Failing to vet the candidates

Posted May 7, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Other Parties, Scandal

BC Conservative candidate for Abbotsford South, Gurcharan Dhaliwal allegedly was convicted of possessing a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking, i.e. drug running.

I am surprised it took this long for one of the minor party candidates to surface as having a track record. My guess is that the BC Liberals held this in the bag as late as possible to try to discredit the BC Conservative Party. My other guess is that the BC Liberals and NDP have dirt on some of the 85 Green candidates (some of whom were hastily nominated to finish the complete provincial slate), but they’ve decided not to bother getting it to the media to reduce exposure to the party.

At this point, the BC Conservative party has one thing alone – their name – that they are riding the coattails of the federal Conservative Party of Canada with. If it wasn’t for this, they would be a complete non-entity.

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Scandal Hits the BC Liberals – John van Dongen

Posted April 25, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

This is the second post (previous post here) about the April 24th news items that saw Marc Dalton and John van Dongen get in trouble.

John van Dongen announced on Friday that he had his drivers’ license suspended because of a high number of speeding tickets on his record. As a result, Premier Gordon Campbell reassigned the portfolio of Insurance Corporation of British Columbia and the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles.

Bringing up van Dongen’s court records, we have the following:

The 1st charge is for excessive speeding; the case was dropped, as the prosecution (police) did not show up to court.
The 2nd charge is for speeding; van Dongen did not show up to court.
The 3rd charge is for speeding; van Dongen did not show up to court.
The 4th charge is for speeding; van Dongen did not show up to court.

Note the fifth record is not the Minister in question (note that Vaughn Palmer was not correct here in saying five tickets). This is a list of court appearances by van Dongen, but what is not displayed is the number of speeding violations that were paid for but not contested in court. If you send money to pay the fine, there will be no court record of the matter.

Ordinarily speeding convictions wouldn’t make the radar of anybody in the public (even the charge of excessive speeding, which is defined as going 41 km/h or over the speed limit), but the political problem for van Dongen is the apparent hypocrisy of implementing and talking about anti-speeding programs when you’re likely the top 1 percent in the province when it comes to being caught speeding. I will take the moment here to disclose that you can see a court record on me for speeding (and the prosecution did not show up, so the case was dismissed).

Almost the entire driving public violates section 146 of the motor vehicle act daily – does anybody out there go over 50km/h in most places in a municipality? You are technically breaking the law even if you are going 51km/h, and the police are well within their rights to write you a ticket for going 51 km/h in a 50 km/h zone – they just have to prove it in court.

This is why court systems exist – charges have to be proven. It is also why, despite Gregor Robertson’s previous experience, that charges that are in question should have to be proven in court – because it is the appropriate check and balance to the powers that the public have entrusted to the police – the police are not always correct.

Preaching against an activity almost everybody does (speeding) is bad enough, but when you take actions that are directly against what you preach is good public behaviour (i.e. everybody should obey speeding legislation), this will turn off a lot of the public and absolutely ruin credibility that you may have on subsequent issues. This is very similar to what happened in the USA when Democratic nominees were discovered to not have fully paid their income taxes – these were people that previously stated or implied that people should always pay their taxes. If the top politicals don’t abide by the legislation they create, why should the public?

One obvious solution is to eliminate the legislation – and removing Section 146 of the motor vehicle act would be a good start.

Politically, this will likely cost van Dongen his cabinet position, assuming the BC Liberals are re-elected. Locally, he is still very likely to keep his seat, but he will probably lose a few voters that will decide not to show up to the polls. Provincially is where most of the damage will be done – this is the second solicitor general in a row that had some adverse event happen to him (the first being John Les, who is under investigation), and as a result, the NDP can take this as a character issue. It may cost the BC Liberals the ability to take in voters that are sensitive to criminal issues.

It is also amazing how these two issues (Dalton and van Dongen) have mostly erased the memories of a horrible last week for the NDP. While it doesn’t appear that these two scandals will affect the inevitable outcome of the election, it may be enough to get more public attention onto the campaign – something that works more in the favour of the NDP than the BC Liberals.

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Scandal hits the BC Liberals – Marc Dalton

Posted April 25, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

The BC Liberals’ received their first political broadside from the NDP last Friday, hitting two candidates – Marc Dalton, and John van Dongen. Both revelations came after nominations closed, which is smart political timing. This post will be about Dalton:

Marc Dalton, is the BC Liberal candidate in Maple Ridge-Mission (a swing riding). The following is apparently a copy of the letter, dredged up from 1996:

I’ve been somewhat torn about making a response to your note to Bruce. I value maintaining a good relationship with you and all the staff and don’t really enjoy jumping into a contentious issue.

