The Aug. 8, 2008 edition of this column is brought to you by the number eight. The Romans called it VIII. In Chinese, it’s a homonym for prosperity.
Eight is the central back row position in rugby union.
Eight runners entered the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games mile race at Empire Stadium, but only Roger Bannister and John Landy finished in under four minutes.
In the Olympics, there are eight men or women rowing, with a coxswain of course to do the steering. Richmond’s Kyle Hamilton is one of five B.C. rowers on the men’s team for Beijing. Darcy Marquardt of Richmond is joined by two others from B.C. in the women’s boat.
Greg Adams wore number eight when he scored “The Goal” that sent the Vancouver Canucks to the 1994 Stanley Cup finals. Michael Dickerson was the Vancouver Grizzlies’ only number eight during his 1999 to 2001 tenure with the bad news bears.
The greatest business deal in hockey history could’ve been done Aug. 8, but Peter Pocklington chose to trade Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings on Aug. 9, 1988.
Quarterback Steve Young entered the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005, a year before Troy Aikman was inducted. They joined receiver Tommy McDonald and free safety Larry Wilson as the great eights in the Canton, Ohio football shrine.
There were eight eights before B.C. Lions’ utilityman Bret Anderson, including quarterbacks Danny Barrett and Jerry Tagge and receiver Ned Armour.
Steve Kindel wears number eight for the Vancouver Whitecaps, but the world’s most famous eight is Spanish defender Xavi Hernandez, the top player of Euro 2008. The 2004 Whitecaps women won the W-League final on penalty kicks on Aug. 8, the same day the number eight horse Actxotic won the eighth race at Hastings Racecourse.
Lynn Swann is the greatest 88 of NFL history; Eric Lindros was going to be the greatest 88 in hockey history, but he got his bell rung a few too many times. Kobe Bryant has one eight on the back of his gold-and-purple Lakers jersey.
More than any other sport, baseball is the ultimate game of numbers. It has a veritable dream team of eights.
Baltimore Orioles’ ironman Cal Ripken Jr. wore number eight. Eight Chicago White Sox were banned forever from baseball for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds and are collectively known as the Black Sox.
Eight turned on its side is the symbol for infinity, but this column’s length is finite.
Aug. 8 is also the final day on the job for Courier editor Mick Maloney after 25 years in the chair. It was Mick who took a chance on this columnist in the summer of 1998. For that I am forever grateful. Enjoy your retirement. We’ll miss you.
In what she said was her last news conference as a public figure, ex-Premier Christy Clark told reporters that none of her 42 fellow BC Liberal MLAs wanted her to quit the party leadership.
But after a walk on a beach, she did so anyway, for the good of the party. Because her head caught up with her heart.
“I talked to the caucus the day before [her July 28 resignation], I asked them all, did they want me to stay, did they want me to go?” Clark said July 31 in Vancouver. “Every single person in the room asked me to stay.”
That is not the way it went down, according to two independent sources intimately familiar with the caucus retreat at the Penticton Lakeside Resort. Clark chose to quit instead of being dumped.
In Penticton, Prof. Plecas pressed previous premier.
Clark had repeatedly vowed to stick around as both the MLA for Kelowna West and the opposition leader — “as long as my caucus wants me to” — after losing the June 29 confidence vote that led to the NDP’s John Horgan becoming premier. The June 22 “clone speech,” which copped parts of the NDP and Green platforms that her party campaigned against, backfired and threw the party into an identity crisis. She was a lame duck.
The sources told theBreaker that, during the retreat, Abbotsford South MLA Darryl Plecas demanded a review of Clark’s leadership. He even threatened to quit caucus and sit as an independent when the Legislature reopens this fall.
Plecas was not alone in the release of pent-up anger directed at Clark. Of the prevailing mood at the retreat, one of the sources said bluntly: “It was really ugly.”
Plecas was a star candidate recruited before the 2013 election, from his job as an accomplished and oft-quoted criminology professor at the University of the Fraser Valley. He defeated independent incumbent John van Dongen, who quit the BC Liberal caucus in 2012 over Clark’s rapidly waning integrity and her habit of being economical with the truth. “When more and more decisions are being made for the wrong reasons, then you have an organization that is heading for failure,” van Dongen told the Legislature in a prophetic speech.
Clark put Plecas in charge of a blue ribbon task force on crime reduction, but the premier’s office ensured the panel’s report was relegated to obscurity. It was released with no fanfare on the last Thursday before Christmas 2014, buried under dozens of news releases and more photo ops than the province’s media could keep up with.
That the end of Clark’s political career (for now) has an Abbotsford angle is an intriguing historical footnote. While Kamloops used to be British Columbia’s bellwether riding, Abbotsford has become the end of the road for right-leaning leaders, provincial and federal.
Clark held the last rally of her province-wide campaign tour May 8 at the Quality Hotel in Abbotsford.
