Bookending The BCLiberal Cronification Of Everything...BC Rail & The Casino-Industrial-Complex.

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Bookend Number 1...

Remember the BC Rail deal?

Remember the very fine fellows that did very well by the deal, Mr. David McLean and Mr. Peter Armstrong?

Remember how much money each of them and/or their affiliated companies gave to the BC Liberal Party and its then leader Mr. Gordon Campbell in days gone by (see here and here)?

And remember how the deal was hatched, in super-secret, months before the govenment of Gordon Campbell via it's Minister of Transportation (who was also a fine public servant named Robert Virk's boss at the time) repeatedly said it was?

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Bookend Number 2...

Remember the Casino-Industrial-Complex?

Remember how one of the purveyors of the deal, a very finest of the fine fellow named Mr. Richard Turner was the Chair of the BC Lottery Corporation way back in 2003 when decisions were first made that would later help make the Casino-Industrial-Complex possible and who was, at the same time, an investor in a Las Vegas gaming concern called Paragon.

And remember how, when he later became a director with Paragon after he was no longer BCLC Chair, the good Mr. Turner called up the Campbell government minister concerned, the always affably awesome Mr. Kevin Krueger, and told him that it would be a deal breaker if we, the people of British Columbia, didn't build him and his a $600 million dollar magic carpet atop BC Place? 

And then remember how an even more recent Chair of the BCLC, Mr. Michael Graydon, temporarily took our severance money and ran straight into the arms of Paragon, public data and knowledge in tow?

Well...

It would now appear that, like the BC Rail deal lo those so many ears ago, the latest Casino-Industrial-Deal was hatched (and fully consumated) months before the BC Liberal government, now of Christy Clark, would admit to it.

And, surprise!, those months bracketed an election.

Cassidy Olivier, backed by the digging of Dipper MLA David Eby, had the story earlier this week in The Province:

The B.C. Liberals continue to spar with the Opposition over precisely when the government signed its deal with Paragon Gaming to develop a half-billion-dollar casino on lands adjacent to B.C. Place and whether due diligence was exercised during the project’s tendering process.

The latest flurry of jabs came Tuesday when Opposition critic David Eby tabled a copy of the master agreement signed between the B.C. Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) and Paragon Gaming, the Las Vegas-based company behind the Edgewater Casino project. The document shows the agreement came into effect on March 15, 2013.

This date is at odds with comments made by Peter Fassbender, the current Minister of Education, to media back in May 3, 2013, some 10 days before the provincial election. At the time, Fassbender, then a B.C. Liberal candidate and chairman of PavCo, told the media a final decision had not been made and discussions remained ongoing.

Eby said in an interview with The Province: “I’ve got a contract that the effective date is March 15, I’ve got a Paragon website that says the contract was signed in March, and then I have Mr. Fassbender saying there was no contract in May, a month later.

“They should come out and explain what is going on.”

The Opposition last raised this issue during a question period in November 2014, at which point they also suggested the contract had been awarded to Paragon because one of the company’s former directors, Richard T. Turner, has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the B.C. Liberal Party over the years.

One of the donations was for $50,000 in May 2009, a month and a half after the government posted its request for proposals for a mega-casino development...

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All this and we're still prepared to give the finest of the finest there ever was folks from Paragon, even more subsidies.

Cronify!


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