Tuesday, June 22, 2010

RailGate Rewind....Is Gary Mason Also Just An "Avowed Political Opponent Hurling Comments"?


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Update: 3:00pm Tuesday June 22nd/10....
Martyn Brown was supposed to be back on the stand again today being cross-examined further by defense lawyer Michael Bolton....Neal Hall had reported early this morning in the VSun that he figured the line of questioning would follow-up on the matter of the 'relationship' between one of the RCMP's lead investigators on the case, Kevin Debruyckere, and the Executive Director of the BC Liberal Party, Kelly Reichert.....That questioning did not happen, apparently, at least in part, due to objections of the special prosecutor William Berardino that contributed to more 'legal wrangling' with the jury out of the room...."Citizen Journalist From Courtroom 54" has the best take I've read on that so far over at Mary's place, here....
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AllThePretzelLogic
ThatFitsVille



Last week, under questioning from David Basi's lawyer Michael Bolton, Gordon Campbell's chief-of-staff Martyn Brown said the following as a means of explaining why he and his boss both ignored a question asked, and a potential problem raised, by then (unofficial) opposition member Joy MacPhail in the Legislature in the Spring of 2003:

"I don't know there was any optics problem - I didn't concede that there was an optics problem. Ms. MacPhail, leader of the opposition at the time and an avowed political opponent hurling about comments in the Legislature that even of themselves would necessarily pose a problem, so I don't accept your characterization."


So.

What exactly was the question asked by Ms. Macphail that led to the raising of the potential "optics problem" oh so many years ago?

Well......

Here it is - straight from Hansard:

J. MacPhail: A longtime Liberal Party fundraiser is Patrick Kinsella. He is the lobbyist for CN. Has the Premier or any of his ministers met with Mr. Kinsella and representatives of CN?


And how did Mr Brown's then and still current boss, Mr. Campbell, answer the question?

Why, of course, without actually denying anything, he did the only thing he possibly could have done to remain plausibly non-deniable.....

He told Ms. McPhail to go FOI herself:

Hon. G. Campbell: I don't have an answer for that. As the member opposite knows, if she wants to know about specific meeting times with either myself or the minister, she can do that through freedom of information.



But here's the real thing....

That potential "optics problem" has never ever really gone away because Mr. Campbell, CN Rail, and Mr. Kinsella, to the best of our knowledge, have all refused to answer any and all questions about whether or not the latter had any sort of working relationship whatsoever with CN Rail at the very same time that he, Mr. Kinsella, was also working for BC Rail when the big deal went down.

By way of illustration, we'll let Gary Mason pick up the trail six years later, in a piece he wrote for the Globe and Mail in April of 2009:

....During the bid period (for the BC Rail deal), Mr. Kinsella was seen entering the Premier's wing of the legislature with CN chairman David McLean on more than one occasion. The relationship between Mr. Kinsella and CN was raised in the legislature in May, 2003, by then-NDP MLA Joy MacPhail, who identified Mr. Kinsella as a paid lobbyist for the national rail line.

In an exchange long since forgotten, Ms. MacPhail asked Mr. Campbell if he had ever met Mr. Kinsella and Mr. McLean during the bid phase.

The Premier said at the time he didn't have an answer, and that if Ms. MacPhail wanted to know she could make a freedom-of-information request.

The trail went dry after that.

But now the matter is quite different. There is the appearance that Mr. Kinsella might have been on the payroll of BC Rail and CN Rail during the $1-billion sale of the rail line. And that there were meetings and phone calls going on between Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Campbell and/or members of his office.

I phoned CN yesterday to ask if Mr. Kinsella was a paid consultant or lobbyist during the bid process, and spokesperson Kelli Svendsen said: "We have nothing to say."

Mr. Kinsella, meantime, has long taken a vow of silence on his activities. Let's not forget that CP Rail angrily pulled out of the bid process in November, 2003, complaining that CN had the inside track all along - that the process was effectively rigged in its favour.
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So.