On Oct. 18, 2015, Stephen Harper ended his ill-fated federal Conservative campaign at Cascade Aerospace, before flying home to Calgary to become the ex-Prime Minister.
Late Social Credit leader Grace McCarthy attempted a 1994 comeback in Matsqui, but Liberal Mike de Jong eked-out a 42-vote, by-election upset over B.C.’s first lady of free enterprise.
Most of the Clark-less caucus appeared before cameras in Penticton after the publication of her written resignation, which is effective Aug. 4.
“What she’s given to this province should never be forgiven,” said distraught interim leader Rich Coleman, who held back the tears and corrected himself a moment later. “Forgotten.”
Buried in the middle of the Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training minister’s622-page, 2016 budget binder are eight pages rife with bureaucratic word salad about controversial patronage appointee Gordon Wilson’s job to flog B.C.’s going-nowhere LNG export industry.
The former BC Liberal leader and his wife, Judi Tyabji, were facing financial and legal struggleswhen he endorsed Premier Christy Clark in the May 2013 election. Clark rewarded him in October that year with a $50,000, four-month contract as the “Buy B.C. LNG Advocate.” The Clark cabinet renewed Wilson’s gig twice and expanded it twice. By the time he was fired Aug. 1 by the new NDP government, Wilson had been paid more than $550,000.
Clark and endorser Wilson in 2013.
The briefing notes for then-Minister Shirley Bond claim that Wilson had “great success connecting communities and companies with the LNG Buy B.C. program” because Wilson “engaged 200 businesses during 22 community visits and 16 presentations.”
The briefing notes contain no list of names, dates or places for Wilson’s engaging, visiting and presenting. But they do shed more light on the expensive program, which cost taxpayers $567,841 for the 2015-2016 fiscal year alone.
Besides Wilson’s $150,000 salary, $32,000 in travel expenses (down from $35,730 the previous year) and $1,200 cell phone bill, there were two-full time workers and a co-op student assigned. Their names were not disclosed. The office spent $45,100 on workshops, $21,000 on a “local benefits dashboard project” and $18,000 on an “aboriginal business development project.” The other $300,000 was deemed an “inter-ministry cost share with [Ministry of International Trade] for systems support.”
“A good example of the advocate’s work is his efforts to encourage industry to follow the leadership example of FortisBC in tracking and reporting on local participation in their Tilbury LNG expansion project,” said the briefing notes. “FortisBC leveraged the LNG Buy B.C. program and is using their dashboard to help local communities see how benefits from the project are flowing to local businesses.”
Bond’s successor, Bruce Ralston, said the NDP government could find no reports or evidence of deliverables. Indeed, freedom of information-released documents provided to theBreaker by a reader earlier this year showed that the only reports Wilson filed were expense reports. Wilson, who was paid $600 a day, claimed in media interviews that he was not hired to write reports. Wilson is a former community college economics and geography instructor who also boasts two university degrees.
theBreaker issued a public challenge to Wilson via Twitter on Aug. 1 to deliver a report (maximum 3,000 words, deadline Friday, Aug. 4 at 5 p.m.) to answer key questions about what he actually achieved in his well-paying job. Who did Wilson meet? When and where? What was discussed? What were the outcomes?
Though theBreaker would not pay the already well-compensated Wilson anything, it would give Wilson a chance to explain, in detail, what exactly he did for all that public money he received after endorsing Clark and the BC Liberals in the 2013 election.
UPDATE (Aug. 8): Wilson never did respond to theBreaker’s #ReportToThePublic challenge. Instead, he threatened to sue Premier John Horgan and Jobs minister Bruce Ralston for defamation for comments made after firing him, about the paucity of reports. They both did apologize, but that wasn’t good enough for Wilson, who may still sue.
A report released under FOI by the previous BC Liberal government to the NDP could be the most-expensive in B.C. history. It is apparently the only report made public about Wilson’s activities.
That report was filed in early 2014, near the end of Wilson’s first three-month appointment. In it, Wilson told then-Minister Shirley Bond what anyone reading business media websites already knew — that Russia, Qatar and Australia were leading the way in the LNG industry — and included the key recommendation to launch an interactive website. When that website was launched in 2016, it cost $1 million and it contained no LNG job or contract opportunities.
UPDATE (Aug. 12):On Facebook, Ralston published an apology and retraction to Wilson, stating “Mr. Wilson did provide reports setting out what he had done to earn the money that he was paid.” Ralston claimed that he was provided “incorrect information” before originally claiming the NDP government was unable to locate any written reports by Wilson.
The NDP government wants to turn the page on “Flip” Wilson, but theBreaker is determined to get the goods for taxpayers who were dinged for Wilson’s patronage job.
