Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Mr. Chase's Job Description....

BCRailGate
TrialVille



Mr. Stuart Chase is a British Columbia government employee.

That means that we, the people, pay his salary.

As part of his job the good Mr. Chase apparently makes his way to BC Supreme Courtroom #54 in downtown Vancouver to sit in on the BC RailGate pre-trial hearings.

And ,according to one of BC Mary's eyewitness Anon-O-Mice, this is what the good Mr. Chase does:

Mr. Chase doesn't talk with reporters. He doesn't talk with members of the public. He sits on his own on the left hand side of the gallery.

When court rises he gathers his things and leaves directly, takes the elevator down to the Smythe street entrance, jaywalks across the street towards Hornby, crosses at the light and strides into 865 Hornby, where the Ministry of Tourism has offices. It is there, I presume, that he files his reports, twice daily.

I'd say he has more than a hundred pages of hand written notes to date to draw from. Oddly, he seems much more engaged and active in the note taking department when the defence is before the court.

According to Attorney General Wally Oppal, however, the good Mr. Chase is actually there to help the media and members of the public in the courtroom gallery and, I dunno, perhaps wayward schoolchildren and folks who get lost heading back to their cars in the courthouse parking garage after shopping on Robson St., understand the intricacies of our legal system.

Which, of course, is quite at odds with the Anon-O-Mouse's description.

But who ya gonna believe these days, anyway......

A highly respected member of the British Columbia legislature who works in the highest capacity for the Premier, Mr. Gordon Campbell, or some lowly member of the public who is just doing his or her best to find out what is really going on.

Well, luckily, we have a report from Les Leyne in the Times-Colonist who discovered what the good Mr. Chase is really up to by, get this, asking him:

At the risk of putting the young man on the outs with his boss, it was Chase himself who cheerfully set the record straight.

In an interview later, Chase said he sits in on the trial daily and sends a straight factual report on proceedings twice each day to the director and the manager of the attorney general's public affairs division. Those reports give them a sense of what's going on. He doesn't brief reporters, he doesn't talk to the public.


Hmmmm......

Looks like the highly respected, and highly respectable, Mr. Oppal has some explaining to do.

And it also looks like it is getting to the point where we, the public, may wish to consider the possibility that everything Mr. Oppal has to say about this matter from now on may actually be a highly respectable and respected attempt at, how shall we phrase it.....

Obfuscation?

Which is, of course, just a very respectable and highly respected way of saying lying.


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If it is, in fact, true that the good Mr. Chase does file his reports from the Ministry of Tourism offices on Hornby St. it is hard not to recognize the irony in the fact that is the very same Ministry that released those highly respected and highly respectable 'Cultural Precinct' funds to the City of Vancouver, some of which are currently being used by that most highly respectable and even more highly respected Mr. Ken Dobell to creatively consult with, but not lobby, his former Boss in whose office he still has a desk so that he can creatively consult right back at, well, everybody else who has attained the highest level of respectability with all of whom are known to be extremely well respected.......Or some such thing.

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