Given all that we now know about 'media monitoring' by the current government and its agents and/or avowed 'stakeholders', we feel the following needs to be asked given Mr. Brown's statement from last week that is quoted above:

Is Mr. Mason, like Ms. MacPhail before him, also just an "avowed political opponent hurling comments" at Mr. Campbell et al. that should therefore just be dismissed as such?


We figure only Mr. Mason's editors and/or his potential sources know for sure.



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*We've long wondered, though, if Ms. MacPhail did follow through with that FOI......Wouldn't that be interesting?....
The quote from Mr. Brown at the top of the post comes from the invaluably fulsome eyewitness reports by Bill Tieleman that he regularly posts up on his blog....Thus, his place is where you really see the PAB-Bots attack in the comments.
For the record,
we have written quite a lot about this in the past also....You can find a pretty good backgrounder on how Ms. McPhail's original question came to later light here....


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3 comments:

theo said...

So let me get this straight. A direct question in the Legislature can be sluffed off like that? It’s time to put a cage around the Legislative seats methinks. I have a hard time believing that question could be ignored. What the fuck is it with the Opposition? I would be in jail right now had I been privileged enough to sit in the Legislature and ask that question and gotten the same answer from fuckwad and couldn’t pursue it further.

Ian said...

theo,
What do you mean "what the fuck is wrong with the Opposition" because the government refuses to answer questions? It's called Parliament and has been around in more or less the same form with generally the same rules for nine centuries. And the government has never answered questions.

Sometimes the media (including town criers and their ilk) plus the populace have noticed and got angry. Not so much nowadays as there are more interesting things to do like facebook, blogposts, casinos and such.

It's true the BC opposition have tried a lot of tricks they haven't pulled a gun and taken the Minister of Finance hostage yet, so maybe it is their fault.


But the opposition continues its work - there were a lot of good unanswered questions last session - I hope you paid attention.
And guess what, they even debate laws and offer pretty trenchant criticism yet the government still forces them through regardless. I hope you followed that as well because some of it will no doubt affect you directly.

RossK said...

theo--

'Tis true what Ian speaks of, but from my point of view there are definitely two different 'Opposition' records to consider with respect to the Railgate matter.

The first is the record assembled by (mostly) Joy MacPhail and Jenny Kwan back in the bad old days when they were the ONLY (not evern really real) opposition just before the Railgate deal went down.....And that record for anybody who wants to sift through it is very, very, very impressive. This is just one example, but it is important to point out that Ms. MacPhail's question led to a big shebang more than SIX years later and now SEVEN (although I first wrote about it way back in 2007 thanks to the fact that Paul Willcocks let it out back out of the bag at his blog)....Personally, given what we KNOW is now available to the defense but cannot currently speak about due to the pre-trial publication ban, I think this will have huge effects later this year. Now, it is important to realize, I think (and I've only really just come to this realization myself), that that first record could be assembled so completely and thoroughly by Ms MacPhail and Kwan because at that that time the Dippers had absolutely nothing to lose so they could go full bore without being concerned about procedural and/or political traps and landmines.....

So....The second record is somewhat less fulsome, I think, because now the Dippers do have something to lose....As such they have been more careful...Of course, I don't agree that it is really the best way to go (but I'm not a Pol), but still, they got us a huge amount of documentary evidence to look at (much of which can STILL be found on their website), and they brought a lot of other stuff to light more recently, including the fact that Mr. Kinsella was paid $297,000 by BC Rail during the period in question...

So, with all that said, I think the real group to be upset with here if you want to make a fuss regarding the fact that the government has not been held fully to account on this matter really is the proCorpMedia because, with a few exceptions, they have refused to really dig into the publically available record and connect the really bright, really large and sparkly dots on this one.

(and Ian and both feel that this is also the case with the Vegas with Deep South Roots-owned Casino-Industrial-Complex that will soon be built next to the $600 million dollar rag cloaking the former marshmallow on the North Side of False Creek).

OK?

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