Four out of 10 new BC Liberal memberships sold in Abbotsford South may be illegitimate, according to a document leaked to theBreaker.news.
Kevin Falcon (left), Michael Lee, Renee Merrifield, Stan Sipos, Gavin Dew, Val Litwin and Ellis Ross (BC Liberals)
The Jan. 6 spreadsheet for the leadership election organizing committee (LEOC) shows that before the leadership race, there were 264 memberships in the riding, represented since 2020 by rookie BC Liberal MLA Bruce Banman.
Another 637 were sold in time for the Dec. 17, 2021 cut-off. In total, LEOC is auditing 41.4% of the new memberships, the highest percentage of all 87 electoral districts. The province-wide average is 17.62%.
The colour-coded spreadsheet shows more than 32,000 new memberships were sold province-wide. The party had 6,606 members before the race began.
The Abbotsford South growth pales in comparison to Surrey-Panorama (1,960 new memberships), Surrey-Green Timbers (1,351), Abbotsford West (1,093) and Surrey-Newton (1,287). The party is auditing between 21.4% and 29.23% of new memberships in those ridings.
More than a third of new memberships are also subject to additional vetting in Surrey-Whalley (36.2%), New Westminster (35.39%), Chilliwack (33.56%), and Burnaby North (33.3%). By comparison, West Vancouver-Sea-to-Sky has a high rate for audit of 29.12%, after it added 467 new memberships to its existing 136. West Vancouver-Capilano, the home riding of perceived frontrunner Kevin Falcon, had 90 before the leadership race, and added 467 new memberships; 19.43% of them are under audit.
Neither LEOC co-chairs Colin Hansen and Roxanne Helme nor party president Cameron Stolz responded to theBreaker.news.
On Jan. 11, Hansen and Helme released a statement to party members that said 3,025 of the current 43,000 active party members remain flagged, but no memberships had been cancelled or members expunged. They denied the Falcon campaign’s allegations that a racist algorithm was targeting new members of South Asian or Chinese heritage for audit.
“The criteria used to identify memberships for further review is based on a number of objective measures,” the statement said. “It does not use any form of demographic characteristics to identify individuals for audit.”
Red flags sparking followup included anonymized IP addresses, missing email addresses and phone numbers, credit cards that don’t match the member’s name or address, non-Canadian IP addresses, and overuse of a single IP address. LEOC said the party has been contacting members directly to verify their membership data.
“Members will be given every opportunity and supported through the end of the party’s registration period to address any issues concerning their membership data.”
The party already planned to randomly audit 10% of memberships, but the five managers said their independent reviews of the membership list suggested between a third and half of all memberships should be flagged for audit for a variety of irregularities.
Eligible BC Liberals will vote for a new leader in an online, preferential ballot election Feb. 3-5. The new leader will replace Shirley Bond, who took over on an interim basis after Andrew Wilkinson quit following the 2020 election.
The B.C. NDP government is hiding even more data about the COVID-19 pandemic.
B.C. COVID-19 ventilator inventory from November 2021 (BC Gov/FOI)
In May 2021, the Vancouver Sun reported on the leaked BCCDC Weekly Data Summary that included detailed infection and vaccination maps kept secret for months by officials in the Ministry of Health and B.C. Centre for Disease Control. After the scandal erupted, BCCDC began to routinely release the report.
theBreaker.news has now obtained copies of the Daily COVID-19 Report, which is produced by the Ministry of Health’s COVID Response and Health Emergency Management Division. The records from the first week of November were disclosed under the freedom of information law on a two-month delay, in early January.
Occupancy rates at B.C. COVID hospitals in November (BC Gov/FOI)
The report is marked “confidential and not for distribution” in bold, red letters. While some of the data is announced regularly, much of it is not, including the number of patients battling to stay alive on mechanical ventilators.
