Vancouver? Where’s that at?

Let’s let the Premier speak for herself on the Times of India Film Awards:

“Christy Clark says the show is less about ticket sales and more about the long lasting benefits.

“’It’s about having 100 million people see Vancouver and see British Columbia. This is part of a big trade initiative that we’ve started to open up those markets in India to create jobs here in British Columbia.’”

“But she admits the show isn’t being televised live. She says that was up to organizers to coordinate. Critics also say the province did a poor job marketing the three-day event.

So the BC Liberals paid $11 million for a show that wasn’t even broadcast live, but at least readers “see Vancouver and see British Columbia.” Correct.

Not correct.

Here’s the lead in the Times of India this morning:

“At a glittering awards function Saturday, Anurag Basu picked up the best director award whileRanbir Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra carried home the best actor and best actress trophies, respectively.”

Not one mention of the location in the whole story.  It might as well have been held in Mumbai.  The only mentions of the location were in local BC stories.

And let’s be clear.  That’s what this is all about:  Getting Bollywood stars here before the election so Clark can be seen arm in arm with them in the local South Asian media.  It’s a pathetically transparent election strategy that delivers no benefit to the province.

And BC’s media ate it up.

(thanks to Sandy Garrossino for the tweet that started me looking at the Indian coverage)

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The wheels on the bus… still falling off

resampled_Group 1 NewThe guys over at Wazuku have certainly gone to bat for Christy Clark and the BC Liberals.

They set up CC4BC, possibly the worst, least effective smear campaign in BC history.  One million dollars (or maybe a little less as Shepard fell short on his fundraising) spent and Clark went down in the polls while Dix and the NDP emerged with a 20 point lead over Clark’s Liberals.

But they blew the auditor out of the water over his report on the Pacific Carbon Trust… Oh, did I get that wrong?

Why, yes I did.

Pacific Carbon Trust paid Wazuku $10,000 to smear the Auditor General before the release of his audit of the Trust.  The smear resulted in sustained negative press for Pacific Carbon Trust and a new, heavily jaundiced look at the sleight of hand program it runs, transferring money from schools and hospitals to big, wealthy corporations for GHG reduction programs that the corporations can and should be doing anyway.  Nice strategy boys.

Even better Wazuku’s campaign caused the opposition and the press to look at the cosy relationship between the Trust and its supplier Wazuku, who share a Trust board member and a Wazuku partner in Mike Watson.

The only person in the province looking the other way and seeing no evil is the Premier.  But then she might have a reason to look the other way.  Rumour has it one of the Wazuku principals will be playing a major role on her campaign team.

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 1.00.41 PM

Stephen Kukucha campaigning for Clark at 2011 Liberal Party meet and greet

According to sources, the guy on the campaign bus running  Clark’s days – the guy known as the wagonmaster in the business – will be Steve Kukuchu, one of three Wazuku partners.  Kukuchu also campaigned for Clark in the Point Grey by-election.

No wonder the Clark government isn’t following up on the PCT disgrace.

 

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark, Stephen Kukucha | 11 Comments

Pacific Carbon Trust – a division of Smear Inc…

Just who are Pacific Carbon Trust’s media relations guys? The guys who put together the attack on outgoing Auditor General John Doyle?

Wazuku, aka the boys from Smear Inc., according to Jonathan Fowlie of the Vancouver Sun.

resampled_Group 1 NewWe all remember Wazuku don’t we?  They brought us this winter’s biggest bomb, CC4BC.  Industry analysts  are still clucking over the way the bottom dropped out of the Clark campaign after this hit the air.

Pacific Carbon Trust said, in their defence, that they have to outsource PR.  But we all know the only reason for hiring Wazuku is the big smear job.

Congrats Wazuku, another piece of slime to nail to the wall next to CC4BC and all those Hochstein campaigns.

I expect work will be drying up in this province soon enough.  How about trying the NRA? They seem to have an endless appetite for this kind of thing.

 

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, BC Rail, Christy Clark | Tagged , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Unraveling today’s news

Screen Shot 2013-03-26 at 4.32.40 PMRecently Gary Mason retweeted an interesting Scott McCrae tweet – Shakespeare is spinning like a top in his grave – about the latest Pew “State of the Media” study.

News consumers, Pew observes, are deserting media outlets as quality reporting diminishes in the face of cuts and editorial decisions.

I tweeted back, “That’s me” but heard no more from Mr. Mason.

Today in provincial politics is a perfect illustration of how and why this is taking place.

It all started with a government leak that landed in the pocket of CP reporter Dirk Meissner.

