WeDon'tNeedNoStinkin'TenderVille
Remember this, from last week's continuing cross examination of the man with the missing memory, Premier Gordon Campbell's chief-of-staff Martyn Brown:
In his cross-examination of Mr. Brown, lawyer Kevin McCullough suggested Virk was worried about fallout from hiring CIBC World Markets to act as financial adviser during the sell-off of the provincial asset when the government had made an election promise to put all large contracts up for tender.
“[Mr.] Virk came to you and told you that CIBC World Markets was going to get this untendered contract for millions of dollars and that they were a friend, a close donating friend, of the government. He told you that,” Mr. McCullough put to Mr. Brown.
“I don't remember that at all,” Mr. Brown replied, saying he didn't even know CIBC donated cash to the B.C. Liberals.
“You don't recall him saying, ‘Martyn, we're breaking one election promise selling BC Rail, we shouldn't stick another one on top of it?”’ Mr. McCullough asked.
“The conversation you're alleging that happened, I don't remember it at all,” said Mr. Brown, who is still Campbell's chief of staff........."So.
Just how much did CIBC, in its various incarnations, including CIBC World Markets, give to the BC Liberal Party from 2000-2010?
Well, we actually went back and dug through the individual pdfs for 2000-2004 and sub-totaled $138,205.
Luckily, Elections BC makes it way easier to digitally search donations from 2005-2010 (because, let me tell you, I was getting a headache squinting at the crappy scans of FAXes of the original documents from earlier on).....
(click image to enlarge)Add it all together and you get $282,215.
Heckfire!
That's almost David McLean/CN Rail and Peter Armstrong/Rocky Mountain Railtour money.
Almost.
.
6 comments:
Suddenly, it feels like CIBC is another form of the PAB.
I have an account at CIBC. They pay no interest on any chequing account but they have our money ... and apparently are doing well enough that they can ...
... make huge donations to very destructive political parties, such as the LINO party of Gordon Campbell.
Public Affairs Bureau has access to taxpayers' money ($34 million a year, I understand) which they can use to tell us what's good about that ... for the LINO government of Gordon Campbell.
And this, I figure (thinking aloud) is why it's so desperately important to have an honourable, hard-working, independent news media capable of supporting a functioning democracy.
OK, RossK, I'm done now.
Thanks for your great work on this BC Rail Case.
.
.
Perhaps it's time for people with accounts at CIBC to switch to a financial institution willing to put into writing that they will not donate to any political party?
Apparently, Credit Unions are looking at doing that - or have already done it. I'm looking into it.
Just a thought... .
North Shore Credit Union did it for BC Liberal Candidate Naomi Yamamoto because she was a Board member at the time......
I dunno.
I'm going back and forth on this one.
And I must confess that I'm leaning towards the Holman Doctrine which says full disclosure b/w holding to account.
The problem with this, of course, is that we can achieve the former.
As for the latter?
Well, I think the fact that an F-Troop list blog like this one is the only place, to the best of my knowledge, where these numbers have been 'published' says a heckuva lot regarding how far away we are from the latter.
(and yet they can pull up some lousy $500 donation that a lawyer gave and make a big fuss about it...which is bizarre to me because the CIBC donations have been consistent, large, and exclusive every single year that I looked at them)
.
These donations are never made for 'charity' to political parties. There is always an expectation of a 'return for "investment".
On Billy-B Monday around 10:40 am a caller was given a typical put down over a comment about The Prem's Maui DUI "Get over it, it's history" and yet HE never misses a chance to comment on the Nineties and the DECK. Biased or what?
Frank
Excellent point about the non 'charity' aspect of these massive donations Frank.
_____
About the non-friendly 'call' that somehow snuck its way through t the Watercarrier and the Premier....You know the use of this type of historical ad hominem really, really bugs me because it aids and abets those whose modus operandi is to spin/lie/obfuscate whenever possible... And Mr. Good, who seems to think that any event that is older than 5 news cycles did not actually happen, is one of the worst practitioners of the historical a.h. (for example, if something happened before the last election, well, it doesn't matter because we voted in Mr. Campbell anyway)....
.
Post a Comment