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Business, News

 Bob Mackin 

The B.C. Legislative Precinct occupies almost 12.5 acres of downtown Victoria, but the Clerk never settled on a place to park a $13,000 wood splitter and trailer purchased in the fall of 2017. 

Instead, Craig James parked the equipment 13 kilometres north, outside his Cordova Bay house. That rendered it “utterly useless” according to one of the Special Prosecutors in the B.C. Supreme Court fraud and breach of trust trial against James.

The wood splitter trailer at Craig James’s house in Saanich (Speaker’s Office)

Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes heard Feb. 2 from the former facilities manager, Randy Spraggett, who said it was his idea to buy the equipment in the wake of TV coverage of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Spraggett said a sea container was outfitted as a mobile command post in case of a major storm knocking out power and fuel supplies or even an earthquake-causing collapse of the buildings. 

“When I started thinking about the fact that here we are, we’re kind of late 50s, 60s, maybe older, trying to do cutting up wood, trying to split the wood in order to use it for burn barrels, that it makes logical sense to use a mechanical device which would save us the physical work,” Spraggett testified. 

He said Sergeant-at-Arms Gary Lenz came up with the idea to buy the Wallenstein-brand wood splitter. Spraggett sourced the product online and used his assembly-issued credit card. He testified that James offered to pick up the equipment because he was heading over to the Lower Mainland and had a truck with a trailer hitch. 

The dilemma was where to store the wood splitter and trailer combo. Parking spots near the so-called Premier’s garage were being repurposed for electric vehicle charging. A spot behind the Armoury building was discussed. Spraggett even suggested a gravel pad be created on which to park the trailer. But he never got approval. 

The infamous wood splitter, photographed on the Legislature grounds on Nov. 20, 2019. (Mackin)

Special Prosecutor David Butcher asked who had the authority to say “it’s going to be here, period”? 

“That would be Mr. James,” Spraggett replied. “He would have had that authority at any time.” 

The trailer and wood splitter were delivered to James’s house, while Spraggett said he took the initiative to “basically say, you know, we’re gonna put it on the ground guys.” 

The equipment stayed outside James’s house. 

Defence lawyer Gavin Cameron asked Spraggett: “You also remember, Mr. James telling you during this conversation that his wife was quite unhappy that they’re seeing an unsightly trailer sitting in front of their house. And so he was paying to store it out of his own pocket somewhere else?

Spraggett said “I don’t remember that conversation.”

The trailer was finally parked on the grounds Oct. 22, 2018, almost a month before James and Lenz were suspended by MLAs and escorted off the property. RCMP officers attended James’s house on Dec. 7, 2018 and a tow truck driver loaded the wood splitter onto a flat bed truck and took it to a secure bay at Totem Towing. Police found evidence that it had been used.

The trial is expected to last another five weeks and hear another 20 witnesses.

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 Bob Mackin  The B.C. Legislative Precinct occupies almost

Business, News

Bob Mackin

A BC Liberal Party member is asking a B.C. Supreme Court judge to delay the announcement of the party’s new leader by 15 days, so that a thorough membership audit can take place.

BC Liberal member Vikram Bajwa

“Throughout the course of the leadership election, various party members have made allegations of voting irregularities, including outright voter fraud,” said businessman Vikram Bajwa’s Feb. 1 petition. “These allegations have attracted media attention, to the detriment of the party.”

The filing, by lawyers Greg Allen and David McEwan, names the party, its president Cameron Stolz, leadership election organizing committee co-chairs Colin Hansen and Roxanne Helme and others. 

BC Liberal members vote online or by phone from Feb. 3-5 on a ranked ballot. Bajwa’s lawyers have scheduled a Feb. 4 short-notice hearing at the Law Courts in Vancouver. 

In the court papers, Bajwa said he wrote the party Jan. 26, asking it determine which members are properly entitled to vote, to release details about the pre-vote audit and any violations detected. He also demanded the leadership vote be postponed pending a thorough audit, but the party responded Jan. 27 and declined to take any steps.

“Permitting voter fraud, or even the appearance of voter fraud (particularly on the eve of a vote) is antithetical to the precepts of democratic governance,” said Baja’s petition.

