Police believe Vancity Buzz staffer posed as security guard to confirm leaked bulletin

Bob Mackin

An unnamed person involved with the Vancity Buzz website apparently posed as a mall security officer in order to confirm a leaked police bulletin a year ago, according to a Vancouver Police Department report obtained by theBreaker. 

The website, which rebranded as Daily Hive last June, obtained an internal police bulletin that sought information about three Middle Eastern-looking males that police feared were planning a terrorist attack at Vancouver’s Pacific Centre. The two men and a teenager turned out to be innocent tourists from Great Britain, in Vancouver for medical treatment. They were spotted by mall security photographing the inside of the mall on the evening of Jan. 12, 2016 and reported to police the next day.

A May 20, 2016-dated review by the VPD Professional Standards Section — finally released on Jan. 13, 2017 by the police FOI office — says the leaked internal bulletin did not come from anyone inside the VPD, but it had been shared with the province’s Real Time Information Centre at RCMP E Division headquarters in Surrey and another agency whose name was censored. 

The censored after-action report about so-called Project Tribeca, by Sgt. Mark Bragagnolo of the Criminal Intelligence Unit, said between 7:49 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Jan. 14, 2016, Det. Colin Small received over a dozen calls about the bulletin, including one from a male who the detective believed to be with mall security. 

“They quoted the case number and wanted to confirm if it was three or four males involved in the incident. Det. Small believed the individual was mall security as the case number was only known to the police and security at the mall. He confirmed that there were only three males involved. In hindsight, Det. Small now believes that this call was in fact Vancity Buzz. 

“At approximately 8:30 p.m., investigators were alerted to the fact that the bulletin was posted on the internet. Sgt. Bragagnolo immediately contacted Sgt. Fincham who confirmed the bulletin was on the Vancity Buzz web page and going viral. In consultation with Sgt. Bragagnolo and the VPD Executive it was decided that the VPD would confirm the story and issue a press release with a Tip Line. Immediately after the bulletin was posted online tips from the public were being reported to CIU.”

By the next morning, more than 40 tips were received. But, at 9:30 a.m., one of the males in the bulletin photographs called the tip line. 

Mohammed Sharaz of Manchester told VPD that he was in the photographs with his 14-year-old son Salahuddin Sharaz and friend Mohammed Kareem. He told police that they were in the city for visually impaired Salahuddin to receive medical treatment. 

“He stated that he would be at the clinic all day. All aspects of the males’ stories were confirmed and it was determined that their behaviour was innocent in nature,” the report said. “At [noon], the Command Room was stood down.”

Chief Adam Palmer, who denied it was an incident of racial profiling, ordered an internal review. 

Bragagnolo’s report said that the version of the bulletin published by Vancity Buzz had an RTIC-BC task number in the top left corner, but the bulletin that was later disseminated to a large distribution list by RTIC-BC did not. The original bulletin on the Patrol Bulletin Board was not the bulletin obtained by the media.

“At the time of the call, Det. Small did not know the bulletin was leaked. Det. Small now believes that this caller was in fact Vancity Buzz confirming the story. Det. Small advised that he would never knowingly speak to the media and it is his practice to refer all media to the Public Affairs Unit,” the report said. 

“Det. Jackson had also forwarded his desk phone to his cell phone and this same night received a voice mail on his cell phone from Mr. Mohamed from Vancity Buzz who was calling about the incident at the mall. He stated that he had already spoken to Det. Small and left his contact details. Det. Jackson did not return the call.”

The report said members of the VPD Public Affairs Unit have spoken with Vancity Buzz editor Farhan Mohamed, who, the report said, stated that Det. Colin Small confirmed the information before Vancity Buzz published the bulletin.

“The Public Affairs Unit reminded Mr. Mohamed that media inquiring about a VPD related story must adhere to established protocols and communicate through the Public Affairs Unit only. Mr. Mohamed advised that he has reminded his staff about these protocols. Of note, Vancity Buzz has followed these protocols in the past and the fact they diverted from those protocols in this instance is suspicious in nature.”

Mohamed did not immediately respond for comment, but theBreaker will update this story and add his comments should he do so. 

