RailGate Rewind: So, Who Else Was A Young Liberal Back In The Day?

AllTheYoungDudes
CarryTheNewsVille

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Update: Mr. Holman has responded to our query to let us know that he has most definitely NOT entered a witness protection program. (In true Holmanesque fashion....) You can find a complete copy of his response, which was not obtained in response to an FOI request, here. Our responses to his response can be found here, here and, most completely, here.
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You might not know this, but.....

The proprietor of one of our favorite Lotuslandian websites of all time, Mr. Sean Holman, once went to Graduate School at Carleton University in Ottawa.

And before that he went to UVIC.

From which he graduated in 1999.

And what else, you might (or, more likely, might not) be asking yourself, did he get involved with while he was a student in Victoria?

Stay with me for a minute, because this gets a little more interesting pretty soon.

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The following is from an excellent interview that Mr. Holman gave to Richard Warnica that was published in The Tyee in the summer of 2005 after Holman quit the Vancouver Sun so that he could go back to being a free agent (which is how we like him best, by the way):

Holman always aimed himself single-mindedly towards politics. Before leaving for Carleton he was a member of the University of Victoria's federal Young Liberals.......


Now, that's kind of interesting, don't you think?

But not really that interesting.

So why are we raising it here?

Well.

It's the timing.

Again, Mr. Holman graduated from UVIC in 1999.

Thus, it's a reasonable assumption that he was also there in 1997.

Why is that of interest?

Well, to answer that let's go back to Gary Mason's potential bombshell in yesterday's Globe and Mail:

"An individual has apparently come forward with information about the Crown's star witness (in the RailGate case), Erik Bornmann. He wants his identity protected. I've been told that the information he has is related to $30,000 that went missing from the coffers of the Young Liberals of B.C. in 1997. Mr. Bornmann was president of the organization at the time......"

Now, it is very important to remember that Mr. Bornmann is one of the fine folks that allegedly tried to bribe Mr. David Basi and Mr. Robert Virk to give him and his partner in lobbying, Mr. Brian Kieran, information about the impending sale of B.C. Rail in 2003.


So, after that long and winding set-up, here's the kicker, again from the interview with Mr. Holman in The Tyee published back in 2005:

......The (Federal Young Liberal) group he (Holman) called "the liberal mafia" included senior political aide David Basi, who is linked to the BC Rail scandal, lobbyist Erik Bornman, who is expected to be a witness in the case, and Jamie Elmhirst, the current (in 2005) president of the Federal Liberal Party in B.C.

"It was a real exercise in pure politics," Holman said. "When your policies are mutable it has a tendency to draw in people who are more interested in power than policy."......

Seem interesting now?


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Please do not misunderstand me. I am in no way suggesting that Mr. Holman was involved in any skullduggery whatsoever back in the day. I do wonder, however, if he might have some interesting insights on many of the players that revolved around that Westcoast mini-me/soon-to-be SmallPaul version of the Big Red Machine that he might like to share with us sometime soon.
And, as an aside, just what the heckfire has Mr. Holman been up to for the last 10 days anyway? I mean, I can't ever remember a time when he's gone this long between non-radio show-related posts.
Finally, just in case you missed it, the third member of the so-called 'liberal mafia' mentioned above, Mr. Elmhirst, eventually became a member of a short-lived, Lobb-Shop called K&E Affairs that rose from the ashes of a little outfit called Pilothouse that was run to such great 'success' by alleged RailGate bribers Mess'rs Bornmann and Kieran.


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