On Jan. 6, theBreaker.news revealed that managers for five of the seven candidates claimed the election could be tainted by thousands of illegitimate memberships. Many of the memberships were sold by representatives of frontrunner Kevin Falcon. 

From the Jan. 18 BC Liberal leadership debate (BC1)

Bajwa wants the court to declare the current membership audit incomplete and the party in breach of its constitution and the leadership election rules. Bajwa also wants the party to show the candidates and membership all documents about the current audit and details on what steps have been taken against any coordinated voter fraud.

“In sum, the mere fact that the party and the leadership are content to allow the leadership vote to proceed, given the significant and as of yet unaddressed allegations, cannot be reconciled with the basic rights of members as set out in the constitution.”

Bajwa ran for mayor of Surrey in 2011 and 2014 and was briefly a candidate for the BC Liberal leadership in 2017.

Bajwa’s petition came the day after theBreaker.news revealed that candidate Michael Lee’s campaign manager wrote a scathing email to party brass. Diamond Isinger alleged the election is ripe for corruption, because any member outside B.C. can vote, IP addresses and virtual private networks won’t be limited, and there is no allowance for the candidates to send scrutineers until after voting is finished. 

“In this metaphor, the online voting systems will allow Joe Voter to walk in the (virtual) door of the polling station as many times as he wants and allow Susie Voter to vote on behalf of as many people as she wants, with no ability for campaigns to be made aware of this,” Isinger wrote.

“Similarly, someone could phone the helpdesk from her cell phone 100 times to cast 100 votes over the course of a day and this would not be disclosed to campaigns, nor are we being provided with the ability to proactively scrutineer those call logs.”

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Bob Mackin A BC Liberal Party member is

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Bob Mackin

The Clerk of the B.C. Legislature denied Feb. 1 in B.C. Supreme Court that the fear of publicity caused her to return a large sum of money a year after she was paid $119,000 under a discontinued scheme.

Ken and Kate Ryan-Lloyd at Government House in 2019 (Association of Former MLAs of B.C./John Yanyshyn)

Kate Ryan-Lloyd, who was the deputy clerk at the time, received the payment in February 2012 under a long-service award program. Ryan-Lloyd’s predecessor Craig James has pleaded not guilty to fraud and breach of trust charges, including one for improperly obtaining and keeping $257,988 under the same program. 

Ryan-Lloyd earlier testified before Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes that she felt “uncomfortable” about keeping the money.

During cross-examination, James’s lawyer Gavin Cameron asked Ryan-Lloyd about the role of Bob Faulkner, the Legislative Assembly’s interim executive financial officer, and his relationship to her husband, Ken Ryan-Lloyd.

Faulkner and Ken Ryan-Lloyd both worked in the Office of the Auditor General before and after Faulkner’s seven-month secondment to the Legislature. 

“You get the retirement benefit on February 15th of 2012, you repay it on February 13th, 2013,” Cameron said. “And the auditor general’s critical report comes out nine days later, on March 1st, 2013.”

“Correct,” replied Ryan-Lloyd.

Cameron: ”But your husband was employed by the Office of the Auditor General in 2012 and 2013, correct? 

Ryan-Lloyd: “Correct.” 

Cameron: “And your husband and Mr. Faulkner are or were friends?”

Gavin Cameron (Fasken)

“No, they were colleagues,” Ryan-Lloyd shot back. “They were colleagues in the Office of the Auditor General.”

Ryan-Lloyd initially said she was unaware in February 2013 that a report was coming. 

“What happened is that in February, early February of 2013 or January of 2013, around that time, you received advice, through your links to the Office the Auditor General, that effectively the train was on the tracks, you should get out of the way?” Cameron asked.

Ryan-Lloyd replied: “Absolutely not. I received information, as did all of my colleagues, who were part of the executive team, who were working with Mr. Faulkner. He provided regular advice with respect to the status of financial audit work. My husband, at the time, was a performance auditor. And pursuant to the very strict professional standards in that office, he was explicitly excluded, at that time, before and after, subsequently, to any involvement with the Legislature as an audited institution.”