Highlights:
The Nov. 10 spreadsheet showed 88 of the 117 patients in critical care were mechanically ventilated. As of Nov. 5 at 12:30 p.m., there were 704 ventilators deployed and in service out of the 1,154 level 1 inventory. There were 364 of the 428 level 2 monitors in use;
As of Nov. 9 at 4 p.m., there were 19 patients under active home health monitoring, for a total to date of 18,542;
B.C. COVID-19 case counts from November 2021 (BC Gov/FOI)
Nanaimo Regional General Hospital and East Kootenay Regional General Hospital were both at 100% occupancy as of Nov. 9 at 11:59 p.m. Royal Inland (95.2%) and Vancouver General Hospital (91.8%) were the others among the 20 COVID-designated critical care hospitals with little space to spare.
Internal data under the heading “facility and community outbreaks” shows long-term care, assisted living and independent living outbreaks for residents and staff, including cases and deaths. There is also a column for “students,” suggesting the same method is used to tabulate school outbreaks when those happen.
The stats through Nov. 9 at 10 a.m. said 10 staff and eight residents at Amica Lions Gate comprised the worst outbreak in the province; two residents died;
B.C. COVID lab testing from November (BC Gov/FOI)
Lab testing as of Nov. 9 at 11:59 p.m. showed 15,230 completed tests (of a capacity 21,186) with 552 positive. The rest were deemed “non-positive,” which means negative, indeterminate and invalid results. There were 5,286 lab samples pending, with a median 18.5-hour turnaround time.
As of Nov. 9 at 11:59 p.m., 6,022 tests had been collected at testing sites, of a 7,483 capacity.
An outspoken advocate for transparency said the public needs as much information as quickly as possible during the pandemic, in order to make the right decisions to stay safe and healthy.
“Giving people the power to see for themselves, the raw data, could be very helpful during a time of crisis, and during this particular crisis,” said University of Victoria journalism professor Sean Holman in a February 2021 interview.
The costs of not providing information are severe in the post-truth era, said Holman, who is the Wayne Crookes Professor in Environmental and Climate Journalism. Information gaps are often filled with misinformation and disinformation, which inevitably fuel protests against vaccines and masks, Holman said.
The Jan. 7 incident that claimed the life of a longtime City of Vancouver worker involved a front-end loader that collided with a tandem truck, according to a WorkSafeBC inspector’s notes.
Case front-end loader, similar to the one from a Jan. 7 fatal incident in Vancouver (Case)
“The equipment was being operated beside the salt storage sheds at the National Works Yard. The employer immediately began an investigation into the incident,” said Mark Phifer’s preliminary report about the incident at the National Work Yard, obtained by theBreaker.news.
Truck driver Gord Dolyniuk, 64, died in the incident. He had worked 32 years for the city.
WorkSafeBC has “reasonable grounds to believe” that the tandem truck was either not in safe operating condition or was not in compliance with Occupational Health and Safety regulations.
“The Case 721G front-end loader Unit #D2134 and the tandem truck with spreader Unit #E1209 were in use in the works yard on Jan. 7, 2022 (at 2:10 p.m.). The front-end loader collided with the tandem truck resulting in damage to both vehicles. The employer has not determined that the tandem truck is capable of safely performing the functions for which it use used.”
On Jan. 8, the world lost a pioneer of investigative sports journalism.
Andrew Jennings, 78, died early in a year that includes a Winter Olympics in Beijing and a World Cup in Qatar. He was called “incomparable” in a widely read obituary by Jens Sejer Andersen, the director of Play the Game and the Danish Institute for Sports Studies.
Jens Sejer Andersen (Play the Game)
Andersen is a guest on this week’s edition of theBreaker.news Podcast, celebrating the life and legacy of the reporter, author and documentarian who exposed corruption, bribery, ticket scams and match-fixing at the highest levels of the multibillion-dollar business of world sport.
“Andrew was absolutely unique in being the first who took on the International Olympic Committee, the untouchables, in the 1990s, and then, after the turn of the century, he turned his love at FIFA,” Andersen said.
