Bob Mackin
Remember when Premier Christy Clark got caught running a red light during the 2013 election campaign?
Jonathan Fowlie of the Vancouver Sun was along for the ride for his April 27, 2013 profile, “Christy Clark, a politician first.”
At times, the two seem more like sidekicks — siblings even — than they do mother and son. And especially so the morning when the two were on their way to Hamish’s goalie clinic.
“Let’s see you go through this red light,” Hamish challenged as they pulled up that morning, at 5:15 a.m., to an abandoned Vancouver intersection.
“I might. Don’t test me,” Clark replies.
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
“Should I?”
“There’s no one.”
“Would you go through? You shouldn’t because that would be breaking the law,” she says.
And with that the car has already sailed underneath the stale red stoplight and through the empty intersection.
“You always do that,” says Hamish.
Fast forward to October 2016.
Instead of a newspaper reporter in the backseat, it was Clark. The driver? CTV News anchor Tamara Taggart at the wheel of a Land Rover. Her co-anchor, Mike Killeen, was in the passenger seat.
They were shooting a carpool karaoke skit on Oct. 18, 2016 for the opening of the Taggart/Killeen-hosted Jack Webster Awards, where B.C.’s best journalists were honoured on Oct. 20, 2016. Clark had some time on her hands. She cancelled the last fall sitting of the Legislature before the 2017 election. The documents at bottom show how her aides, Ben Chin and Stephen Smart, put their minds together to help plan the James Corden-inspired video, in which the 2013 red light-running incident was mentioned.
Look closely. Clark is not wearing a seatbelt. That’s a breach of Section 220 of the Motor Vehicle Act, an offence that carries a $167 fine.
To borrow the late, great Webster‘s famous politician-shaming words: “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”
Clark Webster Skit by BobMackin on Scribd
