not to the Attorney-General or any other member of government but to the House itself. This method has been extremely successful with the Ombudsman, Auditor-General and similar offices.

Such an officer would then not have any allegiance to either the government or a law firm.

The decision of Mr Berardino to reduce his witness list, including, we’re told, Gary Collins, may well be an appropriate decision but it looks like hell which brings to mind the famous dictum of Lord Hewart in  Rex v Sussex Justices; Ex parte McCarthy:

“It is not merely of some importance but is of fundamental importance, that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.”

Speed demon John van Dongen cracking down on speeders a year ago.

Libs’ top cop has license yanked, stays in race. Too typical.

With apologies to Walt Disney: “Who’s afraid of the big bad NDP?”

During their decade in office (from 1991 to 2001) I was their constant critic. As I was of Rita Johnston, Bill Vander Zalm and Bill Bennett (after 1981 when I left his government). As a media commentator, holding the government’s feet to the fire was my job. No one in the mainstream media does that any more and it’s left to this paper and others like it to pick up the slack. Having said that, however, this column was partly inspired by Vaughn Palmer’s April 21 column in the Vancouver Sun.

Let me first deal with what I consider the worst and most frequently committed of all political sins — hypocrisy.

Time to park van Dongen

Solicitor-General John van Dongen has his license suspended. This is the same van Dongen who was fired out of cabinet for warning fish farmers when the inspectors were coming. He pays no forfeit and stays in cabinet even after waiting for a week to tell the premier that he, the top cop in the province, has a massive load of trouble with the cops.

Yet 22-year-old Ray Lam, running for the NDP, has a picture on Facebook of himself clutching at the comely breast of a comely female, which had the Liberals baying for blood, which they got. But who hasn’t got, in their mind’s eye, that picture of an obviously pissed Gordon Campbell showing him in the Honolulu clink! A picture that was displayed right around the country bringing shame to us all?

I offer no criticism of the behaviour of any of them on the basis of “there but the grace of God, etc.,” but surely if Lam had to lose his nomination, van Dongen must be fired and Gordon Campbell ought to have resigned thus saving us all a lot of grief. I guess when the stakes are high and you’re the boss, hypocrisy is a legitimate tool.

Gagging on the double standard

On the hypocrisy front, wasn’t it Campbell who was both loud and pious in opposition when the NDP brought in a gag law, and then brought one in himself?

The main thrust of the Liberals is that the NDP were, eight years ago, fiscally irresponsible. Here’s what my colleague Will McMartin had to say here in The Tyee on Feb. 4 of this year: “To the surprise of nearly every British Columbian, the provincial deficit was eliminated [by the NDP]…. Thanks to a sharp spike in revenues (primarily from personal income taxes and energy exports), B.C. recorded a tiny surfeit in 1999/2000, and then a gargantuan $1.4 billion surplus in 2000/01.”

From the fiscal and hypocritical point of view, it’s interesting to note that Gordon Campbell and his then finance critic, in opposition, wailed like banshees at the last NDP budget for taking too much out of BC Hydro profits, profits which, thanks to Campbell’s evil “rivers policy,” will never be available to governments again.

(Campbell’s rivers policy requires BC Hydro to purchase all new power from private rivers and it now has over $30 BILLION owing and it will be lucky to recover half of that on the market. Annual dividends, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which the government has become used to, will obviously no longer be available.)

BS about BC Rail

I’ve written here about the appalling environmental record of the Campbell government and will no doubt return to it but for now let’s talk about the honesty of this government.

You will remember that in the 1996 campaign, Campbell said he would sell BC Rail and when the avalanche of criticism came, especially from the North, he did a 180 and vowed he would never ever sell it. Indeed, his earlier statement is seen by many as the reason Campbell lost.

On May 13, 2003, British Columbia Premier Campbell announced that the government would sell the operations of the railway (including all of the assets other than the rail right-of-way). While he had specifically promised not to sell the railway, he maintained that he was keeping this promise by retaining ownership of the right-of-way and only leasing the land to the operator. On Nov. 25, 2003, it was announced that the government would accept the CN bid of $1 billion.

Many questions arose. What’s the difference between leasing for 990 years and a sale? To put this time in perspective, 990 years ago Ethelred the Unready was King of England! How could a government use a railway for implementing development when they no longer had a railway? Was this sale based upon ideology not rational and careful thinking?

This transaction stinks to high heaven. Other bidders for BC Rail have claimed that they were jiggered out of the process. A criminal case arising out of the sale has exposed many documents which, despite having much of the content blacked out, raise a crescendo of questions that both the attorney general and the premier refuse to answer on the utterly specious ground that the matter is before the courts.

Boondoggles pile up

On the question of fiscal responsibility, Campbell is quick to point to the “fast ferries” scandal, yet is not held accountable for the more than $200 million overrun on the Vancouver Convention Centre. When you add up the convention centre boondoggle, the failed public/private (P3) deal on the Port Mann Bridge, and throw in Olympic overruns, it makes the previous NDP government look like a fiscal paragon by comparison.

(Liberal apologists point out that with the convention we have a usable finished product while that wasn’t so with the fast ferries. One might ask, however, given that the fast ferries were an NDP albatross, did the Liberal government try hard, or at all, to get a decent price for them?)

I have never voted NDP and my support of them in this election is because of Campbell’s disastrous energy policy. But looking at the other issues fairly, even without environmental issues, how could I bring myself to vote Liberal?

http://thetyee.ca/

Now silent on BC Rail deal, Campbell boasted of it in 2003.