Laura Robinson and Andrew Jennings in 2002 (Play the Game)
On this edition of theBreaker.news Podcast, hear from Andersen and Canadian journalist Laura Robinson, plus a clip from the late Jennings himself when he was a guest on theBreaker.news Podcast in March 2018.
Robinson received the first Play the Game award in 2002 from Jennings, for her book Crossing the Line, which exposed the culture of violence and sexual abuse in hockey. Robinson is best known for her 2012 exposé that revealed how Vancouver 2010 Olympics CEO John Furlong came to Canada as a gym teacher and allegedly abused indigenous children.
Through his courageous, anti-establishment work, Jennings created an environment that empowered journalists like her to pursue stories that were once considered taboo, including stories about powerful sports figures who abused athletes or covered up abuse.
“The rest of us looked like little shrinking violets compared to him,” she said.
Plus Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines and commentary.
Documents obtained under the freedom of information law show that Ballem invoiced $77,175 (including $3,675 GST) for the period of Aug. 1-Sept. 30. The Oct. 28 payment pushed her year-to-date total to $404,913.75 and a likely spot in 2021’s top 10 highest-paid public officials in B.C.
Ballem is contracted for $250-an-hour through her company, Pendru Consulting 354948 BC Ltd., for “analysis and planning” of the COVID vaccine project. During August and September, Ballem billed taxpayers every day, except Aug. 28, Sept. 4-5, 11 and 18.
She also chairs Vancouver Coastal Health, the regional health board where people waited up to five hours in line before Christmas to be tested for coronavirus, while more than a million rapid test kits gathered dust on warehouse shelves. Additionally, the Ballem-chaired VCH closed vaccine clinics for eight days over the holiday period, while shopping malls and bars remained open.
Penny Ballem (left) and Premier John Horgan (BC Gov)
In November, Minister of Health Adrian Dix rewarded Ballem by extending her term as VCH chair through the end of 2024.
The Ministry of Health communications department did not respond to questions from theBreaker.news about Ballem’s contract or the overall cost of the mass-vaccination program to-date.
Ballem’s contract is more lucrative than what a retired general got from the Ontario government in late November 2020. Rick Hillier was paid $20,000-a-month, plus expenses, through the end of 2021’s first quarter, to begin the rollout in Canada’s most-populous province.
The contract is also her most-lucrative government gig in B.C. since 2014 when she was paid $334,617 in her last full year as Vancouver city manager.
The former deputy minister of health from 2001 to 2006 was B.C.’s most-powerful municipal official from 2009 to 2015 during the Vision Vancouver administration at 12th and Cambie. One of the Vision Vancouver councillors, Geoff Meggs, is now Premier John Horgan’s chief of staff.
After her 2015 firing, then-Mayor Gregor Robertson described Ballem as “a force of nature.”
Former Surrey Mayor Bob Bose doesn’t mince words to describe Mayor Doug McCallum.
“Unfit for public office.”
Former Surrey Mayor Bob Bose (SCC/YouTube)
McCallum and his Safe Surrey Coalition hold a slim, one-seat majority on city council in a polarized environment.
His supporters say he kept his word to switch from light rail transit to SkyTrain and replace the RCMP with a new municipal force. But he wasn’t honest about the costs to taxpayers and waited until just before Christmas to ram-through the 2022 budget.
Some of his most-vocal opponents were refused entry to city council meetings until they hired a lawyer to sue the city. McCallum was charged in late 2021 with public mischief for allegedly lying to police about being injured by a citizen with the Keep the RCMP in Surrey campaign.
McCallum plans to run for re-election in October. Coun. Brenda Locke is vying to unseat him. Will there be another challenger?
On this edition of theBreaker.news Podcast, Bose sets the scene for a lively year in political battleground Surrey.
Plus Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines and commentary.
One of the special prosecutors in the breach of trust and fraud case against the former B.C. Legislature clerk suggested the coronavirus pandemic could delay the trial.
Brock Martland (vancrimlaw.com)
Craig James is scheduled to be tried beginning Jan. 24 in Vancouver before B.C. Supreme Court Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes. The trial is expected to last six weeks.
