The Six Million Dollar BC Rail Deal....My Question For Geoff Plant

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Update, Friday Mar 30th, Noonish: Mr. Plant has responded to my question....Details are here.

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Former BC Liberal government Attorney General Geoff Plant, who is now a civilian, has a blog.

And yesterday he had a question for John van Dongen about the Six Million Dollar Deal, which was the following:

"...What would you have done?..."

Now, one of the interesting things about Mr. Plant's post was the fact there was a whole lot of preamble that came between the 'Dear John' at the beginning of the thing and the question above that he finally got to near the very end.

And part of that preamble went like this:

"The defendants pleaded guilty. What is clear is that there was no legally binding deal. There couldn’t be. The waiver of recovery of fees was not and could not be an inducement to plead guilty. As a matter of law they were not connected. But that was of course the outcome. It was done very, very carefully, to make sure the rules were followed."

So.

Have you got that?

Mr. Plant makes it very clear that, the way he understands the way things went down, there was no inducement to plead guilty on the basis of a prior deal/agreement regarding the fee waiver.

However, Mr. Plant, in the very next sentence of his preamble, then wrote the following:

" But it was understood that with guilty pleas, the claim to fee recovery would be waived."

Which, to be absolutely honest here, made my lay person/non-lawyer-type jaw drop almost to the floor.

Thus, I felt compelled to ask Mr. Plant the following over at his place:

...(Mr. Plant) perhaps you could help me 'understand' the following....

If it was 'understood' that guilty pleas would subsequently lead to the waiver being granted, does it not logically follow that there was, for all intents and purposes, a prior 'inducement' regardless how 'carefully' things were done to make sure 'the rules were followed'?

Thanks.

It will be interesting to see if I receive an answer from the good Mr. Plant.

And to be fair to him, I have noticed that he has been pretty good at giving answers to most comers.

So fair play to him on that score, because many others who have dipped their toes into the bloggodome have not been so straight up with readers.

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Please note: Paul Willcocks had a similar problem with Mr. Plant's logic. The point he makes is at the top of the comment thread to the post in question...

Meanwhile, Mark Hume and Justine Hunter in the The Globe let us know that the auditor general is taking the government to court because it won't release deal docs to him....

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