Liberals and NDP courting election issues

It was a busy couple days at the Victoria courthouse for a pair of political insiders in trouble with the law and both major parties at the legislature took some knocks.

First up was Marnie Ruth Offman, former constituency assistant to NDP education critic Rob Fleming. Offman appeared in court charged with theft, fraud and forgery after funds allegedly went missing from Fleming’s office.

Next in front of a judge was George Gretes, former executive assistant to Transportation Minister Todd Stone. Gretes pleaded guilty in a document-destruction scandal that rocked the Liberal government.

In terms of immediate political damage, a slight edge went to the Liberals in the “humiliating perp walk” category.

Gretes stayed inside the courthouse until TV cameras dispersed, while Offman looked thoroughly rattled ducking through a media throng.

But that’s where the Liberals’ advantage ends, at least in the short term.

With a provincial election 10 months away, the NDP is already using Gretes’s guilty plea as evidence of a wider pattern of corruption and wrongdoing inside the Christy Clark government.

Gretes was mixed up in the “triple-delete” scandal, in which the government was caught erasing emails related to the murders and disappearances of aboriginal women along the Highway of Tears.

Another government insider blew the whistle on staff deleting emails to prevent their release under freedom-of-information laws. Gretes pleaded guilty to lying to the independent FOI commissioner about it.

But the government’s troubles don’t end with Gretes’s guilty plea, which resulted in a $2,500 fine.

There’s also the ethnic-outreach scandal: A secret plan to use taxpayer-financed staff and resources to score “quick wins” with ethnic communities and compile contact lists for the Liberal party.

A former government manager faces a criminal breach-of-trust charge in the case.

Meanwhile, Liberal party executive director Laura Miller still faces breach-of-trust and mischief charges in Ontario over an email-deletion scandal back east.

The trick for the NDP is to convince voters these cases are part of a wider pattern of abuse that should result in the Liberals’ termination at election time.

Then we come to Rob Fleming, the likable NDP education critic who is fortunate the case against his former assistant will likely not go to trial before the election.

Fleming is the key witness in the case, in which he says he discovered $120,000 missing from his office accounts after Offman left his employ.

Consider this scenario: Clark beats John Horgan in the May election. Horgan resigns as NDP leader and Fleming confirms an already rumoured leadership bid.

If Fleming runs for NDP boss, the Liberals would attack Fleming for not knowing about money disappearing from his office accounts under his own nose for years!

The bottom line in all the court action: The Liberals are absorbing damage right now. The NDP damage could come later.