Meissner’s lead conveyed the raison d’etre for the leak: “A set of leaked letters is undermining the credibility of a report to be released today by British Columbia’s auditor general over the provincial government’s carbon neutral experiment.”

Exactly.  As has been happening more and more recently, someone in or close to the government used Meissner to undermine the credibility of a supposedly damning audit of Gordon Campbell’s pet project, the Pacific Carbon Trust.

Campbell set up the Trust to be the agent of carbon neutrality for the provincial government.  Government institutions with carbon emissions absolve their sins by buying carbon credits from private sector companies that reduce emissions.  The Pacific Carbon Trust is the arbiter of and dealer in supposedly legitimate credits.

Here’s how it works: a company or non-profit figures out a way to capture the value of a real reduction in carbon emissions (a reduction that is sustainable and new).  The Trust evaluates and purchases those options for resale to public bodies like school boards, hospitals and universities.

Put another way school boards, hospitals and universities are mandated to use scarce public dollars to pay for the private sector’s emission reduction programs.

Hadi Dowlatabadi, of UBC’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, put it another way when he told Business in BC “Why not just regulate this stuff? I don’t see why you have to use public money or market forces to address emissions at all.”

Regardless, the Campbell government decided the carrot was a better instrument than the stick and set up the Pacific Carbon Trust to figure out which were the legitimate projects, then purchase credits and resell them to public institutions.

Questions soon arose about price inflation and bang for the public buck.  Earlier this year in response to information released by the Trust through FOI the BC Liberals launched an internal inquiry to determine whether the Trust was paying too much for credits as well as inflating prices in its own interest, both shortchanging schools, hospitals etc…

The Auditor also launched his own independent study that looked not only at the operation of the Trust but at the legitimacy of the credits themselves.  Were companies like Encana and TimberWest – all contributors to the Liberals – inflating prices to cash strapped public institutions, all in the interest of fattening their bottom line?

Now the Auditor’s report is complete, the government has read it and according to the Auditor’s press release had it ready for release today.

Word was the report was more bad news

Cue the selective leaks that cast doubt on the report.  Dirk Meissner was the willing instrument of the government’s damage control effort.  Let’s not kid ourselves, that is what is happening here.

The BC Liberal Speaker Bill Barisoff has spiced up the proceedings with his own bit of improvisation.  He’s now delayed the release of the report because the unseemly leak may be a breach of parliamentary privilege.

Barisoff forgets, disregards, laughs off, whatever, Bill Bennett’s leak, just a couple of weeks ago, of a draft page of an Auditor’s report that was subsequently withdrawn because of inaccuracy. Bennett’s actions flaunting this new found privilege weren’t worthy of a peep from the Speaker.

But back to the whole point of this tangled retelling.  Why the heck is Meissner doing the government’s dirty work?

Rather than taking dictation to come up with the lead why is he not wondering why he’s been chosen to discredit the Auditor General and his report?

Besides Meissner’s dictation today, we’ve got the Tyee outing maybe, possibly a leaker who exposed ethnogate and a couple of other “let’s corral the public service into our party work,” scandals that keep dropping out of the sky.

Except the Tyee offered no definitive proof when it IDed the Liberal staffer.  All they could say was it’s kind of, most likely this guy.

Weak. Very, very weak.

And to what end?  To stop the flow of information about how the Liberal government is using taxpayers’ money to do Liberal party work?  Thank you for that, Tyee.

Tyee editor David Beers, in damage control mode himself, claimed on-line that the reporter had “deepened” the story.

“Deepened the story”?  The only thing deep about this was the gratitude flowing from the Premier’s office.

As someone who wants my newspaper/radio/TV news to tell me the real story, I’m tired of this crap.  I’m tired of reading people who don’t represent me and tell me stories that serve their interests, and their friend’s interests but not mine.

It used to be that I had few options, but no longer, as Pew reminds us.  I can piece the whole Pacific Carbon Trust story together from other sources on the internet.

True, they aren’t all reliable.  But neither is the MSM. And this way I have just a bit more power, as if I’m my own editor of my assembled newspaper/newshour.

***

Day one of the campaign is still more than two weeks away and the Twittisphere is crazy. Besides the tangled web of the PCT there is Kash Heed‘s call for a police investigation of Pat Bell and… the Justice Minister Shirley Bond.

Now do you think this should be a big story?  The former West Van Chief of Police, Solicitor General and recipient of his own Special Prosecutor, twice! thinks the current Sol Gen/AG and Caucus colleague should be the subject of an RCMP investigation.