On Aug. 9, theBreaker filed five FOI requests about Wilson’s activities. Specifically, theBreaker applied for: a copy of the review and related correspondence that led to Wilson’s firing; activity reports and expense reports that Wilson filed since Nov. 1, 2016; a list of the “more than 200 businesses, during 22 community visits and 16 presentations” that Wilson met with (including the names and dates) in the 2015-2016 fiscal year; and any correspondence between Wilson and his son, Mathew Wilson, during the tenure of his patronage job.
BC Liberal Mathew Wilson unsuccessfully challenged NDP incumbent Nicholas Simons for the Powell River-Sunshine Coast seat in the May 9 election. The junior Wilson works as a lawyer for Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. His duties have included strategic partnerships on west coast energy and policy analysis of oil, gas and pipeline development.
In July 2013, Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham recommended the government proactively publish calendars and expense reports for “ministers, deputy ministers and senior executives or equivalent.” In 2016, the BC Liberal government finally began publishing calendars and expense reports for ministers and deputy ministers, but not for those like Wilson, who fall under the “senior executives or equivalent” category.
Denham also recommended the government proactively release “final reports or audits on the performance or efficiency of their policies, programs or activities.” Likewise, the BC Liberals did not act on that recommendation.
Had the BC Liberals followed Denham’s instructions, there would be no mystery about the quality or quantity of Wilson’s work.
One more thing…
History can sometimes be amusing. Very amusing, if you thumb through Hansard transcripts.
In 1993, as leader of the official opposition, Wilson and his fellow caucus member and future wife, Judi Tyabji spoke out in the Legislature against NDP government patronage.
On April 6, 1993, Wilson said this:
“There is no question that what the people wanted when they elected a new government was significant change. They wanted reform and an opportunity to know that their tax dollars were going to be wisely spent. Instead, we see an ever-increasing growth in government through patronage appointments and in those who seek to serve government through various committees and reporting agencies — all of whom have an expense account on a daily basis. Yet the delivery of service to the public is lacking.”
On April 14, 1993, Tyabji said this:
“…get your priorities straight. Rein in government spending, stop the patronage treadmill by cutting back on some of the $100,000-a-year or $120,000-a-year patronage appointments, and feed the people.”
Politicians. They say and do the darnedest things, don’t they?
The baton relay for the 2018 Commonwealth Games came through Vancouver on Aug. 1, a week before the 63rd anniversary of the 1954 British Empire Games.
The Gold Coast Games’ baton, which contains a message from Queen Elizabeth II to be read at next April’s opening ceremony, stopped at the Empire Fields statue marking Brit Roger Bannister’s victory over Aussie John Landy in the historic Miracle Mile.
Could the Games return to British Columbia, for the first time since Victoria held it in 1994?
A Victoria committee, headed by newspaper publisher David Black, has support from Mayor Lisa Helps. But there are no funding commitments yet from the new NDP B.C. government or the federal Liberal government. theBreaker did not receive a response from the NDP government.
Federal sport minister Carla Qualtrough told theBreaker that cabinet is waiting for a formal proposal before deciding.
Durban, South Africa missed deadlines and lost hosting rights earlier this year. The Commonwealth Games Federation wants bid books in by the end of September, so it can make a decision in November. Birmingham and Liverpool are jockeying for the U.K. government’s endorsement.
“We have to factor in all the other things going on in sport and other requests that might come to the federal government,” Qualtrough said, referring to the joint bid with the U.S. and Mexico for FIFA’s 2026 World Cup and Calgary’s potential bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Qualtrough said there could also be a bid for the 2030 Centennial Commonwealth Games from Hamilton, the original host.
“When a formal [Victoria bid] requrest is made, we’ll look at it seriously.”
Commonwealth Games Canada CEO Brian MacPherson told theBreaker in early July that Black’s committee is trying to craft a $700 million operations budget and it envisions using warehouses and hangars for several venues. Whether any proposed venues are in Vancouver would rely on the provincial governemnt funding and priorities.
“If and when we can sit down with the B.C. government, and if they’re supportive of this, if they have other options, we’d be more than happy to listen to them,” MacPherson said.
The Gold Coast baton also visited the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and roof of B.C. Place Stadium, which would be a logical venue for the Commonwealth rugby sevens tournament.
Chris Shaw, the leader of the No Games 2010 Coalition that opposed the Vancouver Olympics, and Grumpy Taxpayer$ of Greater Victoria both want full transparency and a referendum on the bid. Commonwealth Games have doubled in number of athletes and sports since Victoria 1994. Organizers of the Vancouver Olympics claim they balanced a budget of nearly $2 billion, but B.C.’s auditor general never did a final report. Board minutes and financial documents at the Vancouver city archives are hidden from the public until 2025.
As many as seven politicians are seriously pondering a run to become tomorrow’s leader of Today’s BC Liberals.
Christy Clark’s July 28-announced resignation from politics ignited (and, in a few cases, reignited) a flurry of exploring, organizing and fundraising. Some of it had been happening under-the-radar since late last year, all of it can benefit from the NDP’s delay in reforming campaign finance laws.