During a Jan. 6 pretrial hearing, special prosecutor Brock Martland said all lawyers intend to be ready to proceed on schedule. While he did not ask for an adjournment, he expressed concerns about the rapidly spreading omicron variant.
“Dr. [Bonnie] Henry suggested the variant would be peaking in the range of four-to-six weeks from now, which would put us in the middle of this trial,” Martland said during the phone hearing.
Martland said the Crown intends to call 26 witnesses, mainly from Vancouver Island. But, during pretrial interviews with witnesses, he heard their “repeated concerns” about COVID-19, traveling to Vancouver and being in a courtroom. He said fellow special prosecutor David Butcher was involved in a preliminary inquiry this week in which two of eight witnesses and a prosecutor had the virus.
On Dec. 31, B.C. Supreme Court adjourned in-person criminal proceedings scheduled for Jan. 4-7, except phone hearings to arrange a new appearance date.
“The court will try to give counsel as much notice as possible, but I think we will all know more in a week or two’s time,” said Holmes, who approved applications for two Crown witnesses to testify remotely due to the pandemic.
James’s lawyer Gavin Cameron chimed-in.
“I just want to put on the record that Mr. James absolutely does not want this trial adjourned, and he has been living under this cloud since 2018,” Cameron said.
Holmes scheduled another pre-trial conference for Jan. 18. “Perhaps, who knows, we’ll have a better idea then of how the pandemic is developing and what, if any, action might need to be taken,” she said.
Clerk Craig James swore Christy Clark in as Westside-Kelowna MLA in 2013, near Clark’s Vancouver office. (Facebook)
Meanwhile, the court also heard that 11 boxes relating to James’s expense claims were found in the basement of the Parliament Buildings on Dec. 17 after a witness interview earlier that day. Butcher said police collected the items. Photographs and a spreadsheet of the items are being provided to James’s lawyers.
James and Sergeant-at-Arms Gary Lenz were immediately suspended and escorted out of the Legislature on Nov. 20, 2018. On that day, British Columbians learned that Speaker Darryl Plecas had called the RCMP after he and his Chief of Staff Alan Mullen found corruption in the offices of the two most-senior permanent officers at the seat of government. James was charged on Dec. 17, 2020.
James and Lenz both retired in disgrace in 2019 after separate reports found they committed wrongdoing. They kept their pension entitlements, but they were not forced to repay taxpayers. No charges were announced for Lenz.
Less than a month before the BC Liberals are scheduled to elect their new leader, more controversy that insiders fear could ruin the party’s comeback bid.
Kevin Falcon (left), Michael Lee, Renee Merrifield, Stan Sipos, Gavin Dew, Val Litwin and Ellis Ross (BC Liberals)
theBreaker.news has exclusively obtained a copy of a Jan. 5 letter written by campaign managers for five of the contestants to the Leadership Election Organizing Committee. They claim the election could be tainted by thousands of illegitimate memberships.
“We are collectively concerned about the potential for voter fraud, the current audit process, and the risk of catastrophic reputational damage to the party, party staff, LEOC, the executive and all of us if this race is perceived as anything less than free and fair,” said the letter, which was signed by managers for leadership hopefuls Gavin Dew, Michael Lee, Renee Merrifield, Ellis Ross and Stan Sipos.
The party already planned to randomly audit 10% of memberships. But the managers for all contestants, except Kevin Falcon and Val Litwin, say their independent reviews of the membership list suggest between a third and half of all memberships should be flagged for audit.
“As of this letter, there are around 5,000 members flagged as ‘audit’ which represents approximately 11% of ‘eligible’ members,” the letter said.