  VanCity Buzz Email Review and Attachment_r by BobMackin on Scribd

Bob Mackin An unnamed person involved with the

Massive $3.5B bridge still means big ships are coming to the Fraser: documents

Bob Mackin

Remember when the B.C. Liberal government issued its “Debunking Massey replacement myths” news release in early 2016? 

Alleged “Myth #4” about the $3.5 billion plan to replace the four-lane tunnel with a 10-lane bridge was “this project is being driven by Port Metro Vancouver.” 

The 1959-built Massey Tunnel (Mackin)

Documents released under freedom of information laws show that Port of Vancouver was indeed deeply involved in lobbying the government to replace the tunnel with a bridge. The federal Port authority wants bigger freighters to ply the Fraser River.

A Feb. 16, 2016 “Marine Clearance” briefing note to Todd Stone, the Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure, claimed four of the six tunnel segments would be removed to make way for the bridge. It said there would be no significant impact on the size of the ships because of other utilities and the tunnel is “currently flush with the bottom of the river channel.”

“In early discussions, [Port of Vancouver] informally advised of potentially larger Post-Panamax vessels using the River (366m length x 49m beam x 15.2m draft), as well as a preference for a clearance of 65 m to allow for Solstice class cruise ships to pass under the new bridge,” said the briefing note by project director Geoff Freer.

The government has consistently spun this project as a road traffic bottleneck remover, and its myth-debunker claimed that the bridge would be the same height as the Alex Fraser Bridge. But that news release omitted some important details. 

Freer’s briefing note for Stone further says that the new bridge will still be high enough for most of the ships in the world to navigate under.

“[Port of Vancouver] have agreed that air clearances similar to the Alex Fraser Bridge are acceptable. These clearances range from 57 to 60 metres for a two-way shipping channel and 59 to 63 metres for a one-way shipping channel (the range is resulting from various tide levels).

“These proposed navigation envelopes would allow the passage for most of the world shipping fleet, including 94% of bulk carriers, 89% of container ships and 62% of liquid bulk (LNG) carriers, for a two-way channel; and 98% of bulk carriers, 96% of container ships and 70% of liquid bulk (LNG) carriers, for a one-way channel.”

B.C. government rendering of the proposed $3.5 billion Richmond-to-Delta bridge.

This means that shipping traffic up and down the Fraser still stands to increase with a bridge replacing the tunnel.

Signs near the tunnel say that construction is to begin in 2017. Completion would be as early as 2022.

The above information came under FOI from Stone’s budget estimates briefing book, which I requested on May 2, 2016. 

It was finally delivered to me on Jan. 6, 2017. What should have been disclosed in 30 business days or less took eight calendar months and then some.

This is the kind of lacklustre performance that has become the hallmark of the BC Liberals under Premier Christy Clark. 

Stone is the minister who was at the centre of the Triple Delete scandal in 2015. He is also co-chair, with Deputy Premier Rich Coleman, of the BC Liberal re-election committee, aka the committee to re-elect the Premier.

Bob Mackin Remember when the B.C. Liberal government

Ten years after, questions remain about B.C. Place’s ripped roof

Bob Mackin

Where were you when the B.C. Place Stadium roof ripped and collapsed 10 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.

“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.

The hole cut in B.C. Place’s roof on Jan. 5, 2007.

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.

B.C. Place’s collapsed roof, as seen from the Hampton Inn.

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. 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. 

This was confirmed a year later when a report by Geiger Engineers and another by the stadium’s Joint Health and Safety Committee were released.

Bottom line, it was preventable.

It was a costly day for B.C. taxpayers

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.

Inside B.C. Place, after the roof ripped and collapsed on Jan. 5, 2007.

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 will receive $8.5 million of the first $9 million in revenue when the Parq Vancouver casino/hotel complex finally opens later this year.

A decade later, five elements of the incident and its legacy stand out.

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.

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 six seasons and the B.C. Lions closed level 4 in 2015.

The skyline of Vancouver, after the B.C. Place roof ripped and collapsed Jan. 5, 2007.

Post-election sendoff

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).

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?

My 24 Hours Vancouver news report on Jan. 5, 2007

The Skonenblades video of the roof ripping and collapsing

Bob Mackin Where were you when the B.C.