WILKINSON HAS CHANCE TO CLEAN LIBERAL HOUSE
Membership shenanigans show new brush needed at party headquarters
As if the B.C. Liberals weren’t dragging enough baggage from their time in government, last week’s vote on the party leadership coincided with the final courtroom proceedings in a case that plagued them on the eve of the 2013 election.
Brian Bonney, a former Liberal party operative and government staffer, received a nine-month conditional sentence Wednesday for his part in the B.C. Liberal effort to score “quick wins” in the multicultural community. Bonney had pleaded guilty last October to breach of trust for wrongly diverting government resources for party political purposes during the ill-advised scheme, which played out in 2011 and ’12.
“Mr. Bonney enthusiastically went to work on this plan, much of which was expressly designed to promote only Liberal party interests, while he was being paid from the public purse,” said Judge David St. Pierre in passing sentence. “He simply believed that the Liberal party with their ‘free-enterprise’ agenda was the only party that could effectively govern and that essentially, the ends justified the clandestine, partial and dishonest means he was engaged in.”
From the day the New Democrats broke the Quick Wins scandal in early 2013, it was evident that the plan was hatched and directed out of the office of then-premier Christy Clark. But the story fizzled as an election issue, in part because (as the New Democrats conceded in their own post-mortem on a losing campaign) they failed to prosecute the scandal during the four-week-long run-up to voting day.
The scandal gained a second wind after the election, when then-NDP leader Adrian Dix delivered a file of evidence to police, leading to the appointment of an independent special prosecutor. But after an almost three-year investigation, Bonney was the only one in government ever charged with a criminal offence for the abuses associated with the multicultural outreach strategy.
Not for the first time had the allegations in a B.C. political scandal exceeded the provincial guidelines for laying criminal charges, namely that there be a substantial likelihood of conviction. Still, in summarizing the evidence for the court, special prosecutor David Butcher did draw a connection to a related scheme involving Clark’s successful bid for the Liberal leadership in 2011. He described how the Clark campaign assembled a sizable number of memberships from ethnic communities, then gained control of the requisite personal identification numbers and voted them by proxy in her name.
The block voting by proxy wasn’t actually illegal, as Butcher was at pains to advise the court. But it may well have supplied the margin of victory in a race where Clark defeated runner-up Kevin Falcon by four per cent in the final count.
Rumours to that effect abounded at the time. But the Liberals closed ranks behind the newly chosen premier. Falcon himself took a vow of silence in the name of party unity and accepted a consolation prize, appointment from Clark as deputy premier and finance minister. But, after the special prosecutor’s comments in court, Falcon has now aired publicly the suspicions he long held privately about the underhanded methods of the Clark leadership campaign.
“I’m sorry to say I’m not surprised,” he told reporter David Ball of Metro News recently.
“What you see here really speaks to a lack of transparency and integrity in the process that is highly problematic. The stakes were so high, and the premiership was in play.”
Falcon confirmed he’d had his doubts as far back as the leadership vote almost seven years ago. “My team felt very upset as they were seeing irregularities, but there was no way I was going to make allegations to anyone without hard evidence. I’m not going to be a poor loser.”
Rather than accuse Clark of denying him the premier’s office at this late date, Falcon contented himself with a call for the party to ensure openness and integrity in this year’s vote.
The Liberals did tighten up membership and voting procedures this time around, all but admitting that they needed to do so because of the shenanigans in 2011. But, by coincidence, Falcon’s call coincided with last week’s eruption of another membership scandal, this time involving former cabinet minister Todd Stone. Stone and his team denied allegations that he’d been forced to withdraw more than 1,300 memberships because they were submitted with bogus email addresses.
But when former cabinet minister Bill Bennett levelled the accusation in an interview with Rob Shaw of The Vancouver Sun on Friday, the Stone camp finally confessed that the story was true. Even that confirmation had to be further corrected in a followup statement Saturday morning.
Stone paid the price for his evasions, finishing fourth in a race where he’d once been rated as having a chance to be one of the two names on the final ballot.
The party scarcely distinguished itself in the affair, refusing to come clean about Stone’s antics until Bennett went public, and never confirming that it had bounced several thousand memberships from rival camps. All of which presents an early challenge for new leader Andrew Wilkinson. His campaign lost only a few dozen memberships in the vetting process and it was his co-chair, Bennett, who forced Stone to come clean.
Now with longtime party president Sharon White announcing her retirement Friday, Wilkinson has the opportunity to insist on new leadership and a genuine standard of openness at party headquarters.
The Liberals did tighten up membership and voting procedures this time around, all but admitting that they needed to do so.