The five campaigns claim to have found multiple members who:
Share the same phone number or email address;
Share the same phone number or email address, but list different residences, including in separate ridings;
Provided non-residential addresses, including addresses for businesses, parking lots and even a forest service road;
“Additionally, some campaigns have been contacting members by phone and in-person who attest that they have no idea that they are members, who the BC Liberal Party is, and/or that a leadership race is underway,” the letter said. “We know we all have the same objective, which is to ensure a fair leadership election so our party can begin the work to rebuild and renew so we can be competitive in the next election.”
theBreaker.news reached party president Cameron Stolz by phone on Jan. 7, but Stolz refused to answer questions. A prepared statement delivered later by party communications director David Wasyluk said the party would not discuss auditing and authentication due to confidentiality reasons.
“However, I can confirm our audit system has identified some members who need additional follow up to meet our audit standards. Our registration and voting systems are designed to ensure that members who do not satisfy our audit standards will not be able to cast ballots,” said Wasyluk’s statement.
“As with any leadership election the goal of the party is to deliver a verification and voting system that is safe and secure while providing our membership confidence in the results.”
The five campaign managers want the party to delay the opening of voting registration until concerns are adequately addressed and mitigated; schedule a joint meeting with LEOC and the chief returning officer; and commit, in-writing, to enforce the rules, if any candidate or campaign is found to have breached the rules.
At the time, BC Liberal insiders alleged that as many as 2,500 new memberships sold by Falcon’s campaign were in dispute.
In a Dec. 18 email to theBreaker.news, Falcon dismissed the controversy as sour grapes.
Kevin Falcon
“It’s the typical kind of accusations made from a competing campaign that realizes we have signed up the most new members. The party has a rigorous audit process and if there are any mistakes found in new memberships (very common when campaigns are signing up thousands of new members) then they will be dealt with,” Falcon said.
The party set Dec. 17 as the deadline to sign-up new members and Dec. 29 as the deadline for renewals in order to be eligible for voting in the Feb. 3-5 election.
Each electoral district is allocated 100 points under the weighted voting system. Andrew Wilkinson, the 2018 winner, resigned after losing the 2020 snap election to the NDP. Shirley Bond became the interim leader.
Where were you when the B.C. Place Stadium roof ripped and collapsed 15 years ago, after 12:33 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2007?
It was a cold day with occasional drizzle, even wet snow. I was at home, staying warm and dry, watching Canada beat Russia for the World Junior Hockey Championship on TSN. The phone rang. It was a friend that was not watching the game.
The hole cut in B.C. Place’s roof on Jan. 5, 2007.
“Quick, turn on CKNW! B.C. Place’s roof is down!”
So I did. It was true. Less than a minute later, I called my editor at 24 Hours Vancouver, Dean Broughton. We agreed to rush downtown to the stadium on our day off.
I also called a source who told me that the roof had numerous patches and that management had cut back on use of the snow-melting system to save money. The source gave me the phone number for the control room at the stadium. To my surprise, Linda Bilben from the stadium’s external public relations company, Reputations Corporation, answered and told me there would be a media briefing in an hour.
First, we went to the top of the Hampton Inn hotel on Beatty Street, which afforded us a view of the entire downed roof and the masses of snow, ice and slush strewn across the Teflon-coated Fibreglas surface. Then to the hastily called news conference at the east airlock door of the stadium. Reporters allowed were speechless as they gazed from a safe distance at the underside of the downed roof, the damaged lighting and sound equipment, and puddles of water and piles of snow.
Throughout the next week, B.C. Place management stubbornly and vainly claimed that it came down by way of a “controlled deflation” and that wind was to blame.
B.C. Place’s collapsed roof, as seen from the Hampton Inn.
Meanwhile, my source leaked internal documents that proved otherwise and delivered eyewitness accounts of what was really going on inside the stadium. For instance, stadium operations director Brian Griffin was spotted watching the World Junior hockey final on a TV in the lunchroom, unaware that the roof-hung speaker cluster was drooping toward field level.
What happened? In a nutshell, nobody activated the roof-heating system in the 1983-opened stadium.
Management should have learned a lesson at Christmastime 1996, when staffers were called in to urgently shovel snow from the roof. They earned special golf shirts to commemorate their role in saving the roof and preventing cancellation of the New Year’s Eve Three Tenors concert.
