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Bob Mackin

The Pakistani climate change protester who pleaded guilty to repeatedly blocking traffic and reneging on his promises to stop must wait longer to be sentenced.  

Judge Reginald Harris reserved decision in March after Crown prosecutor Ellen Leno asked him to send Muhammad Zain Ul Haq to jail for 90 days and impose 18 months probation. Haq’s lead defence lawyer Ben Isitt argued for a conditional discharge.

Muhammad Zain Ul Haq, a Pakistani national outside the North Fraser Pretrial Centre (Save Old Growth)

On May 31 in Vancouver Provincial Court, Harris — citing his commitments to complex, ongoing trials — delayed sentencing Haq. Harris suggested he could have time to deliver his verdict in late June, but gave the 22-year-old permission to move from Vancouver to Victoria so that he can live with the fellow protester that he married last month. 

Haq pleaded guilty to five charges of mischief for his role in illegal Extinction Rebellion road and bridge blockades in 2021 and one charge of breaching a release order for the August 2022 Stop Fracking Around protest on the Cambie Bridge. Haq separately faces deportation to Pakistan and a one-year ban on returning to Canada for violating the terms of his visa to study at Simon Fraser University. 

Isitt told the court that Haq married Sophia Papp on April 29 in Vancouver and that the court and the Crown have no role in supervising who Haq marries. 

“He’s chosen Miss Papp as his life partner,” Isitt said. “They are going to be life partners, they will likely be talking about the climate crisis, they’ll likely talk about how to raise awareness.”

Haq has been residing in Vancouver with activists Janice Oakley and Quetzo Herejk, who posted a $4,000 surety to the court. Leno opposed the application and argued that arrangement should continue. 

“So the Crown’s concern is we’re taking him from a stable environment with some mature supervision that seems to have been working, and it would disrupt that and potentially put him in a different location with influences that are less positive,” Leno said. 

Protester Sophie Papp vandalizing the Gastown Steam Clock in August 2022 (Instagram/Stop Fracking Around)

Leno showed Harris photographic evidence of Papp with Haq at last August’s Stop Fracking Around protest where Haq violated the terms of his release from previous arrests. 

Also last August, Papp publicly poured molasses on the Gastown Steam Clock in another anti-pipeline protest. Last November, a judge gave Papp an absolute discharge after a mischief charge from a Victoria protest last June. 

In March of this year, Leno said, Papp helped videotape a protester pouring pink paint on the Royal B.C. Museum’s woolly mammoth for another climate change campaign. 

Harris approved Haq’s application because there is no evidence Haq had broken the conditions of his bail during the last eight months. 

“I’m satisfied that it could be amended, I’m satisfied it’s not going to upset the applecart, he’s just got too much to lose by non-compliance at all,” Harris said. 

In January 2022, Haq and four others incorporated Eco-Mobilization Canada, a federal not-for-profit behind the Extinction Rebellion splinter group Save Old Growth. Haq had boasted last August in a New York Times story that Save Old Growth received US$170,000 in grants from the California-based Climate Emergency Fund.

In March, the court heard that should Haq succeed in overturning his deportation on compassionate and humanitarian grounds, he has a job offer from environmentalist Tzeporah Berman at the charity Stand.earth.

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Bob Mackin The Pakistani climate change protester who

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Doctors at four Fraser Health Authority hospitals, including Surrey Memorial, have raised the alarm about a staffing shortage that they say is putting the lives of patients in jeopardy.

But the NDP-appointed chair, once the province’s most-powerful labour leader, isn’t talking about it. A reporter requested an interview last week with Jim Sinclair and the Fraser Health Authority communications department scheduled it for May 30 in the afternoon. But one of its employees cancelled late in the morning, due to unspecified other commitments.

Jim Sinclair at the 2015 BC Fed convention (BC Fed/YouTube)

Health Minister Adrian Dix appointed Sinclair in September 2017, two months after John Horgan’s Green-supported NDP minority government took over from the BC Liberals. 

Sinclair was the president of the B.C. Federation of Labour, which donated $1.4 million to the party from 2005 until 2017, when the NDP banned donations from unions and corporations. Sinclair has also made more than $18,000 in individual contributions to the NDP through 2022. 

During the year ended March 31, 2022, Sinclair received $29,000 in meeting fees and a $15,000 stipend as chair. He chairs a board that includes nine other government appointees, each receiving a basic $7,500 stipend plus $500 for each full-day meeting. 

Together, they oversee an organization that had a $5.14 billion budget last year, with 84% of the revenue directly from the Ministry of Health. 

But Sinclair is not the only board member with an NDP pedigree.

Opreet Kang was appointed at the same time as Sinclair in 2017. Kang, a $1,778 NDP donor since 2016, is also a director of the NDP-aligned Broadbent Institute political research and training charity who spent 2011 to 2018 on the board of Vision Vancouver. 