Heed may hate his colleagues but he does have the chops to know who should be investigated and who shouldn’t.

Forget elections, how is it helpful to the administration of justice to have the Justice Minister under attack from her own colleague and predecessor in the job.  This is like Canada’s version of Italian politics under Berlusconi.  But who’s Silvio?

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

What’s that smell?

I hear something sizzling.  I believe it’s almost all done…

There’s a new poll out.  Things will change and tighten up during the election campaign.  After all, what’s the point of having all that corporate money in the bank?

But the new Ipsos poll seems to suggest that there’s not enough money anywhere to bail the Liberal ship out let alone turn it around.

BC NDP                                  51 (+3)

BC Liberal Party                   32 (-3)

BC Conservative Party           9 (n/c)

BC Green Party                       7 (n/c)

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Yellow journalism courtesy of the Vancouver Sun

In today’s Sun, on the front page, above the fold is a political story.  There is never a political story on the front page, above the fold anymore, since all the big stories are about their good friends in government, the BC Liberal Party.  And they haven’t been good.

For decades now the Sun has always been solidly behind whatever right wing party is in play at the time and in 1993, under the direction of Dennis Skulsky, the Sun became part of the BC Liberal militia, kind of their advance shock troops.

They are true believers, the kind of ardent followers who would print a double page spread the day after the ‘Hawaii incident’ in homage to their favourite Premier, evah.  Even drunk, they loved him.

Then he left. And they became, like many BCers, not sure about his replacement.  About Christy, Not sure? About the worst Premier in living memory?  About a Premier who gives Vander Zalm a good name.  Yes, not sure.

But they are sure about one thing.  They still hate the NDP.  So even as they report a minimum of Clark’s biggest misfires, consigning them to page 3 or even deeper in the obscurity of the Sun’s back pages, they give full play to any opportunity to report an apparent NDP transgression.

Hence today’s above the fold story: a full on made up piece of transcribed trash fresh from of the lips of the BC Liberal campaign chair MLA Bill Bennett.

Bennett claims, and the Sun writes, that the NDP broke the rules to create a caucus fund to pay for a partisan outreach program earning a condemnation from the Auditor General in his report on Legislative spending.  To back it up they quote from a draft of the report.

It’s a full on smear, and Bennett know’s it.  More importantly, the Vancouver Sun knows it.

The Sun knows that the Auditor withdrew his draft and they know why.  The AG learned that the fund was set up on the advice of the Legislative comptroller, the guy hired to oversee Legislative accounts, and a guy who reports to Liberal Speaker Bill Barisoff.

The Sun also knows that the NDP went on its own accord to the Comptroller because they wanted to ensure that the fund followed all the rules.  The Sun knows that the Comptroller, not the NDP, administered the fund.

And they know that the Comptroller signed off on the activities the fund was used for – translation services, writing in Chinese, commentaries, South Asian outreach, advertising, caucus advertising.  All things the NDP Caucus is entitled to do.  The Sun knows that no money was spent on any party activities.

How does the Sun know that the fund was completely on the up and up and the Comptroller signed off on it and administered it?  Because, Vaughn Palmer wrote on it in their paper two months ago.

“The auditor general routinely circulates preliminary drafts of his reports to affected agencies” Palmer wrote about this report, adding, “and he routinely makes revisions in response to the feedback.”

In this case once the AG found out the Comptroller, not the NDP was responsible for the design and administration of the fund he removed any accusations and altered the body of the report to reflect the truth of the matter.

The final report came out today, as per Palmer’s description.  The Liberal smear that appeared this morning above the fold is a lie.

Yellow journalism is the name for this.  According to Wikipedia  It’s a type of journalism “that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headline to sell more newspapers”.

Or in this case, to sell a corrupt government.

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | Tagged , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Doug Christie gets polished up by the Vancouver Sun

I met Doug Christie in 1984 and it wasn’t in the best of circumstances.  I was at a small meeting of a human rights group that was freaked out – as anyone should be – by the rise of neo Nazi and other associated hate groups in the early to mid eighties right here in BC.

The group needed a spy to attend an event sponsored by a bunch of these neo Nazi groups where Jim Keegstra was set to speak about free speech.  I volunteered.

Free speech was a bit of a misnomer.  What Keegstra actually was there to speak about was the cabal of left wingers, teachers, unions, women’s groups and others who were trying to stop him from drumming up hatred against Jews, “Pakis”, “East Indians, the Chinese and anyone else who had the effrontery to not be white.