General manager Howard Crosley indicated in a sit-down interview with me a week later that cost was a reason for not turning on the roof heater. He claimed the roof was withstanding the weight of the snow, ice and slush. NDP critic Guy Gentner charged that preservation of annual executive bonuses at PavCo was really behind the penny pinching which put the public asset at risk.
The roof was patched and reinflated in two weeks. But the main ceremonies stadium for the next Winter Olympics in 2010 gained worldwide attention for the wrong reasons.
BC Place general manager Howard Crosley (left) and operations director Brian Griffin in January 2007.
Despite PavCo’s best efforts to spin the story, we reported the key facts:
Snow had been allowed to accumulate, the temperature fluctuated and five snow alarms were ignored. Nobody turned on the snow-melting system.
In the absence of heat, a control room worker spiked the interior air pressure. But that jolted the mass of snow, ice and slush, causing it to cascade on the west side of the roof where it sliced a gash in the roof and air rapidly escaped the building as the fabric roof violently flapped.
B.C. Place, the home of pro sports franchises owned by billionaires, got ahead of the line for capital funding before earthquake-prone St. Paul’s Hospital.
The stadium was eventually renovated and a new roof constructed for $514 million after the Olympics.
The roofing job was too big and too complex to be done before the Games. The entire cost was on the shoulders of taxpayers after elements of the financing came apart.
Cabinet scuttled the $40 million Telus naming rights deal in early 2012. The BC Liberal government had been under fire for handing a $1 billion, 10-year omnibus contract to Telus in June 2011 after abruptly halting a two-year bidding process on nine separate contracts. Bidders Bell, Rogers and Shaw threatened legal action. Bell is the Whitecaps’ main sponsor and the club’s owner, Greg Kerfoot, is a friend of Campbell’s successor, Premier Christy Clark.
In April 2011, Vancouver city council approved the relocation of Edgewater Casino from the Plaza of Nations to the parking lot on the stadium’s west side. But it refused to allow Las Vegas-based Paragon Gaming to double its slot machines in the new facility. So the agreed $6 million-a-year lease payments with PavCo were halved to $3 million in a 2013 renegotiation.
The Musqueam Indian Band later negotiated for a piece of the action and received $8.5 million of the first $9 million in revenue when the Parq Vancouver casino/hotel complex finally opened in 2017.
A decade and a half later, five elements of the incident and its legacy stand out.
The spin cycle:
PavCo’s PR company, Reputations Corporation, was quick on the scene Jan. 5, 2007. The company was responsible for the “controlled deflation” spin, which many media outlets wrongly took as gospel.
A quickie engineering report released a week later by Geiger Engineering, another PavCo contractor, put some of the blame on winds and the aging roof.
Winds were not a significant factor on the day. They peaked at around 20 km-h. Geiger corrected itself and completed its final report in October 2007.
Mysterious wish list:
In July of 2007, we learned that B.C. Pavilion Corporation had asked its parent ministry, Tourism, to fund major upgrades more than six months before the incident.
The building would host the Winter Olympics opening and closing ceremonies in February 2010 but was not scheduled for any significant modernization.
Inside B.C. Place, after the roof ripped and collapsed on Jan. 5, 2007.
Chad Skelton at the Vancouver Sun had unearthed the heavily censored “Infrastructure Improvements” report via FOI. Fourteen of the 15 pages were blacked out.
The June 20, 2006 report said the stadium had “worn out assets which are critical to basic tenant operations” and improvements were required to “bring it up to standards expected by clients and spectators at events.”
As Skelton reported, Minister Stan Hagen was “unavailable.” Hagen’s spokesman first claimed there was nothing in the report about the roof, and then changed his story to say he didn’t know what was in the report. Crosley refused to comment.
Promises broken:
Premier Gordon Campbell insisted that the renovation would require a business case approved by cabinet.
