NDP Does A Good Job Hammering The Christy Clark Government With Ongoing Scandals After Going To Sleep During The Election When It Mattered Most!
By R. Paul Dhillon With News Files
VICTORIA — Premier Christy Clark, hot off her easy win in Kelowna last week, was back to facing the same old skeletons in the BC Liberal party closet, this one close to outing her as being the all knowing and condoning the ethnic vote scandal, where party officials on taxpayer pay roll were using their paid time to work on getting votes for Clark ahead of the May election and judging by the win, they succeeded wonderfully.
NDP took a closer look at new documents from the report done on the scandal by the government and found new statements from a former government staffer which show that the B.C. Liberals tried every illegal and unethical trick, including hush money, to buy the staffer’s silence.
Responding to an email detailing a plan to offer jobs and financial inducements to someone who had information that “would damage the Premier and the party,” Premier Christy Clark claimed that there was “no evidence that it was ever acted on.”
Yet the subject of the email, Sepideh Sarrafpour, said she was in fact offered a job, confirming that the plan outlined in the email was followed.
“How much more stonewalling and distraction will British Columbians have to endure before the B.C. Liberals tell the truth about what happened?” asked New Democrat leader Adrian Dix.
Sarrafpour also said she attended a meeting in August 2012 in the premier’s Vancouver office, at which then–Multiculturalism Minister John Yap instructed her and others to generate contact lists that were to be used in the upcoming election.
“Did John Yap tell Mr. Dyble about the work Ms. Sarrafpour was doing during the internal investigation, or did he maintain he didn’t know anything?” asked Vancouver-Mount Pleasant MLA Jenny Kwan.
“Before the election, the premier said the ‘quick wins’ document was just a draft, but now we know it was much more than that. She said the plan in the hush money email was never implemented, but now we know it was. The minister responsible at the time, John Yap, said he had nothing to do with any of it, and here we have a witness saying that in fact he was running meetings about it,” said Kwan.
“This government has a profound credibility problem on these issues,” added Dix.
The internal investigation into the scandal was run out of the premier’s office and was limited in scope. It could not look at wrongdoing by the Liberal caucus or the Liberal Party, and the 10,000 pages of documentation gathered when creating the report were only released after the election.
“New Democrats have been calling for an independent, external investigation of this scandal since day one. This government has refused, and they want British Columbians to believe them when they claim that their internal investigation was thorough,” said New Democrat multiculturalism critic Bruce Ralston.
“But we know that this investigation was far from thorough. Its scope was extremely limited, and key figures like Sepideh Sarrafpour were never interviewed.”
New Democrats are calling for an independent, external investigation of the Quick Wins scandal.
“If you look at the operation of this premier’s office from leadership campaign to premier’s office to election, they spent a lot of attention on this,” Dix told reporters following question period where the ethnic-vote issue was debated for the third consecutive day.
“Huge money was involved in government advertising, which is part of the plan.
“Huge efforts were made and significant efforts were made to use government resources it appears to develop lists. They diverted $1 million from the jobs’ plan.”
Dix didn’t accuse the Liberals of cheating to win the May election, but he said the effort put into the discredited multicultural-outreach plan was massive, reached the top levels of the government and included job offers to silence critics, reported CTV News.
“The question is were they acting appropriately or not,” he said. “The answer is they were cheating. That’s plain. They were cheating.”
A review last March by Clark’s deputy minister John Dyble found work lines between the B.C. government and the Liberal party were crossed in a government effort to win ethnic votes.
The review, which made six recommendations, found two serious instances of misuse of government resources.
One misuse involved the payment of $6,800 to a community contractor for work approved by former multiculturalism minister John Yap without a signed contract.
The second instance concerned former government aide Brian Bonney who worked for the government caucus and the Liberal party, while he was being paid as a government employee.
Dyble said at least half of Bonney’s time was spent doing work for the Liberal party on the ethnic-outreach strategy, prompting the Liberal party to later reimburse the government $70,000 as part of Bonney’s salary.
Dyble’s review caused Clark’s popularity ratings to plunge, forced Yap out of cabinet and cost two Liberal insiders, Kim Haakstad and Mike Lee, their jobs, reported CTV News.
Yet, due to Dix’s incompetence, Clark won an easy majority, even gaining seats from the previous BC Liberal victory. How do you explain that?
