What’s the frequency, Ken?

It seems Ken Dobell has been living two lives. One life, he is a friend of the premier, a highly respected advisor to the provincial government, and he separates his garbage at the curbside. The other life, he goes by the hacker alias “lobbyist” doing secretive things for his old bosses at The City of Vancouver. One of these lives has a future. The other does not.

Gordon Campbell figures that even pleading guilty to charges of conflict of interest doesn’t disqualify the man from continuing to exercise his interests in provincial affairs. I suppose coming from a man who didn’t see anything wrong with pleading guilty to drunk driving while presiding over a provincial government striving to make the end of drunk driving a hallmark of its era, he’s right: there seems no need to fire government hacks merely for being criminals.

But the City must fire him.

What were they building in there?

Gordon Campbell has been requested by defence lawyers to appear in court to testify in the BC Rail case. The other two principles in that case quickly skidaddled: Gary Collins quickly resigned after the unusual police raid on government offices, including his own, and ended up at a local airway that he then also made tracks from when it got caught up in yet more shady legal matters. And Christie Clark, close to the BC Rail case, split shortly after the raid “to spend more time with my family,” which ended up being a few months, as she then re-emerged as a wanna-be mayor of Vancouver.

Campbell didn’t beat it, to his credit. But now he might have to testify.

The details of the BC Rail case remain ambiguous and confusing, and of course, as the matter is before the courts, no one who knows anything about it will talk. Though it hasn’t been mentioned lately, The Republic still suspects the real story of the investigation hasn’t got anything to do with drugs or with influence peddling, but rather with the extraordinarily low price CN paid for BC Rail’s tax books—about $200 million for about $2 billion worth of tax advantages.

A company that accumulates a lot of losses on its books attains acquisition value to another company with a lot of profit to report by making its losses directly applicable to profits and thus reduce the income tax bill. BC Rail operated with huge losses to fulfill its public company mandate to serve communities a private company would ignore. Those losses allow CN to reduce its tax bill by $2 billion.

To allay fears of an inside-job theft of government revenue, the Campbell regime hired a third party auditor to examine the deal and make public its report. The auditor gave a thumbs up to the portion of the deal that involved the price for the hard assets of BC Rail—the cars and track bed, amongst other things. But about the price for the tax books, by far the larger part of the deal, the auditor only reported that it wasn’t given enough information to form an opinion.

After that, the police raided the offices of Collins, the finance minister, and Clark, the Deputy Premier.

But since then, there has been no discussion of the deal itself by anyone connected to the case, including the Solicitor General and the police.

It was a bribe in any case

Further on the matter of corruption in high places, the Chuck Cadman bribery case is particularly disturbing, as much for the facts surrounding it as for the way it also seems to just be slipping away uninvestigated, dismissed and ignored.

The allegation, made in a biography of the late Cadman, is that the day before the historic vote of confidence in the Paul Martin Liberal regime in the House of Commons, Tom Flanagan, then-opposition leader Stephen Harper’s long-time hatchet man, offered a million-dollar life insurance benefit to Cadman if he used his independent crucial swing vote to support the Tories and defeat the Liberals. Cadman was then clearly in his last days on this Earth and such a benefit would quickly generate a million-dollar pay out for his family.

Most pundits got lost in the trees and missed the forest, aided by Harper’s smokescreen. Comments were restricted to the observation that it would be hugely expensive to buy a life insurance policy for a man close to death. And Harper himself explained that it wasn’t a life insurance policy that was offered, just some vague “financial compensation” that would help him run for re-election if his vote triggered a federal election.

That explanation is equally strange—Cadman would clearly not be running for office again.

Meanwhile, it seems lost on all observers that it is just as corrupt to offer election-related funds to a Parliamentarian in exchange for his vote as it is to offer a life insurance benefit. The law states that no one may offer anything to anyone in exchange for their vote in Parliament, period.

It wouldn’t be too surprising to learn that friends of the Tories who also own or manage life insurance companies would offer to back a million dollar policy for a dying man. It also wouldn’t surprise anyone if Tory backroom fixers had a slush fund from which to dip into to buy a vote. Either way, an investigation is called for. For our money, Flanagan isn’t an idiot and if he visited Cadman to secure his vote with some kind of offer, he’d know that an offer to financially back Cadman’s next campaign wouldn’t win him anything—Cadman had no intention of running again. But it’s also unlikely anyone would underwrite a million dollar life insurance policy for Cadman.

However, Cadman’s wife Dona has emerged as the Conservative Party’s candidate in the same riding her husband won first as a Reform Party candidate, then as an independent after bolting the party. And she jumped into the story claiming that her leader, Harper, knew nothing of the offer made to her husband, a statement that seems to have satisfied everybody that Harper is innocent of all charges.

Well that’s convenient, isn’t it. Does she have access to Conservative Party slush funds in exchange for defending the honour of Harper? We know Cadman didn’t vote with the Conservatives back in 2006, so no payoff was made for his vote. But we also know that making offers of this kind is no stretch for Harper or his party hacks—by his own admission.

Rats as big as cats

More corruption: Peter Ladner, now running to replace incumbent mayor Sam Sullivan as leader of the NPA, has alleged that Sullivan has used NPA funds for his own leadership re-nomination effort.

Questions about Sullivan’s sources of campaign funds and his use of them had already been raised by opposition councilors. It’s a serious charge. Where is the investigation?

A flabbergasting country

Oil hit US $108 per barrel this week, a record high even for inflation-adjusted 1980 rates during the Iranian revolution. There is no particular crisis to account for a price spike. It’s just the price now. And unlike in 1973 or in 1980, the chances of a slowdown in the US economy lessening demand for oil and thus reducing the price again are slim. The main increase in demand has come from China and India, two economies not showing any signs of slowing down, ensuring that oil demand will not decrease with these higher prices. Meanwhile, the fallout from the mortgage debacle in the US banking system increases. The wars are going bad. And prospective new leaders seem good only at creating platitudes like “Yes we can,” or “Yes, we will.”

During all these worrisome crises, what is the US media fixated on? A governor who hired a hooker.

Rome is burning, boys.

How about really reducing consumption of gas?

Gas prices in Vancouver were observed to hit $1.20 per litre this week. That’s 20 cents more than just a couple weeks ago, and ten times the increase the provincial government claims will sufficiently reduce gasoline consumption to help the province reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Has gasoline consumption been reduced by the price rise? Nope. The carbon tax will even more certainly fail to reduce consumption and the resulting emissions.

All price rises will do is redirect personal spending away from small businesses and other local spending and toward big foreign gas companies. That’s because gas consumption is necessary for nearly all activities from work to leisure as a result of decades of state subsidies for private car travel through construction of free infrastructure like highways.

The carbon tax claims made by the government are especially egregious in light of the government’s continued nonsensical commitment to the massive expansion of Highway One, the biggest transportation infrastructure project in the province’s history. It’s akin to an illicit drug policy that makes more crack available, but raises the street price 2%, and claiming it will lead to less consumption.

If the government wants credit for showing leadership in the global warming arena, it has one choice only: dramatically cancel the Highway One expansion project.