Back then, at the end of the Reagan depression, there was a heated debate about multi-culturalism. People like Keegstra and his lawyer Doug Christie campaigned against such ‘bizarre’ notions as the right of a Sikh to wear a turban while policing. And they got a lot of attention from the MSM.  For a while, Doug Collins, another one of Christie’s extremist clients who loved to write about the decline of “white” was even a columnist for the Sun.

Most of all Keegstra was known for his anti-Semitic screeds, which he wrote while teaching his social studies students that Jews were “treacherous”, “sadistic”, “money-loving” “child-killers”.  He also taught them that the holocaust was a lie.

Christie accompanied Keegstra as he came into the hall with a group of neo Nazi thugs. I remember Christie as a nasty looking man, dark and a bit removed from the proceedings until he introduced Keegstra as a stirling defender of free speech.  It was a fiery introduction.

Keegstra’s speech on the other hand was flat and whiny.  As were his rag tag followers.  They weren’t scary.   They were a just a bunch of limp men with bags of self published books full of foolish theories that explained why they, the losers at life, were not to blame.

I couldn’t get out of there soon enough.

I haven’t thought about that experience for a long while and then just a few weeks ago I walked past Christies’s boarded up office a block away from the courthouse in Victoria.  Christie was dying and had closed up his practice I learned.

Today Christie’s obit appeared in the Vancouver Sun.  “Free speech advocate dies at age 66,” was the headline and it says more about the Sun than it does about Christie.

Christie was a defender of Nazis.  He believed what they believed.  And he used free speech because it was the only defense available for saying what he believed.

I believe in free speech too, but I believe the only way to defend it is to be clear about where someone stands and what he or she is really about.

Doug Christie was about racism.  He was about anti-Semitism.  He was about hate.  That’s what he should be known for.  Letting him hide behind the cloak of free speech even in death, as the Sun did today, is wrong.

 

Share
Posted in BC Politics | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Trust is what it’s all about

Call it the twitter effect.

After spending too much time on #bcpoli this weekend, subjecting myself to non-stop BC Liberal message development via tweet, I feel like lashing out.

Here’s my message to the BC Liberals and their fellow travellers: When you’re reduced to repeating a lie like “they all do it” in hopes of saving your own skins you not only further diminish your tarnished and worthless brand you cement in voters’ minds that the BC Liberals cannot be trusted to govern.

Sun editor Fazil Mihlar was first out the gate with the ‘they’re all bottom feeders’  defence of his buddies over at BC Liberal headquarters.  He was closely followed by Liberal campaign chair Bill Bennett.  Now it’s all over twitter with ministers, their staff and the Premier’s office repeating the baseless charge.

Even the Premier’s ex – he of the limp microphone joke – got in on the act retweeting various Liberal friendly articles conflating outreach with illegal info sharing and such.

Lets be clear about this:  All parties, like corporations, unions, non-profits and any other half decent organization in our multi-cultural country reach out to folks who speak languages other than English and have cultural traditions other than those generally associated with old white men (who still make up the majority of elected officials) like me.

That’s a good thing.  It’s right to make the effort to reach those not addressed by the mainstream.  It’s right to involve all citizens in the business of governing our province.

It’s wrong to do it only out of consideration for your own electoral interests, reducing legitimate cases of wrong-doing like the head tax to a ‘quick win’ opportunity.

It’s also wrong to suggest that all parties disregard rules and laws in order to take political advantage of these issues and opportunities.  The opposite is true.  Only one party had taken this route.  That would be the BC Liberals.

And that leads me to the fundamental Liberal problem.  To make the claim over and over again that all parties do this they have to resort to a lie.  But isn’t trust the fundamental issue underlying all the BC Liberal problems?

Defending a rotten strategy with a bad lie.  That’s the BC Liberal MO and increasingly voters are seeing right through it.

In 2009 they said the deficit was small.  They knew it was huge.  They said they wouldn’t bring in the HST.  They did.  They said they wouldn’t sell BC Rail.  They sold it – to a friend and donor.  They told the public one thing and did the opposite.  On and on and on it goes.

I find it interesting that for a few short weeks Christy Clark, during her leadership campaign, took a different approach, distancing herself from the Campbell record while admitting errors and proposing policies to remedy them.

She didn’t tackle the big ones.  But take, for example the BC Liberal minimum wage policy.  She tacitly admitted it was wrong and proposed a fix.

Looking back it seems clear that that was nothing more than a strategy.  Who knows what she really believes.  Still it was a strategy that worked both within the BC Liberal Party and with the public.  She won the leadership and closed the polling gap.