Liberal sources tell theBreaker to watch out for announcements soon from the following.
Andrew Wilkinson
Wilkinson has been signing up members for months. That November transit shelter ad campaign in his Quilchena riding may have been about more than just the May 9 election in the safest BC Liberal seat in the province. The doctor and lawyer has been acting as a leader since before the election, subbing for cabinet colleagues at photo ops and media interviews. His recent crashing of a news conference by his Attorney General successor, David Eby, was another experiment in heightening his profile.
Jas Johal
Clockwise from top: Sullivan, Johal, Falcon, Stone, Moore, Wilkinson and Watts (centre).
The Tsawwassen-based reporter-cum-LNG lobbyist narrowly won the Richmond-Queensborough seat on May 9 and was briefly in cabinet as citizens’ services minister. He knows it is too soon for him to be a party leader, but would be making the bid for the sake of raising profile. His other purpose? To support Wilkinson, and help put him over the top on the final ballot.
Kevin Falcon
The former Gordon Campbell loyalist is on the fence, which is frustrating party insiders who believe the 2011 runner-up can win this time. Falcon faces a dilemma. Does he want to leave his comfortable position with developer Anthem Properties to return to B.C.’s political wars? He may be chomping at the bit, after watching the party languish under Clark.
James Moore
In Stephen Harper’s Conservative goverment, Moore was once the senior minister for B.C. He has a background in talk radio and is an effective communicator and debater. Moore now enjoys a lucrative job with the Dentons law firm, as a senior business advisor, but he has formed a three-person exploratory committee to ponder a run for the leadership.
Todd Stone
Unlike Moore, ex-Transportation Minister Stone is a shaky communicator. He also has the baggage of the Triple Delete scandal that emanated from his ministerial office. What sets him apart from the other six is geography. That is the main reason why Interior Liberals are pressuring Stone, to throw his hat in the ring and be the voice for the rest of the province.
Sam Sullivan
The one-term Vancouver mayor and two-term MLA is forming a team. He knows he is not a frontrunner, but thinks he has a chance if the heavyweights split votes.
Dianne Watts
The former, three-term Surrey mayor became one of only two federal Tories elected in a riding touching the Pacific Ocean in 2015 (Richmond incumbent Alice Wong was the other). Despite her recruitment by Harper, she can also appeal to social liberals. She faces a rough ride, because heavyweights in the party are already forming an “Anyone But Dianne” plan. Rich Coleman and Mary Polak, especially, blanch at the thought of Watts winning. They fear she would run a top-to-bottom reform of the party.
Watts and new Conservative leader Andrew Scheer were featured attractions at a $100-per-person fundraiser at former Ritchie Brothers industrial auctioneer Russell Cmolik’s South Surrey mansion on July 30. Her successor at city hall, Linda Hepner, showed up to the garden party with Liberal powerbroker Patrick Kinsella, who was in and out within 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, more questions than answers after Clark’s swansong news conference on July 31.
She tried to portray herself as choosing her destiny. Pierre Trudeau had a walk in the snow. Gordon Campbell had a walk on a beach, in California. Clark had a walk on a beach in Penticton. But her political fate was already out of her control.
Party backers had been paying for polling for months and the results were not good. Clark was especially weak among young adults, women, and college-educated males.
Many of those backers sighed in relief when she failed to convince Lt. Gov. Judith Guichon to call an election on June 29. Their polling pointed to an easy and massive Horgan NDP majority in the low 60s, had there been a second 2017 election this summer.
Based on their projections, the Liberals would have fallen from 43 to approximately 24 seats and the Greens cut to two, from three.
Christy Clark was a walking, talking contradiction.
On her 2,345th day as BC Liberal leader — 10 days after becoming the ex-premier — she shocked the province and announced her resignation from politics.
She loved to campaign. But govern? Not so much.
She was a political animal who didn’t want to be in the capital city. She called Victoria a “sick culture” and cancelled the Legislature sitting last fall, to campaign and fundraise instead. She really loved to raise money for the party from corporations because it meant a $50,000-a-year bonus and a sport utility vehicle provided by a donor.
Clark and Coleman, December 2016.
She preached fiscal responsibilty, but scooped millions of dollars out of the public treasury to spend on advertising campaigns and events, like the Times of India Film Awards, which were strategically designed to help the party gain votes at election time.
When the NDP was in power in the 1990s, it was a sin to waste money on such activities. But when she had her hands on the purse, there was no limit.
She sported a pink T-shirt for a photo op to battle bullying in schools on the last Wednesday every February, but did nothing to give B.C.’s downtrodden a voice. She prolonged the tradition of party discipline, which made her the bully in chief.
She came to power promising openness, but ran a government where her staff trained others to not write things down, delete what they did write down and use non-government email and apps to evade freedom of information laws.