Campbell had come to power in 2001, vowing his BC Liberal government would never repeat the mistakes of the NDP’s Fast Ferries debacle. There would be evidence-based decision-making via business plans for every major project undertaken. His BC Liberals would also be the most open, accountable and democratic in Canada.
They failed that test.
My quest to get a copy of that business case and cost-benefit analysis for the renovation and roof replacement finally ended in failure in March 2016 when an adjudicator with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner ruled that the documents were protected by cabinet confidentiality.
We do know that Burgess Cawley Sullivan & Associates was hired to review the 2010 to 2014 business plan for the stadium, but we don’t know how deep it went.
Did the consultants consider the impact of an aging population, the end of sports TV blackouts as we know them, the proliferation of high definition TV and desire for content on mobile devices?
All of those challenges have combined to cause major attendance declines for sporting events at the 2011-reopened B.C. Place. The Major League Soccer Whitecaps haven’t opened level 4 once after 10 seasons and the B.C. Lions closed level 4 in 2015.
Post-election sendoff:
The skyline of Vancouver, after the B.C. Place roof ripped and collapsed Jan. 5, 2007.
Crosley and operations manager Brian Griffin both kept their jobs. Not only that, but they were key figures in the renovation project.
While Griffin remains employed at PavCo, Crosley was mysteriously fired the day after the 2013 provincial election (the surprise Liberal win) and sent packing with a nearly half-million-dollar golden parachute.
Why did that happen?
Audit avoided, documents destroyed:
Did taxpayers get value for their money?
We may never know.
In early 2013, with a provincial election looming, Auditor General John Doyle agreed to undertake a fact-finding mission after NDP critic Spencer Chandra Herbert complained. Chandra Herbert found a Jan. 22, 2008 letter from PavCo chair David Podmore to Vancouver’s city manager Judy Rogers. Podmore wrote that the cost would be “in the order of $100 million, which includes replacement of the roof.”
Rather than replace the inflatable roof, Podmore and co., with the Campbell cabinet’s blessing, decided on a German-engineered retractable system that would be built under a $365 million funding envelope announced in January 2009.
By the fall of 2009, the budget ballooned to $563 million.
After a power struggle with the BC Liberal government, Doyle went back to Australia without greenlighting an audit. (It would have required the contracting of external auditors, because B.C.’s auditor general is also the auditor for PavCo’s annual report).
Meanwhile, a whistleblower continues his quest to uncover details and seek accountability. John Hardy was an occupational first aid attendant from 2003 to 2009. He said he was fired for contacting PavCo’s insurer, Commonwealth Insurance, alleging that the Crown corporation collected a $7 million claim, despite failing to follow engineering guidelines, safe work procedures and structural warnings prescribed by roof engineer Geiger.
In late 2015, my source gave me a tip about a paper-shredding truck that pulled up to the stadium for an afternoon. PavCo was forced to admit to me under a freedom of information request that it paid nearly $1,700 for a company to destroy 403 bankers boxes full of files spanning 1983 to 2009.
They included operations and engineering work logs.
What would those documents have told us about the events of Jan. 5, 2007?
Welcome to 2022 and theBreaker.news’ first podcast of the year.
Andy Yan (SFU)
Joining host Bob Mackin to forecast what’s ahead are Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s city program, and Mario Canseco, president of ResearchCo.
Research Co. pollster Mario Canseco (Mackin)
It’s a civic election year, the BC Liberals will choose a new leader and the NDP government continues to grapple with crises galore. Hear what Andy and Mario have to say about these issues and more. Including the question on everybody’s minds: Will B.C.’s pandemic mask mandate or Vancouver’s barge on the beach be first to disappear?
Plus commentary and Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines.
The auditing is vindication for the managers of candidates Gavin Dew, Michael Lee, Renee Merrifield, Ellis Ross and Stan Sipos. theBreaker.news was first to report about their joint Jan. 5 letter to LEOC, expressing concern about potential voter fraud and “the risk of catastrophic reputational damage” to the party and its staff, executive and volunteers. 