Cameron said that in January 2013, Faulkner told her that Auditor General John Doyle “had significant questions” about the payment of the retirement allowances in the wake of his scathing July 2012 report on shoddy Legislative Assembly accounting. 

Ryan-Lloyd repeated her earlier answer, before Cameron showed a transcript of her interview with former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin on March 19, 2019 in Victoria. 

The Legislative Assembly Management Committee hired McLachlin to investigate whether James committed misconduct, after Speaker Darryl Plecas had revealed evidence of corruption by James and Sergeant-at-Arms Gary Lenz.

Portrait of Craig James outside the Clerk’s Office at the Parliament Buildings (Mackin)

According to the transcript, Kate Ryan-Lloyd said: “the auditors had questions with respect to the payment of these retirement allowances. So I asked him to keep me apprised in their work in this area, hoping that things will be balanced in order. So apparently, there was a lack of documentation. In particular, I was advised by the chief financial officer of the day, Mr. Faulkner, Miss Woodward’s predecessor, that no legal opinion was on record.”

Cameron asked Ryan-Lloyd again if she agreed that the imminent, critical report from auditor general was “at least a factor causing you to return the funds.”

“No, I don’t agree because I was not sure of the contentions of the auditor general’s finding, what was the substance of that finding,” she said. 

The trial is expected to last another five weeks and hear another two-dozen witnesses.

Meanwhile, Holmes denied theBreaker.news application to webcast the trial, ruling that it would be too cumbersome for the court to allow with the trial in progress. Lawyers for James and the Crown were mutually opposed.

Court rules allow media outlets to make applications between 14 and 60 days before a trial. theBreaker.news submitted an application the week before the trial based on the risk of the rapidly evolving omicron pandemic and the judge’s late admission that accredited lawyers can use the court’s Microsoft Teams system to observe the proceedings from anywhere in Canada.

The application suggested the webconference system could have been repurposed to enable the trial to be viewed online. 

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Bob Mackin The Clerk of the B.C. Legislature

Business, News

Bob Mackin

Kate Ryan-Lloyd returned a sum of money she held for a year, nine days before the Auditor General issued a scathing report on controversial retirement packages. 

Craig James’s defence lawyer Gavin Cameron showed the B.C. Legislature clerk her Feb. 20, 2013 letter about the return of a February 2012 payment under a discontinued program intended for retiring senior officials. Ryan-Lloyd, then the deputy to James, cited “personal reasons.”

A 2013 letter from Kate Ryan-Lloyd to Craig James, returning a retirement bonus (LAMC)

“That was the only description you gave as to why you were returning funds, nine days before the auditor general’s report came up,” Cameron remarked in B.C. Supreme Court on Jan. 31. 

John Doyle’s update to the July 2012 Audit of the Legislative Assembly’s Financial Records found none of the payments to James, Ryan-Lloyd and two others were publicly disclosed, as required under the Financial Information Act, even though their regular salaries were.

When the trial opened Jan. 24, James pleaded not guilty to five charges, including breach of trust for improperly obtaining and keeping $257,988 from the long-service award scheme. Ryan-Lloyd was earmarked $118,915.84, but returned $83,235 in 2013.

Ryan-Lloyd testified she didn’t go into detail about her concerns with the money, because “I didn’t intend this letter to be accusatory of Mr. James.”

She said she had received legal advice, including from a tax lawyer. Her husband was employed by the Office of the Auditor General, although she didn’t cite that as a reason.

“I met with Mr. [Chris] Considine just to ensure that um, again, my understanding of what options would be best available to me were understood.”

She testified that she also met with Speaker Bill Barisoff and clerk emeritus George MacMinn about the payment, without James, and remembered seeing a poster “think like a taxpayer.”

Earlier, in her Crown-led evidence, Ryan-Lloyd explained she was “humiliated” and “quite embarrassed” that she could not obtain a copy of the legal opinion about the payments from the Speaker’s office that James claimed to exist.

The wood splitter trailer at Craig James’s house in Saanich (Speaker’s Office)

“I had been led to believe one thing when in fact another was true,” Ryan-Lloyd said.

