VANCOUVER— It’s clear that Canadian legal system takes a very White view at who can practice law here. Earlier, the Law Society of Upper Canada turned down a reformed Sikh militant who had passed his bar exam and wanted to be a lawyer in Ontario but they had no problem this week admitting a former B.C. political power broker who admitted to bribing a BC Liberal insider Dave Udhe Basi in the BC Rail scandal, one of this country’s biggest corruption cases that have not been fully investigated.
The Law Society of Upper Canada held three days of hearings into the case of Erik Bornmann to determine whether he is of good character, ultimately deciding he’s been transformed from a self-described “arrogant, amoral and immoral person” to one who has been humbled by his remorse, reported the Globe and Mail newspaper.
Bornmann was a lobbyist for a Victoria company called Pilothouse. It had been hired by Denver-based OmniTRAX, one of three bidders vying for BC Rail, which the Liberal government decided in 2002 to privatize and sell.
This decision will be seen as another example of we Whites stick up for our own as despite being the briber – Bornmann was given immunity from prosecution by the Crown in exchange for helping the RCMP in the prosecution of Basi, Bobby Virk and Aneal Basi after a raid on their Victoria legislature offices in December 2003.
Bornmann’s home office was also raided, and he quickly acquired a lawyer and negotiated an agreement with the B.C. Crown so he would be spared from possible criminal prosecution.
He moved to Toronto in 2006, where two law firms refused to hire him as an articling student after he told them he may appear as a Crown witness in a criminal case in Vancouver and was let go from a third firm when his past came to light.
Last October, Dave Basi and Virk pleaded guilty to two counts each of breach of trust and accepting rewards or benefits and were sentenced to two years of house arrest for leaking government information to Bornmann.
But in reality this was a payoff to tune of $6 million by the BC Liberal government to sweep their party’s corruption under the carpet and let Basi and Virk be the fall guys or scapegoats.
Bornmann told the Law Society hearing that between 2001 and 2002, he paid about $1,500 in small cash disbursements to Dave Basi, ministerial aide to then-finance minister Gary Collins.
From March 2002 to December 2003, Bornmann said he made larger, intermittent payments to Dave Basi, through a scheme that involved writing cheques totalling almost $26,000 to the man’s cousin. The money would later be transferred to Basi.
Bornmann also told the hearing that he and his partner, Brian Kieran, regularly took Dave Basi and Virk for dinner at upscale restaurants and expensed the meals to OmniTRAX. They also flew the men and their wives to Denver to watch a football game.
“There are so many layers of regret and shame to my conduct, conduct that has led me here today,” Bornmann testified when asked how his last six years working as a student lawyer in a clinic for disadvantaged people has affected his character.
“I get sick thinking about it,” he said. “It’s as if what I did set off a chain reaction. Things just kept exploding for six years, seven years, eight years, leaving this gigantic mess.”
But Bornmann’s remorse failed to move one of three Law Society members, who said the public needs to be confident that lawyers are people of unquestionable integrity.