As I write this, I’m coming to the end of a long road trip where I’ve been speaking to groups about the Campbell government’s energy policy, which bids fair to permanently lay waste to 600 to 700 of our rivers and streams in this wonderful province of ours.

In fact, tomorrow evening I will do my seventh speech in six days, 10 in the past two weeks. During those days, I’ve had time to reflect on just what makes this premier such a destroyer of our unique environment.

When Gordon Campbell was leader of the opposition, I was up to my eyeballs fighting Alcan over Kemano II, or as they preferred to call it, the Kemano Completion Project. He wanted to know more about this matter so he came to my radio studio and looked at my material. He was with me for half a day whereupon he pronounced himself opposed.

Some time afterwards I asked him what had made him take that position and he related to me that he had seen a billboard showing sockeye salmon going into the Adams River to spawn and he didn’t want his kids deprived of this wonder. I was impressed.

It surprised me when he became premier and almost immediately took the moratorium off Atlantic salmon fish farms.

Questions about our salmon

The issue at that time was the huge escapements of farmed salmon and the question was whether or not they might establish themselves in our rivers and streams. The premier was deaf to the entreaties of many of us who asked that he bring back the moratorium and apply the “precautionary principle” before anything further was done. Taking him at his word, I assumed that he cared for our environment.

Then, in 2003 or thereabouts, a lady named Alexandra Morton from the Broughton Archipelago, on the mainland opposite Port McNeil on Vancouver Island, came upon the scene. Though not a fish biologist, she was a scientist and had come the Broughton to study whales. At the suggestion of some nearby First Nations people, she tested young pink and some chum salmon and warned that sea lice from fish farms situated on their migration paths were slaughtering them.

The then minister responsible, John Van Dongen, wouldn’t listen.

Neither did the premier who asked me to do a paper for him. Again, taking him at his word that he cared for the outdoors and our salmon, I did it. I collated all the scientific evidence available and it made an irrefutable case that Morton was right. He never acknowledged my work, let alone thanked me for it.

Questions about BC Hydro and our rivers

The more the evidence piled up, the more licenses were granted. When a legislative committee and then a commission under John Fraser, appointed by Campbell, confirmed Alexandra Morton’s findings, the Campbell government issued more licences and expanded others.

Now we have the Campbell’s 2002 Energy Policy, which mirrors the recommendations of Alcan. BC Hydro is no longer allowed to bring in new sources of energy. That must be done by the private sector, which is being allowed to stake rivers like old-time prospectors staked claims for gold. These private firms then will divert “their” rivers, often through tunnels up to 20 kilometres in length, thus reducing the flow in portions of the river bed by up to 95 per cent.

Questions about sweetheart deals

BC Hydro must pay huge contracts for this private power, often twice as much as they can get on the market. All this is done, we’re told, to meet imminent power needs in the province. I will simply deal with the claim by observing that the National Energy Board, which vets export of energy, says B.C. is in most years an exporter of power.

Here is the insidious part. Even if B.C. did need new power, they would not be getting it from private operations for this reason: you cannot store electrical power in quantity, it must be used as it is created. You can, and BC Hydro does, “store” power by storing water in reservoirs behind dams but private projects have little or no ability to do that. Thus, private power, for the most part, can only be generated during the spring run-off when there’s enough water to make their generators work.

That happens to be the very time BC Hydro’s reservoirs are full so that they can’t use the private power!

This means that all private power produced for the foreseeable future will be for export. We have, then, a BC Hydro unable to bring in new energy sources, strangled at this writing with $30 billion dollars in sweetheart deals with the private companies, no longer able to contribute millions of dollars to the public treasury, large companies making the power and sending their profits to their shareholders.

Questions about backroom dealings

Last year BC Hydro gave the public treasury about $500 million for schools, hospitals and the like. Now that money is going out of the province. Everywhere I go people ask the same question. Why?

The people look at the Basi-Virk “Railgate” court case and see the disappointing Attorney General Wally “Stonewally” Oppal refusing to answer questions about documents being disclosed. The premier does the same on the specious argument that the documents emerging from the trial are sub judice (before the courts).

There were the huge fees paid to Ken Dobell who was in a clear conflict of interest. We all read daily about the money that Liberal backroom boy Patrick Kinsella apparently got for consulting for the purchasers of BC Rail and the private power moguls while advising the government.

Last week Sean Holman and Mark Hume, in the Globe and Mail, laid l’affaire Kinsella bare before the public. If this isn’t sleaze, what the devil is? And people, not surprisingly, ask: What the hell’s going on here?”

They reflect on the fact that Gordon Campbell ran for office as a man who loved our precious fish and promised never to give up BC Hydro or BC Rail. People see money that used to come to us now goes to foreign shareholders and they ask again: What gives?

Questions about the smell in the air

How can any decent taxpayer look at all these goings on and not say in Hamlet’s words “there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark”.

That doesn’t make it so, I agree, but the air is odoriferous.

What I do say to Mr Campbell is this:

Your dealings with the sale of BC Rail.

The clear attack on BC Hydro.

The favouritism towards fish farmers and private power moguls (especially after posing as an environmentalist and defender of our Crown Corporations).

The conflicts of interest and huge fees paid to favourites.

All of this is bound to make ordinary British Columbians ask: Mr Campbell, just what the hell IS going on here?

http://thetyee.ca/