Rafe Goes Hard....

49^o 15' 0" North 123^o 7' 0" West

True to his 'hard talk' slogan, Mr. Mair actually went hard at Gordon Campbell for a good half hour today (Fri July 23rd). Four issues/questions that Mr. Campbell had no plausible explanations/answers for were....the lack of independent scientific support for his fish farm policy (paraphrasing..."the people inside our ministry care about wild salmon"); Doug Walls ("Don't blame me, I didn't hire him"), privatization of BC Rail ("we didn't sell it.... the people of BC still 'technically' own the rail beds!"), and the off-shore Ferry contract ("there was no point using local shipyards because we know that subsidies don't help"). Go tell that last one to all the contractors getting set to rake in the big bucks on Olympic construction projects (personally, I think this is a Union busting issue, but more on that shortly).

All in all, Mr. Mair's performance on the front-end was pretty impressive, but then it all broke down in the last half hour when the clearly stacked calls in favour of the Premier flooded in. For that I blame Rafe's sidekick, producer Shiral Tobin. Clearly Tobin was so giddy from booking both Campbells the same morning (Larry was on before Gordo with a disgusting suggestion that extra money from the Hastings Pk slots could be used to fund gambling addiction research!) that she failed to do her job call screening....no excuse there despite the patter between Mair and Tobin during the mutual back-slapping 'last call' session as the show wound down post-Gordo.