Are The BC Liberals So Desperate That They Don't Even Care About...

...The Potential For A Boomerang Smear?

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Update: There is more on this story from Charlie Smith in the GStraight....Note the comments to the story...Looks to me like there is some real attack mode wurlitzering going on here at all levels

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Personally, I find it incredible that the BC Liberal Party and it's surrogates, including a young woman who has a blog-site devoted to demonstrating how difficult it is for members of her gender to make a go of it in politics as well as the former spouse of the current premier, have decided to go after Dipper candidate Jane Shin over her academic credentials.

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Look.

Firstly, there is the matter that a lot of what the BC Liberal Party is using as a full on smear was written by someone other than Ms. Shin.

Secondly, it would appear that Ms. Shin spent some time at institutions that she did not receive a degree from, at least according to a piece by Wanda Chow in The Burnaby NewsLeader, a piece that was written in response to the smear:

...Shin has a medical degree and teaches at Vancouver Community College, the West Coast College of Massage Therapy in New Westminster and until last year, B.C. Institute of Technology.

Until recently, her biographical information found online did not list where she completed her medical degree but it now states she graduated in 2007 from the Spartan Health Sciences University in St. Lucia in the Caribbean.

A BC Liberal press release notes that the school's graduates are prohibited from being licensed to practice medicine in the U.S. states of California, Kansas, Texas, North Dakota and Indiana, and in the U.K. for those who began their studies before Dec. 31, 2008.

The Liberals also claim a Korean Times article stated she graduated from medical school at the University of British Columbia while a Korean language interview with blogger jonleeblog.blogspot.ca has Shin claiming to have attended the University of Florida. Her BCIT biography also previously stated she studied at Oxford University.

Shin was born in South Korea and immigrated to Canada when she was 11. Her current biography on her campaign website states, "She trained at University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Dalhousie University in Halifax, and John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital in United States, as part of her comprehensive medical education."

In an interview last October when Shin won the NDP nomination for Burnaby-Lougheed, she was clear that she is not a practising physician and that she decided to attend medical school after contracting a serious illness when she was 16.

But during her medical training she fell out of love of practising medicine when she found her interactions with patients limited to only about five minutes each. She turned her attention to academic medicine when she completed her training.

The NDP campaign said in an emailed statement: "Jane Shin completed her Doctor of Medicine at Spartan Health Sciences University, an institution recognized by the Medical Council of Canada. She completed her clinical rotations, almost entirely with honors, at a variety of hospitals in the United Kingdom and in Chicago. Following completion of her Doctor of Medicine degree, she moved to Vancouver, where she has served as a respected instructor at Vancouver Community College and BCIT."...

Here's the thing.

Lot's of folks attempt to put a shine on their CV by listing places they've stopped off in their academic travels, especially when those places are more notable than the place they graduated from.

Case in point...

For sometime now, from her run at the BC Liberal leadership right through to her attempt to kinda/sorta compare herself to the just departed Margaret Thatcher a few days ago, the current Premier, Ms. Christy Clark, has been very quick to tell anyone willing to listen that she studied at the Sorbonne and in Edinburgh as well as SFU.

But there is one thing missing from Ms. Clark's CV that was never, to the best of my knowledge ever willingly noted by Ms. Clark and/or her surrogates.

Which is the fact that Ms. Clark did not graduate from any of those post-secondary institutions.

Or any other post-secondary institution for that matter.

All of which makes one wonder if the people linked to above, as well as the Wizards currently running the BC Liberal Party, have stricken the word 'hypocrisy' from their dictionaries and/or their Google search-term bars.

Seriously.


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And, if it did turn out that some some mythical candidate, somewhere did not graduate from any of the schools that he or she claimed to have 'attended'?....Well....Would that not mean that that said mythical candidate would have, essentially, done the same thing that the current Premier and leader of the BC Liberal Party has been doing for  more than two years now?...Again, I mention this only to demonstrate the hypocrisy at play here, because at this time I have seen no evidence whatsoever to indicate that Ms. Shin did not graduate with a degree from the institution mentioned in the Burnaby NewsLeader piece cited above...OK?


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