As a parent of three school-aged children in public schools and as a teacher, I am very much concerned about the motions before the BCTF (B.C. Teachers Federation) presently being petitioned against.

I am not against homosexuals as people, but I do not support their lifestyle choices. I believe homosexuality is a moral issue. Most of us agree on many morals: respect, honesty, kindness. There are also many behaviours and acts that most of us would not condone: rape, robbery, assault, drunken driving, pedophilia, incest and so on.

There are other moral issues that large segments of our society do not see eye to eye: gambling, abortion, adultery, pornography. I believe that homosexuality fits in this category.

I became aware of the motions this weekend when a concerned mother of school children approached me and asked if I would get involved in some small way to see the proposals defeated. She handed me a clipping of the Vancouver Sun and some people to write.

There are many, many people who hold homosexuality to be an improper and high-risk behaviour. Though I oppose violence towards these people as well as towards all people, I am against the BCTF ram-rodding the homosexual motion against the wishes of great numbers of parents (and teachers) in this district and in this province.

Thank you for bearing with me.

NDP MLA Spencer Herbert (Vancouver-West End) went on to say in an NDP press release:

Gordon Campbell said that his party has a vigorous screening process. Either Mr. Dalton chose not to disclose these comments or they are acceptable to Mr. Campbell. If Mr. Dalton hid his homophobia he should be asked to resign. If Mr. Campbell approved the candidacy knowing of these statements he should do the right thing, denounce these comments and fire this candidate.

Herbert’s initial comment is quite powerful – was this factoid known by the BC Liberals in the nomination screening, or was it not revealed by the candidate?

Marc Dalton was not without known baggage, as the Conservative party rejected his nomination in Burnaby-New Westminster for the 2008 election; he had previously run as a candidate in the 2006 federal election in the same riding; he lost to NDP MP Peter Julian by about 11% in that election.

It is likely by the timing of this release that the NDP had held it in “reserve” and decided to use it today as an effort to stem the clear loss in momentum they have been receiving in the media after the CKNW debate. It was a fairly smart decision, as the media concentrated on this and van Dongen’s scandal, effectively derailing the political messaging of the BC Liberals for the day, and possibly the weekend.

In terms of politics, the NDP was smart to exploit something that the federal Conservatives have tried very hard to mitigate – the social conservative component of the party. Dalton was an easy target.

Whether this compromises Dalton’s chances in Maple Ridge-Mission is a good question; certainly the further into the Fraser Valley you are, the more socially conservative the area becomes; however, the question is whether this would get NDP supporters to show up to the poll, or for liberally-minded BC Liberal voters to not show up or even swing their votes in response. In a close swing riding like Maple Ridge-Mission, something like this could make the difference. Provincially, it could also have an impact on socially liberal ridings, such as Vancouver-Fairview. The damage is minimized if there is no future candidates that have statements from the past brought up against them; but if the NDP have a few of these in their political pockets, then it could be trouble for the BC Liberals.

It is not known whether the date of the email (1996) will factor into public sentiment or not.

Later that day, Dalton gave a full apology; the only correct political response.

This also brings up a last point, similar to Ray Lam’s Facebook pictures – anything you’ve written, said, or had recorded in any medium can be pulled up from your past and used against you; a 1996 email is 13 years old, but it still has come back to haunt Marc Dalton.

11 Comments

First candidate down

Posted April 20, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: NDP, Scandal

NDP candidate Ray Lam for Vancouver-False Creek got “outed” by not deleting some racy pictures off his Facebook profile. Couresty of a comment by BJ, you can view the “racy” pictures here (just don’t do it at work to be on the safe side).

False Creek is a probable BC Liberal riding in this election, so it won’t damage the NDP too much other than likely boosting the membership of young potential members that might think that the NDP is literally a “party” first and “political” second.

As far as I know, this is the first “scandalous” removal of a nominee after the writ was dropped. There are surely more to come as new candidates are vetted and screened by the opposing party members. Any juicy material will likely be withheld until after April 24th, as that is when nominations close.

The Vancouver Sun quoted:

Liberal Mary McNeil demanded the photos be immediately removed and called for a public apology from Ray Lam, candidate for Vancouver-False Creek, saying the pictures were “offensive and demeaning.”

This is the wrong approach politically; it would hint that McNeil would call for the removal of content that she doesn’t approve of in other instances. This remark likely cost her a few votes.

