Who Was The First FedCon Operative Hired By Christy Clark?

YouKeepOnUsingThatWord,'Liberal'

IDoNotThinkItMeansWhatYouSayItMeansVille

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Triple-Sokaw-From-The-Pike-Position Update: 7:00am Monday...Alison has reset the clock back to April 2011 (ie. BEFORE the post-Fed election mass exodus West)

Double-Secret Probation Update: 10pm Sunday...Our good friend GWest has already come through offline with the precise details of the hiring of Ms. Chiarelli who was...."Originally appointed as Communications Director of Government Communications and Public Engagement;Ministry of Labour, Citizen's Services and Open Government....The appointment was made by OIC 255 on June 17, 2011.....About a month after Christy Clark (just barely) won the Pt. Grey byelection.... And about 3 months after she became Premier."

Update: 4pm Sunday....Dave, at The Galloping Beaver, has already moved the clock back another month, to June 2011...You can read all about this 'resetting' in the update to his original post (at the bottom) that triggered this entire exercise...

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Look.

We all know that the 'BC Liberal' Party label is a misnomer.

In that they really are 'Liberal In Name Only' (ie. 'LINO').

Which is, on the surface at least, fair enough if they are a true coalition of 'Everybody That Is Not A Dipper', which makes for a pretty lousy acronym (ie. 'ETINAP'), in British Columbia.

But....

What if that which Gordon Campbell stole from Gordon Wilson has since, say, somewhere between the hatching of the HST and the reinventing as the High Commisioner, become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Conservative Party of Canada?

Seriously.

If that really was the case how would all those folks, and I'm talking about a huge swath of nose-holding 'ETINAP' voters, that are stuck in the middle feel?

****

Now.

As I mentioned earlier today, Dave over at the Galloping Beaver has done an amazing bit of digital backtracking and has discovered that an Interweb Tech Co. that has done a lot of work for the FedCons recently (and we're talking about a heckuva lot of work) has also done a heckuva a lot of work for the BC Liberal Party as well as some of that secret contract-awarded proHST wurlitzering for the government of that party.

Now (again).

As Sean Holman discovered back in the day, the Tech Co. that Dave focussed on initially, Backbone Technologies, was not the only outfit with FedCon and BC Liberal Party connections that got some of that once secret HST wurlitzer money from the government of the BC Liberal Party:

The government office running the province's pro-harmonized sales tax campaign secretly doled out contracts to two Liberal-connected companies and a former aide to the minister who introduced the tax, records show. The contracts, according to documents obtained via a freedom of information request, had paid out more than $250,000 as of June 1.....

{snippety doo-dah}

Internal government guidelines would normally have required those contracts to be awarded via a competitive process because they're valued at $25,000 or more. But the guidelines allow that process to be circumvented - and contracts awarded without public notice - if it would "compromise government confidentiality."....

{snippety doodle-dandy}

Campaign Research Inc., which worked on cabinet minister George Abbott's unsuccessful campaign for the Liberal leadership, got the biggest contract - receiving $167,800 for conducting the government's telephone town-hall meetings on the HST...

Yes, as Dave says, 'that'.....

Campaign Research Inc.

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So.

Getting back to my question at the top of the post which is, again.....

What if the BC Liberal Party, sometime back at the time of the changing of the guard did, in fact, become essentially a subsidiary of the Conservative Party of Canada run by their operatives?

Well.

If that really was the case why did the appointments of Ken Boessenkool and Sara McIntyre come so late in the game?

I mean, if the FedCons were all set to take charge from the beginning, wouldn't they have parachuted someone in, maybe under the cover of darkness and/or an off-to-the-side OIC, to start working of the Refs on behalf of the government of 'The Christy Party' way, way earlier than the last few weeks?

Well (again).

Thanks to the work of another hard-rock public database miner, North Van's Grumps, we have (at least) one two-part answer to that question....

Part One can be found in a story from the Spring of 2011 on the 'War Rooms' being set up by the federal parties in the Hill Times. In the realm of the FedCons, one person who stayed behind in the PMO to actually run the thing was the very capable Nina Chiarelli:

...Many PMO staffers have taken leaves of absence to join the war room, said Conservative sources. Holding down the fort in the Langevin Building, where the PMO is housed, is policy director Paul Wilson who is acting chief of staff, issues management adviser Chris Woodcock, who is acting director of issues management, and the transportation minister's communications director Nina Chiarelli, who is acting communications director, Ms. Chiarelli said last week....

So.

Establishing the timeline here...In April of 2011 Ms. Chiarelli was the Communications Director for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Which brings us to North Van's Grumps Part Two:

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - 07/19/11) - Intergovernmental Relations SecretariatMEDIA ADVISORY(aussi disponible en francais) Vancouver - Premiers and National Aboriginal Organization (NAO) Leaders will meet with Premier Christy Clark in Vancouver on Wednesday, July 20 to discuss ways to improve the quality of life for Aboriginal people.....

What the heckfire is this meaningless PR Pap, you may be asking?

Well, if you had been interested in this dross at the time (ie. way back in July of 2011), who would you have turned to looking for info?

You got it.....

Contacts:
Intergovernmental Relations Secretariat
Nina Chiarelli
Communications Director
250 387-0793
nina.chiarelli@gov.bc.ca

Now, I'll leave it for the folks who know about these things (GWest perhaps?) to dig out the precise date of the OIC that led to Ms. Chiarelli's appointment by the newly-minted government (and then newly re-named Public Affairs Bureau) of Christy Clark but, regardless, July 2011 was just a scant three months after Ms. Chiarelli was running communications for the PMO in Ottawa.

However, July 2011 is a long time ago now, at least in raw-market, nut-cutting retail political terms.

Especially, if you recall that last summer we were still talking about the possibility that the 'The Christy Party' was going to call a snap election in the fall.

Which would have required all kinds of top-notch 'communications' work....

Right?

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Now, first, before somebody thinks about sending us a lawyer's letter, we are not in anyway suggesting wrongdoing by the various players and companies mentioned above....

What we are suggesting, however, is that the now obvious close ties between the Campbell/Clark government and its political party, and those of the Harper government and its political party have perhaps been in place for much longer, and are much stronger and more direct, than most of the voting public of British Columbia realizes.

Second, some of you may be saying...'Hold on a second here, the very fine Campaign Research Inc. worked on George Abbott's BC Liberal Party Leadership campaign....And Abbott lost, so....So what?'...Well, we will return to that matter in a later post...

And, again, this post would not have been possible without the digging of North Van's Grumps so, make sure you head on over to his place and read his stuff...He really is doing the Izzy Stone-type work 'round here since Sean Holman headed off to do other things....You will not find anything on this topic over there at the moment because...Well...Guess what?...We amateurs actually do this weird thing wherein we talk to each other, pass info around and work ...Gasp!...Collaboratively...

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