She was a career politician who enjoyed an interlude as an open line radio talkshow host. But, as premier, she refused invitations to be a guest on open line radio in the province’s biggest markets.
She pledged to be a leader who wouldn’t run away, but when scandal visited — and it visited often — she made herself scarce for the first 24 to 48 hours, hoping the media and public would move onto something else. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
In the midst of a real estate bubble, driven by massive inflows of Chinese money, and rising homelessness, she left her Mount Pleasant house and moved to a bigger, posher one in Dunbar registered to a party donor connected to one of her biggest supporters.
She represented a riding in Kelowna, but never followed through on a promise to buy a house there. Where did she stay on those rare occasions when she visited Kelowna? She spent on Galiano Island vacation property instead.
She was fond of repeating the jobs and families mantra. She gave many government jobs and contracts to friends of the party. Her ex-husband Mark Marissen and one of her brothers, Bruce Clark, were not only her inner circle, but powerful influences in the party.
After the election, she pretended to be humble and threw a hail mary with that embarrassing “clone speech” that adopted the heart of the NDP and Green platforms. Instead of driving a wedge into the alliance, it ignited an identity crisis in the Liberal camp; her party’s conservative wing felt betrayed. She claimed she listened to B.C.’s divided populace, which wanted politics done differently. But that was all talk. She only wanted another election and the Lieutenant Governor, a Liberal rancher, wouldn’t put up with her nonsense.
Clark liked to lecture her NDP opponents on the qualities of a true leader, which include not hiding or running away. Unlike Bill Vander Zalm, Mike Harcourt, Glen Clark and Gordon Campbell, Clark’s resignation was a two-step process with the second part delivered by news release.
Career politician Rich Coleman became the interim leader in the most awkward fashion. At a news conference with caucus standing behind him in Penticton, he was on the verge of tears and stumbled over his words. “What she’s given this province should never be forgiven… forgotten.”
Coleman as interim leader could be a tantalizing prospect if Horgan wanted to call a snap election and convert his minority government into a majority. The Langley bloviator is tied inextricably to the ultimate Liberal power broker, Patrick Kinsella, and has extensive political baggage. Many believed Coleman to have been the real premier since 2011, much like Dick Cheney was to the George W. Bush White House. Coleman would be such a convenient target, that the biggest challenge for a quickie NDP campaign would be limiting the number of attack ads.
Look for ex-Finance Minister Kevin Falcon to attempt a comeback in a leadership race. Former Advanced Education Minister and Attorney General Andrew Wilkinson has acted like a leader for months and is exploring a run. Could a reform-minded outsider emerge? Or could the post-election in-fighting lead to a split in the free enterprise coalition and resurgence of the B.C. Conservative Party (which has a convention scheduled for Sept. 30)?
This is not the year that the party had in mind. It lost its majority on May 9. Lost a confidence vote on June 29. Lost power on July 18. It lost its leader on July 28. And the RCMP investigation into illegal donations from lobbyists is ongoing.
The 35th Premier of British Columbia from March 14, 2011 to July 18, 2017 shocked the province just a week and a half into her new role as opposition leader.
Christy Clark quit the helm of the B.C. Liberal Party and MLA for Kelowna West on July 28.
The Dunbar resident had vowed to remain as opposition leader against NDP Premier John Horgan, who held a narrow, one-seat edge with the help of the Green Party. But, as theBreaker exclusively reported on July 14, a mutiny was brewing. Clark was blamed for her party’s loss of its majority status on the May 9 election day. That led to the June 29 no confidence vote and the end of the 16-year BC Liberal dynasty.
A party source told theBreaker that Clark no longer felt wanted by caucus and was tired of being blamed. So she chose to quit. Horgan’s horde will have a two-seat cushion, at least until a by-election is called to replace Clark. Expect a leadership convention early in the new year.
Clark’s resignation was delivered to party members and media by email, Twitter and Facebook on the last Friday of July. Nicknamed “Premier Photo Op,” Clark did not go before cameras to deliver the news.
The younger brother of reclusive Vancouver Whitecaps FC owner Greg Kerfoot was sentenced to 13 years in jail on July 27 in a Seattle courtroom, in a case prosecuted by the grandson of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi.
Kevin Donald Kerfoot led a cross-border drug smuggling operation in 2005, in which he directed others to trade 41 kilograms of cocaine (bound for Canada) for 20 pounds of escstasy (bound for the U.S.). His subordinates were caught and pointed to Kerfoot as their leader. Kerfoot battled extradition for a decade and U.S. authorities believe he was behind last summer’s attempted murder of one of his subordinates after he served a 54-month sentence.
Kerfoot, 53, pleaded guilty in April in U.S. District Court in Seattle to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and ecstasy. The lead attorney on the case was Vincent T. Lombardi.
Court documents say that although Kerfoot was entitled to contest his extradition in Canada, he was “not entitled to obstruct justice in doing so — and he clearly did.”