Meanwhile, Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes also heard from one of James’s Cordova Bay neighbours, gift shop owner Jamie Cassels. 

Cassels testified it takes him 23 minutes to drive to work, near the Inner Harbour. He said he saw the wood splitter and trailer James bought with public funds on “a little paving stone area” out front of James’s house. He said he also saw a truck, Jeep and SUV, and Airstream trailer. He testified that he never saw the wood splitter used, nor did he see James chopping wood. 

The trial is expected to last another five weeks and hear another two-dozen witnesses. 

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Bob Mackin Kate Ryan-Lloyd returned a sum of

Business, News

Bob Mackin

Just three days before the BC Liberals begin to vote for their next leader, a party insider fears the election will be easily manipulated.

In a Jan. 31 email to party interim executive Lindsay Cote, obtained by theBreaker.news, Michael Lee’s campaign manager wrote that contractor Votem does not have basic safeguards to limit the use of multiple IP addresses and virtual private networks, nor is the party allowing real-time oversight.

Michael Lee (left) and Kevin Falcon, from the Jan. 18 BC Liberal leadership debate (BC1)

“Campaigns are to trust that this vote will have integrity, with no ability to independently verify this, despite that being a basic standard in all other types of modern day elections,” wrote Diamond Isinger.

Campaigns will have no way to digitally scrutinize the process as it happens, according to the email. Only after polls close will two people from each campaign be allowed into a room at the Wall Centre Hotel “to receive very high-level info (e.g. how many votes were cast, etc.) provided in a hurry before the new leader is announced.”

Additionally, an unlimited number of votes can be cast online from anywhere in the world. The email said that the candidates had been assured that those legitimately out of country, such as on vacation, would need to vote by phone. But that policy changed in the last few days. 

Without a way to monitor the system in real-time, the potential for abuse is significant. The email said that it is standard for scrutineers to see who is coming or going and observe whether a voter has walked through a door multiple times to vote or if a voter shows up claiming to be someone else.

“In this metaphor, the online voting systems will allow Joe Voter to walk in the (virtual) door of the polling station as many times as he wants and allow Susie Voter to vote on behalf of as many people as she wants, with no ability for campaigns to be made aware of this,” Isinger wrote. “Similarly, someone could phone the helpdesk from her cell phone 100 times to cast 100 votes over the course of a day and this would not be disclosed to campaigns, nor are we being provided with the ability to proactively scrutineer those call logs.”

From the Jan. 18 BC Liberal leadership debate (BC1)

Nobody from BC Liberal headquarters responded for comment by deadline.

The campaign has been rocked by allegations of mass-quantities of fraudulent memberships. theBreaker.news revealed that five of the seven candidates wrote to the leadership election organizing committee on Jan. 5, demanding a thorough audit because thousands of members provided incorrect, non-existent or out of country contact information. 

“This is unbelievable for a leadership race, in the BC Liberal party, in British Columbia, in Canada, in the year 2022, which is being conducted online (with limited phone voting options) and requires both solid technology and common sense rules to underpin it,” said Isinger’s email.

Isinger’s email came two hours after Cote conveyed a message from Pete Martin, the CEO of Votem.

“We cannot universally put a limit of 10 votes or less per site/IP. Our CastIron platform and our Google cloud hosting partner have multiple security strategies for detecting and preventing bot-voting and other nefarious election hacks,” according to Martin. 

Martin said an unnamed third party monitoring service has been retained, but “we do not track IP address interactions to votes to ensure the privacy of voters throughout the process of casting their ballots.”

Wrote Cote: “I want to assure each of you, that the limitation to the system is not something that LEOC or the BCLP staff have asked for however, we are confident that with this additional program we will be able to monitor for suspicious behaviour and act accordingly.”

During the Jan. 18 debate, Lee lambasted perceived frontrunner Kevin Falcon, whose campaign is accused of selling fraudulent memberships. 

“We need to use this as the opportunity to restore that trust,” Lee said. “And the first step to restoring trust with British Columbians is running a process that every member can have confidence in, and the result the outcome, we need to go forward united. But your old style of politics, your backroom deals only erodes trust in our party, Kevin.”

