Thursday, July 26, 2012

"Fairness" You Keep On Using That Word...

SomeCliffsAreMoreInsaneThanOthers
InconceivableVille

...I Do Not Think It Means What You (Want Us To) Think It Means.

A few days ago, I compared the Campbell/Clark/Falcon/McLean/Brown/Kinsella government's use of (what I consider to be) bogus 'fairness' types to give cover to both the BC Rail deal from days gone by and the impending sale of the distribution arm of the Liquor Distribution Branch today.

Anyway....

Regarding the findings of the so-called Fairness Advisors in the RailGate fiasco, for a long time I have focused on a passage in the original 'interim' version of their report that was released on November 14th, 2003 just before the deal went down that, in my opinion, demonstrates it was a whitewash.

Why?

Because in that passage the 'fairness' guys themselves explicitly stated that they hadn't actually talked to the bidders (i.e. CPRail and BNSF Rail) who had been screaming bloody murder that the still unconsumated deal had been fixed from the beginning in CNRail's favour.

Now, Ian Reid has a fantastic post on what went down between the time of that 'interim' report and the release of the 'final' report in December of 2003.

I find the following passage most interesting:

...Following the CPR and BNSF letters (fairness advisor) C(harles)R(Rivers)A(ssociates) agreed to release an early and incomplete draft of its report on the process to give the appearance that the process was proceeding as it should.
Then the going got sticky.  On November 23rd David Morhart asked Larry Shugart to speed up the release of the final report (“pulled him away from a college football game on TV”).
Shugart agreed to have the report to the government “for Dec. 3 at the latest.”
So in just ten days at the most, CRA miraculously fully investigated and cleared up the problems raised by CPR and BNSF.
Or maybe they didn’t because after December 3 the government began its editing process which was still underway December 15, as new facts and figures came in...

But that's only a small part of the thing. 

Go read Ian's entire post and see if you agree with my opinion about what 'fairness' is NOT, at least as repeatedly defined by the Campbell/Clark/Falcon/McLean/Brown/Kinsella government.

OK?


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Btw...I have digital copies of both versions of the RailGate report if anyone would like to check and compare both...Feel free to send me an Email if you want 'em....pacificgazette at yahoo dot the two letter suffix for canada...
Why do I have both reports?...Well, back in the day a whole bunch of us 'cultists' (including our good friend BCMary) had to do a lot of digging to track 'em down because they kept disappearing from gov.bc.ca domain webpages...
Header/SubHeader an earworm that is bugging you?....This should help.

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