This Victoria Day In Clarkland...Some Wins Are Quicker Than Others.

FourLong
YearsVille


Well, well, well, whaddy'a know....

Last week the Clarklandians subverted a Supreme Court of British Columbia ruling and, essentially, granted a bunch of Sparkle Pony purveyors environmental review-free building permits.

Charlie Smith of the Georgia Straight has the story. Here's his lede:

The B.C. Liberal goverment recently announced that some natural-gas projects won't have to undergo provincial environmental assessments.

This is despite the government losing a court decision to First Nations, who objected to the province's refusal to subject the Northern Gateway pipeline to an Environmental Assessment Office review.

The Spectra South Peace pipeline, Spectra's Dawson gas plant, Spectra's Fort Nelson North plant, Nova Gas Transmission's Groundbirch pipeline, and Nova Gas Transmission's Horn River mainline extension were exempted under an order-in-council last week...


Entirely coincidentally (of course!), the fine folks from Spectra, whose home office is in Texas (Oil and Gas Team Forever!!), have someone most interesting working for them on the ground here in Clarkland, as also noted by Mr. Smith:

...Premier Christy Clark's former deputy chief of staff, Kim Haakstad, is Spectra Energy's manager of technical workforce strategy...

****

Now.

Just in case you don't remember a specific, most fascinating aspect of Ms. Haakstad's tenure as Ms. Clark's deputy chief, how about we dig up a few wise words taken from one of the Dean's last good, pulled punches-free columns, like, ever:

The date was Jan. 10, 2012 and Premier Christy Clark’s inner circle was hard at work on a strategy to capture the ethnic vote.

“Anecdotal reports suggest that some ethnic communities, particularly Chinese, feel that they are ignored by government between elections,” wrote the premier’s hand-picked deputy chief of staff Kim Haakstad in a confidential memo to key staffers in the government...

{snippety doo-dah}

As for the means by which this might be accomplished, the premier’s office urged the pursuit of “quick wins,” for instance: “Identify and correct ‘historical wrongs,’ such as the Komagata Maru apology in the house.”

For some, the aforementioned apology, like the one the Liberals are planning to deliver for the Chinese head tax, represent long-overdue redress for genuinely wrong actions in the provincial past.

But for Haakstad and her little band of hacks — the distribution list included Clark staffers Pamela Martin, Barinder Bhullar and Lorne Mayencourt — the apologies were merely a vehicle for scoring a quick win with ethnic voters...

{snippety doodle-dandy}

.... (A) thorough reading underscored a more insidious element. The premier’s office proposed to combine the resources of the public service and the resources provided to MLAs to represent their constituents — both taxpayer funded — and bend them to the partisan purposes of the Liberal party...


So.

There you have it...

Four years and some months later, pretty much everybody wins.

Except, of course, for the designated fall guy.

But, in the end, we're pretty sure he, too, will be taken care of.

Right?

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And, yes, that link, above, back to the glory days of GordCo Inc's 'Oil and Gas Team' is a post from back in the dinosaur days of June 2004, the first month of this little F-Troop blog's existence...Boy, am I ever an old guy...In more ways than one....Weirdly, though, the BCL's crony-tricksterims are amazingly similar, then and now...


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