Falcon denied the allegations and accused Lee of “creating a cloud of distrust.”

Party members vote online or by phone in a ranked ballot system from Feb. 3-5. 

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Bob Mackin Just three days before the BC

Business, News, Opinion, Sports

For the week of Jan. 30, 2022:

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics are almost here, despite the pandemic, despite the Chinese Communist Party’s abuse of Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans and Hong Kongers, and despite its threats to invade Taiwan.

Jules Boykoff (Brian Lee)

“There’s never been an Olympics quite like what we’re seeing with the Beijing Games,” said Jules Boykoff, political science professor and author.
“I mean, we’re talking about staging an optional sporting spectacle under coronavirus pandemic conditions in a country that is a serial human rights abuser, that has long acted in ways that clash mightily with the lofty ideals that are enshrined in the Olympic Charter. And that may well be blunting the exciting zeitgeist of athlete activism, that you and I have talked about before, and also might be blunting critical reporting because of surveillance of reporters.”
Pacific University of Portland’s Jules Boykoff is the special guest on this edition of theBreaker.news Podcast with host Bob Mackin. Listen to the full interview about the most-controversial winter mega-event in history.
Also, hear from Jeff Buziak ahead of the annual walk in memory of his daughter Lindsay Buziak, a victim of the unsolved Feb. 2, 2008 murder in Saanich, B.C. Buziak wants justice for Lindsay and has a message for anyone harming women.

Plus Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines and commentary.

CLICK BELOW to listen or go to TuneIn or Apple Podcasts.

Now on Google Podcasts!

Have you missed an edition of theBreaker.news Podcast? Go to the archive.

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For the week of Jan. 30, 2022: The

Business, News

Bob Mackin 

B.C. Legislature Clerk Kate Ryan-Lloyd testified in B.C. Supreme Court Jan. 28 that she felt “uncomfortable” in early 2013, so she returned money received in 2012 under a discontinued retirement scheme.

Kate Ryan-Lloyd (left) and Darryl Plecas (Twitter)

Her predecessor, Craig James, has pleaded not guilty to all five charges for which he is being tried. One of the charges is breach of public trust for improperly obtaining and keeping $257,988 under a program intended for the three 1984-employed senior clerks employed when they eventually vacated their jobs.

James had been hired in 1987 as clerk of committees, two months before the executive benefit plan ended. The BC Liberal caucus appointed James the new clerk in June 2011. By early 2012, Speaker Bill Barisoff triggered the payments when he signed a memo for James that also provided $202,385.41 to clerk assistant Robert Vaive and $80,224.17 to law clerk Ian Izard.

Ryan-Lloyd, the deputy clerk in 2012, was allotted $118,915.84 under the so-called long-service award program.

“I was very concerned about the size of the payout and very uncomfortable with it,” Ryan-Lloyd said before Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes. “Indeed, I had heard as well that Mr. Vaive, who was also in receipt of the allowance, should not have received it, but it was provided to him on compassionate grounds. I could not see a logical extension of eligibility or liability to Mr. James or myself.”

B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner Michael McEvoy, sworn-in by Clerk Craig James in April 2018 (BC Leg/Twitter)

Ryan-Lloyd said the scathing July 2012 auditor general’s report into legislature finances influenced her about-face. (Her husband Ken is a longtime employee of the office, and is currently the manager of compliance, controls and research). 

By early 2013, she returned the $83,235 she had received for personal reasons, according to a formal letter addressed to James. 

“Did you have a discussion with Mr. James before this letter was sent to him?” Special Prosecutor David Butcher asked. 

“I did,” Ryan-Lloyd said.  

Butcher: “What was his response when you told him that you were going to return the money?”

“Mr. James, I think he thought I was going to think about it a bit more,” Ryan-Lloyd said. “I did confirm to him that I had made a decision. I recall that he said ‘well, you can do what you want, but I’m keeping mine’.”

Ryan-Lloyd said she believed there had been a thorough process to approve the payments, including legal advice to determine eligibility. 

“I concluded by 2013, that my understanding was not correct.”