Inderjeet Hundal is an NDP supporter from Dix’s Kingsway riding. During the 1990s, the NDP appointed Hundal to the Workers’ Compensation Review Board. The $3,935 NDP donor since 2005 became the director of seniors’ care with the Progressive Intercultural Community Services Society in 2006. 

Opreet Kang (LinkedIn)

Ramya Hosak is a fundraising executive at the Kidney Foundation of B.C. and Yukon and co-founded the Young and Type 1 support group for people with type 1 diabetes. That’s where she met husband Mark Hosak, a former Vision Vancouver canvasser, aide to ex-NDP MP Fin Donnelly and campaign worker with ex-Mayor Kennedy Stewart’s Forward Together party. In February, Mark Hosak became an aide to NDP Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon. 

The name Manpreet Grewal appears in the Elections BC database for a $5,000 donation in 2009, but the Fraser Health director and Multicultural and Immigrant Integration Services director said by email that she has never made a donation to any political party. 

When Dix was the NDP leader, he was frequently critical of the BC Liberal government rewarding its donors, campaign workers and former caucus members. 

For instance, in May 2014, the year after losing the election, Dix called the $140,000-a-year earthquake preparation oversight job for ex-solicitor general John Les “a wasteful, extra superfluous, pork-barreling, double-dipping patronage appointment.” Premier Christy Clark withdrew Les’s job offer. 

A 2013 Carleton University thesis on the history of patronage called Canada’s system unique from the U.K. and U.S.

Inderjeet Hundal (Fraser Health)

“Patronage has a long and multifaceted history in Canadian politics,” wrote the author, David Banoub. “It has been used as a tool to reward party support, as a weapon to punish opponents, and as a strategy to extend party goals into the different regions across the nation. It has been supported as a legitimate form of governing and challenged as a form of corruption that stood in the way of bureaucratic progress.” 

Published documents for the most-recent public meeting of the Sinclair-led board from February include an update on creating a Fraser Health Regional Health and Safety Committee. The management and union group was scheduled to meet for the first time in April and then once every quarter. 

The board also received an upbeat report on its brand reputation, boasting nearly a million visitors to its careers website in the last quarter of 2022’s calendar year. It trumpeted a better than average rating on the Indeed job search site, just behind Vancouver Coastal Health. 

“Good news: All of our career channels (except Twitter) are trending upwards in audience growth,” the report said. “This allows our brand, jobs, and content to reach more potential candidates in the global market.” 

That reputation is now at stake, along with the lives of patients, at Fraser Health’s Surrey, Langley, New Westminster and Port Moody hospitals. 

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Bob Mackin Doctors at four Fraser Health Authority

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A Provincial Court judge in Vancouver banned a telecommunications installer on June 1 from organizing or participating in protest roadblocks for the next two years. 

Brent Eichler, 56, pleaded guilty to breaching his probation at an anti-natural gas protest last Aug. 15 on the Cambie Bridge.

Brent Eichler (right) with Muhammad Zain Ul Haq (Instagram/Extinction Rebellion Vancouver)

Eichler had received a conditional discharge and 200 hours of community work service in October 2021 after pleading guilty to mischief for his role in a February 2021 Extinction Rebellion protest that closed the Hornby and Smithe intersection for several hours. His probation stipulated that he must not block or impede any traffic for two years. 

Eichler, who gained media attention for hunger-striking with Save Old Growth in 2022, formed the Stop Fracking Around splinter group last summer and organized a protest march from Vancouver city hall to the CBC studios via the Cambie Bridge.

Crown prosecutor Ellen Leno said that Eichler was under the “simple condition to not block or impede the traffic,” but he marched on the bridge and was arrested on a warrant in September. 

“His moral culpability is at the highest end, it was planned and deliberate and he was an organizer. He was breaching a court order, and he has a history of breaching court orders, as evidenced by the criminal contempt conviction,” said Leno, referring to the 25-hour community work service sentence for breaching the Trans Mountain Pipeline protest injunction in 2018. 

Eichler’s defence lawyer Ben Isitt told Judge James Sutherland that Eichler followed the march on the Cambie Bridge in a vehicle so that he could assist elderly or physically infirm protesters. The group paused mid-span for about 20 minutes for speeches. Eichler got out of the vehicle with the intent to de-escalate a confrontation between a protester and a reporter. 

“That’s where the breach occurred and he regrets having done it,” Isitt said. “He was strongly inclined to try this allegation, but, ultimately, when he learned of the Crown’s position on sentence, he was able to enter a guilty plea.”

Leno said the bridge is critical infrastructure needed for police, fire and ambulance vehicles when “minutes matter.” She said the specific march delayed a police vehicle that was responding to an unrelated emergency. 

Eichler’s written statement to the court said he did not intend to break the law, but apologized to police and the courts, and for disrupting the public. 

