RailGate Rewind....Is Gary Mason Also Just An "Avowed Political Opponent Hurling Comments"?

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Update: 3:00pm Tuesday June 22nd/10....Martyn Brown was supposed to be back on the stand again today being cross-examined further by defense lawyer Michael Bolton....Neal Hall had reported early this morning in the VSun that he figured the line of questioning would follow-up on the matter of the 'relationship' between one of the RCMP's lead investigators on the case, Kevin Debruyckere, and the Executive Director of the BC Liberal Party, Kelly Reichert.....That questioning did not happen, apparently, at least in part, due to objections of the special prosecutor William Berardino that contributed to more 'legal wrangling' with the jury out of the room...."Citizen Journalist From Courtroom 54" has the best take I've read on that so far over at Mary's place, here....
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AllThePretzelLogic
ThatFitsVille


Last week, under questioning from David Basi's lawyer Michael Bolton, Gordon Campbell's chief-of-staff Martyn Brown said the following as a means of explaining why he and his boss both ignored a question asked, and a potential problem raised, by then (unofficial) opposition member Joy MacPhail in the Legislature in the Spring of 2003:

"I don't know there was any optics problem - I didn't concede that there was an optics problem. Ms. MacPhail, leader of the opposition at the time and an avowed political opponent hurling about comments in the Legislature that even of themselves would necessarily pose a problem, so I don't accept your characterization."


So.

What exactly was the question asked by Ms. Macphail that led to the raising of the potential "optics problem" oh so many years ago?

Well......

Here it is - straight from Hansard:

J. MacPhail: A longtime Liberal Party fundraiser is Patrick Kinsella. He is the lobbyist for CN. Has the Premier or any of his ministers met with Mr. Kinsella and representatives of CN?


And how did Mr Brown's then and still current boss, Mr. Campbell, answer the question?

Why, of course, without actually denying anything, he did the only thing he possibly could have done to remain plausibly non-deniable.....

He told Ms. McPhail to go FOI herself:

Hon. G. Campbell: I don't have an answer for that. As the member opposite knows, if she wants to know about specific meeting times with either myself or the minister, she can do that through freedom of information.



But here's the real thing....

That potential "optics problem" has never ever really gone away because Mr. Campbell, CN Rail, and Mr. Kinsella, to the best of our knowledge, have all refused to answer any and all questions about whether or not the latter had any sort of working relationship whatsoever with CN Rail at the very same time that he, Mr. Kinsella, was also working for BC Rail when the big deal went down.

By way of illustration, we'll let Gary Mason pick up the trail six years later, in a piece he wrote for the Globe and Mail in April of 2009:

....During the bid period (for the BC Rail deal), Mr. Kinsella was seen entering the Premier's wing of the legislature with CN chairman David McLean on more than one occasion. The relationship between Mr. Kinsella and CN was raised in the legislature in May, 2003, by then-NDP MLA Joy MacPhail, who identified Mr. Kinsella as a paid lobbyist for the national rail line.

In an exchange long since forgotten, Ms. MacPhail asked Mr. Campbell if he had ever met Mr. Kinsella and Mr. McLean during the bid phase.

The Premier said at the time he didn't have an answer, and that if Ms. MacPhail wanted to know she could make a freedom-of-information request.

The trail went dry after that.

But now the matter is quite different. There is the appearance that Mr. Kinsella might have been on the payroll of BC Rail and CN Rail during the $1-billion sale of the rail line. And that there were meetings and phone calls going on between Mr. Kinsella and Mr. Campbell and/or members of his office.

I phoned CN yesterday to ask if Mr. Kinsella was a paid consultant or lobbyist during the bid process, and spokesperson Kelli Svendsen said: "We have nothing to say."

Mr. Kinsella, meantime, has long taken a vow of silence on his activities. Let's not forget that CP Rail angrily pulled out of the bid process in November, 2003, complaining that CN had the inside track all along - that the process was effectively rigged in its favour.....


So.

Given all that we now know about 'media monitoring' by the current government and its agents and/or avowed 'stakeholders', we feel the following needs to be asked given Mr. Brown's statement from last week that is quoted above:

Is Mr. Mason, like Ms. MacPhail before him, also just an "avowed political opponent hurling comments" at Mr. Campbell et al. that should therefore just be dismissed as such?

We figure only Mr. Mason's editors and/or his potential sources know for sure.



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*We've long wondered, though, if Ms. MacPhail did follow through with that FOI......Wouldn't that be interesting?....
The quote from Mr. Brown at the top of the post comes from the invaluably fulsome eyewitness reports by Bill Tieleman that he regularly posts up on his blog....Thus, his place is where you really see the PAB-Bots attack in the comments.
For the record, we have written quite a lot about this in the past also....You can find a pretty good backgrounder on how Ms. McPhail's original question came to later light here....


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