“Kerfoot repeatedly suborned perjury, and likely ordered the attempted murder of one cooperating witness,” said the sentencing report.
That was in reference to accomplice Reginald Purdom, who was shot in Kelowna by a cyclist while he drove a car on Aug. 2, 2016. (A sentencing report explains in a footnote that Purdom is no longer using that name and refers to him only as R.P.)
Tyrone Reynolds McGee was charged with attempted murder, but is apparently not cooperating.
The document alleges that Kerfoot ordered the hit in an attempt to silence R.P. during the extradition process.
“According to a later interview, R.P. had fallen back into drug use and drug trafficking, including with Kerfoot. On August 2, 2016 – approximately two weeks after Kerfoot lost his intermediate appeal of his extradition – Kerfoot asked R.P. to go meet with another drug trafficker to pick up narcotics in a parking lot in British Columbia. While R.P. was waiting in his vehicle, a man on a bicycle pulled up next to him and shot him seven to eight times with semi-automatic pistol equipped with a silencer.
“Amazingly, R.P. survived the shooting. He managed to put his vehicle in gear and run down the shooter before he could reload. The shooter also survived and is pending trial in Canada for the attempted murder. According to the RCMP, he has refused to make any statement about whom he was working for, and the investigation is ongoing.
The report said there is nothing in Kerfoot’s background to mitigate the circumstances.
Greg Kerfoot (Santa Ono, Twitter)
“Unlike many defendants who come before this court, Kerfoot appears to have had every advantage growing up. His parents, by his own account, were loving and provided for him. His brother is a wildly successful businessperson, who also provided Kerfoot with many opportunities to make a lawful living. Kerfoot appears to have willfully chosen a life of crime.”
In an unrelated case, Kevin Kerfoot was accused of failing to repay a $115,000 debt last fall. In B.C. Supreme Court documents filed Sept. 23, 2016, Eric Dutcyvich of Port McNeill claimed Kerfoot, who was residing at a house on 105th Avenue in Surrey, and a Langley-based vodka company owed $115,456.64.
Greg Kerfoot, who is believed to be 57, is a software billionaire and BC Liberal donor with houses in West Vancouver and Kelowna. He is a close friend of ex-Premier Christy Clark, who represents a Kelowna riding, but lives in a Dunbar house registered to Kerfoot business associate Nevin Sangha.
The massive Petronas Pacific NorthWest LNG plant will not be built.
It is no longer pining for the fjords. It is an ex-proposal.
The Malaysian state oil company chose to make the announcement July 25, upstaging NDP Premier John Horgan’s meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.
Coleman at a Petronas plant in Malaysia in 2013. (BC Gov)
In the words of Petronas, the $36 billion project, which included an $11 billion plant near Prince Rupert and $6.5 billion natural gas pipeline, had been under “total review” since last year, even though the Trudeau Liberals gave it conditional approval last Sept. 27.
Petronas claimed the cancellation was all about economics and not about politics. But the week-old BC Liberal opposition claimed otherwise. It blamed the week-old Green-supported NDP minority government.
The Liberals trotted out two rookie MLAs to slam the NDP — camera-ready, ex-LNG lobbyist Jas Johal (Richmond-Queensborough) and Ellis Ross (Skeena), the taxi boat operator-cum-Haisla First Nation chief councillor who was natural gas minister for all of five weeks.
Rich Coleman, the original natural gas minister, who held the portfolio for four years, used Twitter to blame Green-NDP “imposed market uncertainty.”
But how much did Coleman know about the announcement ahead of time? A lot, according to a senior BC Liberal source, who told theBreaker that Coleman was involved in the decision.
Coleman has yet to respond to phone and email messages from theBreaker.
At a Sept. 20, 2016 fundraiser on Granville Island, Coleman gave party members no indication that a change in government would threaten the project.
Instead, Coleman said that the economics of the project had changed so radically since 2012, that Petronas had returned to the drawing board and delayed its final investment decision. In a recording leaked to theBreaker, which is published below, Coleman is heard saying that he needed to meet with executives to “restart our discussions in and around our project development agreement which we signed with them.”
“Everything in the market has changed, the price of steel and everything else, so they have to go back out and re-bid it and then decide if they go to a final investment decision. But I can tell you this, that the numbers have really got to be tightened down, because the price of gas in Asia right now is so cheap, because of the price of oil. Just about nobody is globally competitive unless they have a long-term contract that they signed before the market crashed,” Coleman said.
“I know the number they have to get to in order to make it financially viable, I think they’re about 50 cents to a dollar away from that, but it’s a lot better than it was six months ago… We really need them them to be able to figure out the numbers,” he told party members.”
Coleman claimed Petronas had already spent billions. “They’re in, it’s just a question of price, but it’s very complicated stuff. But I’m still optimistic.”