“I thought very much that my colleagues throughout the assembly work very hard in the service of the house,” she said. “And it was not right to hold on to these funds… I could not see rationale for holding them.” 

The trial is expected to last five more weeks and hear from 26 more witnesses.

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Bob Mackin  B.C. Legislature Clerk Kate Ryan-Lloyd testified

Business, News

Bob Mackin

For the second time in six weeks, the special prosecutors in the fraud and breach of trust case against former B.C. Legislature clerk Craig James have surprised the court.

Special prosecutor David Butcher (Mackin)

In a Jan. 6 case management conference, Brock Martland told Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes that 11 boxes of evidence were found in the Parliament Buildings before Christmas. Three weeks later, on Jan. 27, David Butcher revealed that executive financial officer Hillary Woodward told him the night before that she found two more documents.

“One of the documents would be exculpatory in nature,” Butcher said. “It is copied to Ms. Ryan Lloyd.”

“Exculpatory” means it could prove guilt or innocence. “Ms. Ryan-Lloyd” is Kate Ryan-Lloyd, the first witness in the six-week trial and James’s successor as the Legislative Assembly’s chief executive. 

James’s lead lawyer objected to admission of the new document and called it “grossly unfair.” 

“I’m shadow-boxing right now,” Gavin Cameron told Holmes. “I’m concerned with where I think we’re going, but I don’t know where we’re going.”

Butcher gave no hints about the contents of the document. Holmes called a time out for the defense and prosecution to confer. Butcher successfully asked for adjournment until 2 p.m. so that a police officer could conduct a taped interview of Ryan-Lloyd about the documents. 

B.C. Legislature beancounter Hillary Woodward (BC Leg)

When the trial resumed for the afternoon, Butcher said “we are on our way to solving the problem.” Ryan-Lloyd had been interviewed for 49 minutes but neither side had finished reviewing the recording. Butcher said he would carry on asking Ryan-Lloyd questions about working under James, without touching on the newly discovered documents. 

The six-week trial opened Jan. 24, when James pleaded not guilty to all five charges. One of the charges is about his $13,230.51 purchase of a Wallenstein WX450-L wood splitter and P.J. D5102 dump trailer with taxpayers’ money. He kept the equipment at his house in the Cordova Bay area of Saanich, rather than in the Legislative precinct, more than 13 kilometres away. 

Ryan-Lloyd revealed in court that she is pondering what to do with the combo, which became symbols of the scandal that was revealed by then-Speaker Darryl Plecas in a scathing January 2019 report about corruption under James and Sergeant-at-Arms Gary Lenz.

Speaker Darryl Plecas (left), interim clerk Kate Ryan-Lloyd and the black binder of evidence in January 2019 (Mackin)

“I have been in discussions to Speaker [Raj] Chouhan to ensure that, although public funds had been used to purchase equipment, that we would be able to find an appropriate way to dispose of the equipment,” she said. “There is no need, in my view, to retain these items of equipment.”

Ryan-Lloyd told the court she knew the combo had been purchased as part of spending on emergency preparedness in fall 2017. In the spring of 2018, she said, Plecas mentioned to her that the Legislature had these items, but instead of being on-site, they were stored at James’s house.

Ryan-Lloyd said there was no policy that allowed the off-site storage of equipment. 

“It did not make any sense to me at all,” she said. 

Both items were licensed and insured, but the trailer hitch was not compatible with work trucks at the Legislature precinct. 

“So there were many questions that surfaced in the fullness of time, but clearly, in October of 2017, I needed to ask more questions,” Ryan-Lloyd conceded.

The trial continues. 

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Bob Mackin For the second time in six

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Bob Mackin 

Bus drivers on routes through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are facing another challenge to their safety.

A Coast Mountain Bus window shattered by an apparent pellet gun shot on the Downtown Eastside.

A source told theBreaker.news that there were 22 cases of projectiles striking Coast Mountain bus windows on East Hastings, between Main and Cambie streets, from Jan. 19-23.

Some of the windows were shattered and the buses taken out of service. A driver, who asked not to be named, said the weapon was a pellet gun. 