How quickly she abandoned that, returning to the old BC Liberal way of things by jumping into the HST battle, pouring public money into a losing cause while seeing her own credibility slip away. After all this is over it will be interesting to hear what caused that about face – a caucus against her? too many lies to address?  too many bodies buried carelessly?

Now Clark’s leadership honeymoon seems like a small blip in a steady, steep decline.  All of it related to trust.

And as long as the Liberals keep spinning and every new revelation unveils another lie (see Pat Bell and the Prince George mess) the decline will continue no matter how many ads they run and fresh lines they tweets.

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | 3 Comments

You should Thank God for the BC Liberals

Greedy little students.  Stupid universities.  Loathsome trades trainers.

Don’t you understand?  Our future depends on cutting your support now.  Without the 2% in post sec and training cuts over the next three years there is no way we could afford to pay for quick wins now.

No way your government could pay $11 million to host a party for a second rate Bollywood awards show – the SAG awards of India.

No way your government could dole out $2.7 million for a Grey Cup party. Go Orange!

No way you’d get to see three government ads every half hour of your waking, breathing life – right up to and maybe even through the election.

None of this would be yours without these, we admit it, large cuts to post secondary education.

But you can count on us.  You know where we stand.

“Your long term pain for our short term gain”

That’s your BC Liberals.

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | 4 Comments

Why Yap?

bloy-pinsHere’s the guy who should resign along with his boss, the Premier.

Here Harry Bloy is pinning a Diamond Jubilee medal on Brian Bonney’s chest during a ceremony at the Leg.  Bloy was Minister responsible for multiculturalism when the infamous ‘Outreach Plan’ was developed and implemented.

Bonney – his former campaign manager – was parachuted by Bloy into the Communications Director position in time for the development and implementation of the ‘Outreach’ plan.

As the former BC Liberal Party Operation Director responsible for lists and such Bonney was the guy who could serve as the link to the BC Liberal Party.  He likely is the one who found the appropriate partisans for the jobs.  And he was the one who instructed the outreach hires to ‘go around their official reports in the Ministry’.  ’Come directly to me’ he advised.

But Bloy and Bonney can’t resign for this one.  Bloy’s already out because of his disastrous performance in the rest of the ministry.  And after Bloy resigned, Bonney moved on to become the CEO of the Canadian Homebuilders Association.

Interestingly, that means Bonney can’t be touched by Dyble’s investigation. Dyble doesn’t have the power to investigate Bonney’s interactions with the Liberal Party, nor the Liberal Party’s involvement in the plan.  The so-called investigation will be short one key player and all the private phone messages between Bonney and the BC Liberal Party that unfolded as part of the outreach effort.

Dyble’s investigation isn’t worth a thing.  It should be treated as the cover-up it so clearly is.

The only thing I’m surprised by in all of this is the involvement of Mr. Dyble, who normally would be above the role of  ’Official cover’ in a whitewash of this magnitude.  What a lousy way to end a good career.

***

Twitter is both addictive and informative. One of the fascinating things is that it tends to be almost the first link in the chain of spin that emerges after a crisis like this one.

A line appears, takes hold and gets repeated over and over again by spin meisters, MLAs, surrogates and – in the case of the BC Liberals who seem to be running out of humans who will repeat their foul words – fictitious entities and people who adopt a name and title that doesn’t represent a real human.

It took an awful long time for one to appear this time, but it’s there now.  This is it, the BC Liberal defence: “No big deal, everybody does it.”

It’s kind of weird, because it’s directly countered by the Premier’s deep and heartfelt™ apology.  And it’s a line developed by the most mediocre of all commentators, Fazil Mihlar.

But there it is.  The only talking point they’ve got left.

It started yesterday, picked up steam and is now all over twitter or seems to be although few surrogates are daring to raise their heads.

After twitter of course, the pundits take it up.  First exhibit Andrew Coyne.  Coyne dresses well and I like that.  But this one can’t be dressed up and his column in the Sun (who would have thought) is pathetic.  He even admits they Clark government’s actions might be illegal but law be damned, they all do it.

Well, they don’t.

Coyne is better than that.  He knows that it’s not that “they all do it.” It’s all about how they do it.  With generosity and integrity, respecting both the issues and the law or cynically and possibly illegally.

 

By lumping the former in with the later in an attempt to support the government all Coyne does is tarnish his own reputation.  It’s the kind of thing I expect from Mihlar. It’s not what Coyne should be doing. Very unfortunate.

Share
Posted in BC Liberals, BC Politics, Christy Clark | 5 Comments