Coleman went to Kuala Lumpur on Oct. 17-18 and met with Petronas executives, including president Datuk Wan Zulkiflee Ariffin and PNW LNG president Adnan Zainal Abidin. Coleman’s March 15 agenda indicates he met with Abidin, there are no other meetings visible between March 1 and May 31. Deputy Minister Dave Nikolejsin’s only meeting during the period with the proponent was March 7 with Datuk Anuar Taib, the CEO of the Petronas upstream department.
In March, Ariffin was quoted in the Financial Post saying that Petronas was “doing a total review of the project, and taking into account all the cost optimization options. That is still ongoing.”
In April, as the May 9 election loomed, Bloomberg reported that the total review continued, but Petronas was pondering Ridley Island as an alternate site. On June 24, five days before the Liberals government fell in a no confidence vote, the B.C. Lions opened their 2017 home schedule and there was no PNW LNG sideline advertising. Even with the federal approval in its pocket, Petronas had quietly ended its highly visible sponsorship after the 2016 season.
UPDATE (July 27): The database for the Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists shows that PNW LNG never registered to lobby anyone in the new Green-supported NDP government, which was sworn-in July 18 after toppling the BC Liberals in a June 29 no confidence vote.
National PR lobbyist MacInnis
In fact, the lobbying database shows that Matthew MacInnis of National Public Relations registered to lobby for three days only, July 24-26, and named only two targets — ex-Premier Christy Clark and ex-Natural Gas minister Rich Coleman — with the intention of arranging meetings to “provide an update about the proposed (PNW LNG) project.” The registry requires lobbyists to report only their intentions, not whether meetings ever took place.
MacInnis’s registration shows he worked as a BC Liberal government aide from 2008 to 2012, including as Premier Gordon Campbell’s communications coordinator. He is also listed as the BC Liberal Party’s communications chair. MacInnis did not immediately respond to theBreaker’s request for comment.
PNW CEO Abidin registered June 6 for vice-president of external affairs Tessa Gill to target outgoing BC Liberal energy minister Bill Bennett and various staff of labour minister Shirley Bond and advanced education minister Andrew Wilkinson. The registration was not changed to reflect Clark’s June 12-sworn Liberal cabinet or the July 18-sworn NDP cabinet.
Pipe dream?
Petronas’s minority partners in PNW LNG included Japan Petroleum Export Corp., PetroleumBrunei, Indian Oil Corp. and Sinopec-China Huadian.
Chinese president Xi Jinping visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in April. On May 11, the Trump administration announced it was opening the doors wide to LNG buyers.
“The United States welcomes China, as well as any of our trading partners, to receive imports of LNG from the United States,” said a Trump administration statement. “The United States treats China no less favourably than other non-[free trade agreement] trade partners with regard to LNG export authorizations. Companies from China may proceed at any time to negotiate all types of contractual arrangement with U.S. LNG exporters, including long-term contracts, subject to the commercial considerations of the parties. As of April 25, 2017, the U.S. Department of Energy had authorized 19.2 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas exports to non-FTA countries.”
May 11 was, coincidentally, two days after the B.C. election. The BC Liberal campaign included attack ads that featured Trump’s image and Christy Clark was portrayed as the only leader who would stand-up to the U.S. president in the latest dispute over softwood lumber tariffs. The U.S. Consulate in Vancouver was following the election closely and its daily cables to the State Department would have included anything from the campaign trail directly relevant to U.S. interests.
BC Liberal attack ad taunted Trump, who opened LNG exports to China.
During the 2013 election campaign, Clark predicted a $100 billion LNG bonanza for the province and three plants would be up and running by 2020. With the cancellation of Petronas and the delays for Shell and Chevron/Woodside projects in Kitimat, only one of the 18 proposed may be built.
The Singaporean owner of the $1.6 billion Woodfibre LNG near Squamish gave a green light on the opening day of the BC Liberal Party’s November 2016 convention. But a profit-sharing deal isn’t yet done with the Squamish Nation.
A mid-July report by the National Energy Board painted a dim picture of Canada’s prospects to play catch-up to LNG market leaders, such as Russia, Qatar and Australia.
It called Canada a “late entrant” to the global LNG market, despite an abundance of natural gas and prospects for long-range demand from Asia.
“Canada has yet to emerge as a significant participant in global LNG markets. There are no LNG export projects currently under construction in Canada, and only one of the smaller projects has decided to move ahead,” said the report.
The report said historically low global prices for natural gas and ample supply “make it challenging for Canadian LNG projects to secure long-term contracts.” Spot price trends mean it is more difficult to finance LNG megaprojects. Projects under development are competing for labour and materials, driving up development costs.
“Canadian project proponents are concerned about cost overruns observed in other global projects. Canadian LNG projects would generally be greenfield sites and incur higher costs than U.S. projects built on existing LNG import terminal sites,” reported the NEB.