Inevitably, it is up to voters to decide whether such pictures are appropriate or not. Lam had no choice but to resign (to avoid dilution of the NDP’s messaging in the future) but I would suspect that in Yaletown (which is a socially liberal area) most people wouldn’t care. Provincially, however, is a different story.

Paul Hillsdon has some interesting commentary on the matter – I disagree with his conclusion that Lam shouldn’t have resigned (he had to for the good of his party), but Hillsdon provides some interesting colour commentary on four other points that I agree with.

The one conclusion is the following – don’t put digital pictures of yourself in compromising positions no matter how “private” you think they are. They will get out.

10 Comments

Patrick Kinsella / Does the public care?

Posted April 17, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

The NDP have been trying to bring up Patrick Kinsella and his relationship between the government, the BC Liberal Party, BC Rail, and about $300,000 in contract payments.

They are likely trying to create a sentiment of public outrage equivalent to that of David Dingwall’s classic quote “I’m entitled to my entitlements”, but I’m having my doubts that any of this will stick without more of a “story”, such as the entire sponsorship scandal. Certainly having police raid the legislature is quite an event, but will the events of many years ago have any effect on the voting public? Will any marginal BC Liberal voters stay home as a result of this press campaign?

6 Comments

BC Rail – Will it hurt the BC Liberals?

Posted April 3, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

There has been a lot of content generated over the past couple weeks with respect to the BC Rail case and Patrick Kinsella – about 2/3rds of question period has been consumed by this topic, and Bill Tieleman has been very busy trying to uncover more material relating to this case.

The question is whether this will electorally hurt the BC Liberals or not; the NDP will likely be using this as an attack measure on the Premier’s integrity with two arguments – the first argument about breaking a 2001 campaign pledge to not sell or privatize BC Rail (both sides would generally not argue this fact); the second being that government insiders orchestrated elements of the BC Rail sale for personal interest. Right now the only thing the NDP has is Kinsella’s $297,000 payments from BC Rail – will they be able to dredge up any other insiders that received payments? It would be a deadly campaign strategy if this were the case – the obvious marketing campaign would be “a name a day”. If Kinsella is all they have, then this is likely to go nowhere electorally.

I might add at this point that from an economic perspective, it made sense to sell BC Rail to either CN or CP Rail.

3 Comments

Bill Bennett in the news again

Posted February 6, 2009 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

East Kootenay MLA and Minister of Tourism, Sports and the Arts, Bill Bennett is in the news for writing off a direct email to the Fernie chamber of commerce.

In 2007 he sent an email that had profanity in it, and resigned as minister as a consequence.

This time, the email is different. The Public Eye Online has a copy of it.

My take on this is that anybody reading the letter will find Bennett’s letter to be very well written, and direct. The public often complains that politicians are too avoidant and non-committal in fears that they will alienate some part of their constituency. With Bennett, you know where he stands.

This bit of media actually will be helping him in the upcoming election campaign. If more politicians in Victoria were this straight-forward, it would actually represent a significant cultural change, compared to the sanitized “message” that is centralized by party leaders. I will chalk this one up as a clear victory for Bennett, and NDP candidate Troy Sebastian is looking weak with his assertions that “I think there’s a lot of people that are embarrassed by this kind of conduct and certainly it’s not the way that I believe constituents should be treated.”

I don’t know anybody that would be embarrassed other than Steve Kuijt, who undoubtedly will be hearing snide comments about his “intellectual level” in the medium term future. I think it is guaranteed that Kuijt will not be voting for Bennett in the upcoming election.

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Coleman exonerated

Posted September 30, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

The conflict of interest commissioner clears Rich Coleman.

The NDP will try to claim that the commissioner was somehow partisan in this decision, but it will not stick and this issue will be politically dead with respect to the May 2009 election.

The residual “known unknowns” for the BC Liberals revolve around the special prosecutor investigation of John Les and the ALR rezoning, and any resolution concerning the legislature raids approximately five years ago (which is going on at a snail’s pace).

Another uncontrollable variable will be the state of the economy and the commodity markets (of which BC is vulnerable to economically) but it will be impossible to predict until closer to the election date.

I highly suspect that if the election dates were not fixed there would have been an election called by now. As a humourous note, it would have been amusing if Premier Gordon Campbell said to the Union of the BC Municipalities (UBCM) that “We have lost the confidence of the BC Legislature. I will be going to the Lieutenant Governor and dissolving the legislature”, which is roughly equivalent to what the Prime Minister said before pulled the plug on parliament.

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