Transit Police Const. Amanda Steed said officers are investigating multiple incidents of mischief-caused broken bus windows. 

“Early investigation indicates that low impact force was used in each occurrence, causing damage to the bus exterior,” Steed said in a prepared statement. “At this stage, there is no indication that the windows were broken by any form of firearm and the incidents are occurring in an isolated area.”

A Coast Mountain Bus window shattered by an apparent pellet gun shot on the Downtown Eastside.

Nobody has been arrested and a suspect has not been identified, Steed said

“We understand how concerning this may be for those using Transit, specifically travelling on a bus, but our investigation to date has not suggested the public are at risk and there have been no reported injuries,” Steed said. 

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Bob Mackin  Bus drivers on routes through Vancouver's

Business, News

Bob Mackin

The former clerk of British Columbia’s Legislative Assembly went on trial at B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver Jan. 24, three years and three days after then-Speaker Darryl Plecas and chief of staff Alan Mullen’s damning report alleging corruption at the seat of government.

Clerk Craig James swore Christy Clark in as Westside-Kelowna MLA in 2013, near Clark’s Vancouver office. (Facebook)

Craig Harley James, who was charged in late 2020, formally pleaded not guilty to three charges of breach of public trust and two charges of fraud over $5,000 before Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes. Holmes is expected to hear 27 witnesses over the next six weeks.

“Mr. James was no ordinary employee,” Special Prosecutor David Butcher told the court. “As the parliamentary equivalent of the CEO, he had responsibility to the institution, the people of British Columbia to manage the affairs and resources of the legislature in an exemplary manner. The Crown alleges that Mr. James’s conduct at different times, and in different ways, was a marked departure from the standard of responsible management expected of a person occupying one of the highest offices in the province.” 

Butcher said the case against James has three facets, because the Crown alleges he broke the law by:

  • Making a claim for more than $250,000 in February 2012 for a retirement allowance to which he was not entitled;

Special prosecutor David Butcher (Mackin)

  • Filing travel expense claims throughout his tenure for clothing and souvenir purchases to which he was not entitled, and;
  • The 2017 purchase of a woodsplitter and trailer that he stored at his home in Saanich for a year. 

Butcher said the woodsplitter was bought under the guise of emergency preparedness when the assembly had a budget surplus. But, he said, “Mr. James took both pieces of equipment his house in suburban Victoria, which is 13.4 kilometres from the legislature. The equipment would have been utterly useless in an emergency once stored in his residence.”

Butcher pointed to the “scathing” July 2012 report by then-Auditor General John Doyle that found assembly financial reporting for 2009-2011 to be insufficient. 

“He found that the LABC fell well short of the financial management and accounting standards established for the rest of government. He said that the internal control deficiencies were serious and pervasive,” Butcher said.

Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes of the B.C. Supreme Court.

“If Mr. James’s response to the allegations is that there were no or insufficient policies or standards to guide his conduct, the Crown says that he was a career parliamentarian who was on full notice of the institutional shortcomings. And as the most senior person he had the ability and obligation to correct the deficiencies identified… if that is his position, the Crown says he has full knowledge of the absence of effective control took advantage of that by using public funds for personal benefit.”

The first witness is scheduled to be Kate Ryan-Lloyd, who was James’s successor after serving as deputy clerk under him. Ryan-Lloyd took a $180,000 retirement allowance in early 2012, but returned the money a year later. 

The list of witnesses also includes former speakers John Reynolds and Bill Barisoff, but not Plecas, who did not run in the snap 2020 provincial election.

James was appointed clerk in June 2011 by the B.C Liberal majority. Then-NDP house leader John Horgan and NDP leader Adrian Dix expressed their disapproval of the partisan departure from the traditional hire by an all-party committee.

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 Plecas and Mullen called-in the RCMP and that two special prosecutors had been appointed.

James and Lenz both demanded their jobs back, but they retired in disgrace in 2019 after separate investigations found they committed wrongdoing. They kept their pension entitlements, but they were not forced to repay taxpayers. 

Lenz was not charged.

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Bob Mackin The former clerk of British Columbia’s

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