“Disadvantages facing Canadian projects include high costs to develop projects in remote locations with limited infrastructure, and, where the construction of new pipelines is required to supply the necessary gas. With LNG prices falling in recent years, the margins needed to justify this type of capital-intensive development have eroded. Increased competition has also made it difficult for Canadian projects to sign long-term supply contracts.”
The former Yaletown playboy who launched an online gambling giant in Vancouver reached a plea bargain with United States authorities to avoid jail.
Court documents from the United States District Court in Maryland show that Judge Catherine Blake agreed July 14 to fine Bodog.com founder Calvin Ayre $500,025 and sentence him to one-year unsupervised probation. Antigua-based Ayre pleaded guilty to the misdemeanour of being an accessory after the fact to transmission of wagering information between June 2005 and December 2011.
Online gambling pioneer Calvin Ayre in Vancouver (CalvinAyre.com)
Ayre and three others, who were charged in February 2012, had faced up to 25 years in jail each for conducting an illegal sports gambling business and conspiracy to launder money. Those charges were dropped.
The plea agreement stated that Bodog “provided marketing assistance to entities that accepted funds from people located in Maryland and elsewhere to open accounts.”
“This activity constituted the business of betting or wagering information on a sporting event. Furthermore, the representatives of the Bodog brand participated in a wire communication in which information assisting the placing of bets was transmitted, which was made across state lines or from the United States to a foreign country.”
Ayre agreed not to make any claim to the $66,113,389.78 seized from various accounts. His probation is unsupervised and the mandatory drug test waived because he is not a U.S. resident or citizen.
U.S. authorities seized the Bodog.com domain in 2012, but relinquished it for $100,000 under Ayre’s plea deal. The Feb. 21, 2000-registred domain was updated July 17, 2017 via Safenames House based in Milton Keynes, England. Other iterations of the Bodog brand have continued to exist online.
U.S. authorities originally alleged that Ayre, James Philip, David Ferguson and Derrick Maloney ran an illegal online sports gambling business between June 9, 2005 and Jan. 6, 2012, that moved funds from Bodog accounts in Switzerland, England, Malta, Canada and elsewhere, to pay winnings to gamblers, and to pay media brokers and advertisers located in the U.S.
“The conspirators directed payment processors to send at least $100 million by wire and by check to gamblers located in Maryland and elsewhere,” said a news release from prosecutors in February 2012. It also said that Bodog paid more than $42 million to advertise to U.S. gamblers from 2005 to 2008.
A 2006 Forbes magazine feature, under the headline “Catch Me If You Can,” said Bodog handled $7.3 billion in online bets in 2005, triple its 2004 volume.
Forbes reported: “Ayre says all this betting gave him sales of $210 million and that he took 26% of the revenue to the bottom line. Whats his business worth? Two similar ventures that are publicly traded (in Europe) go for well over 18 times trailing earnings. At that multiple Bodog, along with other assets, gives Ayre a net worth of at least $1 billion.”
Bodog sponsored the 2011 Grey Cup at public-owned B.C. Place Stadium and advertised its free-to-play promotional website on the stadium’s exterior video boards in 2013, even though B.C. Lottery Corporation has the statutory monopoly for online gambling in the province. Bodog sponsored the Canadian Gaming Summit at the Vancouver Convention Centre in late June. During a rare appearance at an industry event, Ayre slammed the B.C. government-run gambling system.
“B.C. Lottery Corporation is actually an operator, not a regulator; they’re an unregulated operator from my view of the world. Regulation is something that should be put in place here in B.C.,” Ayre said in an interview on CalvinAyre.com.
“They have to put proper third-party regulators in place, who would then regulate their company as well and then open it up to the private sector.”
The Canadian Criminal Code says it is illegal for anyone — other than Crown corporations like BCLC — to take bets online from Canadians or advertise gambling websites. Federal authorities have been reluctant to enforce laws against grey market operators like Bodog, which have spent millions of dollars on advertising with Canadian sports channels. The Kahnawake Mohawk reserve near Montreal became a global hub for various online gambling operators, including Bodog.
Ayre and Bodog operations are now based in Antigua, a Caribbean country that became home to another Vancouver website that broke the law in 1999.
Starnet International forfeited $4 million and was fined $100,000 after pleading guilty in 2001 to keeping or controlling a device for recording or registering bets.
On June 13, B.C.’s Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit held a news conference to reveal that it arrested nine people after a year-long investigation into money laundering through B.C. casinos that involved an organized crime group with links to China.
theBreaker asked the CFSEU spokeswoman, Sgt. Brenda Winpenny, for an update on July 19. “Once charges are laid, we will release an update,” she said by email.
On July 18, B.C. Premier John Horgan named David Eby the new Attorney General, with responsibility for BCLC and the Gaming Policy Enforcement Branch. In the June 29-defeated BC Liberal government, ex-Finance Minister Mike de Jong oversaw the marketing and regulation of gambling.
release. 