Vancouver Provincial Court (courthouses.co)

After the joint Crown-defence submission, Sutherland sentenced Eichler to four days in jail, but gave him credit for three days served and waived custody for the fourth. Terms of his two-year probation include 40 hours community work service, a $100 victim surcharge fine and orders that he not intentionally block or impede traffic, cyclists or pedestrians on any B.C. road or highway and that he must not plan or organize any event that disrupts or interferes with the regular use of public or private roads, highways or bridges. 

“Ultimately, his motives were altruistic, in that he wasn’t gaining personally, as much as he was attempting to make a change collectively for society,” Sutherland said. “As misguided as those methods may have been, when they’re viewed in the context of the collective march.”

Earlier, Leno told the court that in 2021, police arrested 96 people and Crown charged 71 individuals for illegally blocking roadways during Extinction Rebellion protests. Eighteen of those charged had more than one court file. In 2022, Save Old Growth organized six roadblocks in January, eight in April and four in June. Save Old Growth briefly paused actions at the end of last June, but returned to block traffic on the Lions Gate Bridge in October. Forty-eight Save Old Growth protesters were arrested and 34 charged, with 16 of them having multiple files.

In a separate hearing on May 31, Judge Reginald Harris blamed his heavy schedule of trials for delaying the sentencing of Save Old Growth leader Muhammad Zain Ul Haq. 

Harris did give Haq permission to vary his bail so that he could move to from Vancouver to Victoria and live with fellow protester Sophia Papp. The couple married on April 29. 

Haq is facing deportation to his native Pakistan and a one-year exclusion from Canada for violating the terms of his visa to study at Simon Fraser University. 

In January 2022, Haq and four others incorporated Eco-Mobilization Canada, a federal not-for-profit company behind Save Old Growth. Haq had boasted last August in a New York Times story that Save Old Growth received US$170,000 in grants from the California-based Climate Emergency Fund.

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Bob Mackin A Provincial Court judge in Vancouver

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A dozen TransLink Mayors’ Council members and their executive director spent $46,000 on last month’s lobbying trip to Ottawa.

But the Mayors’ Council is already plotting at least one return to the nation’s capital this fall to continue the quest for billions of federal taxpayer dollars to expand TransLink.

TransLink Mayor’ Council members in Ottawa (TransLink/Twitter)

“Being present in Ottawa during the traditional pre-budget period will be important to ensuring our asks are heard and pressure for action felt,” said a report to the June 1 council meeting. 

The report said between May 15 and 17, the delegation met with 22 Members of Parliament, including Infrastructure Minister Dominic LeBlanc and his Parliamentary Secretary Jennifer O’Connell, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre and six other Conservative MPs, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and two other NDP MPs, and BC Liberal caucus chair Taleeb Noormohamed and seven other Liberal MPs. They also met with the chief of staff to Transportation Minister Omar Alghabra. 

The Mayors’ Council hosted a Parliament Hill reception for eight MPs, staff from the Prime Minister and Finance Minister’s offices, and representatives of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and Canadian Urban Transit Association. 

The cost of the Metro Vancouver Transit Days in Ottawa was $45,857. It’s part of a $500,000 campaign coordinated by contracted lobbying outfit Earnscliffe Strategies. 

Executive director Mike Buda had previously declined to disclose the budget for the trip.

“At least one and likely two more trips to Ottawa are proposed in fall 2023 to leverage Ottawa’s focus on the fall economic statement (usually released at the end of October) and the pre-budget consultation period (late-September to February),” the report said.

Port Coquitlam Mayor and Mayors’ Council chair Brad West led the delegation, with mayors of Anmore, Burnaby, Langley Township, Maple Ridge, New Westminster, North Vancouver City, North Vancouver District, Pitt Meadows, Port Moody and Richmond. Delta was represented by Coun. Dylan Kruger, instead of Mayor George Harvie. 

Kruger also works as a senior associate with the Kirk and Co. communications and government relations firm, whose website lists TransLink among its clients.

The delegation went to Parliament Hill with a long wish list for help in funding TransLink’s $21 billion, long-term plan. That includes doubling bus service, matching SeaBus with SkyTrain service hours, building a bus rapid transit system, expanding SkyTrain to the University of B.C., planning for Metrotown to North Shore rapid transit, and building a gondola up Burnaby Mountain.

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Bob Mackin A dozen TransLink Mayors’ Council members

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At somewhere around a quarter-of-a-billion-dollars, hosting part of the FIFA World Cup 26 in Vancouver will be the most-expensive event to promote B.C. tourism since the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

B.C. Auditor General Michael Pickup (OAG/YouTube)

In the years before the “games of ice and snow,” the Office of the Auditor General regularly identified risks to B.C. taxpayers and gauged spending on construction and operations. 

Is the current Auditor General, Michael Pickup, thinking of doing the same before the biggest soccer tournament in history comes to B.C.? 

During a May 30 news conference in Victoria about his audit of $41 million of community tourism grants, a reporter asked Pickup whether he would examine World Cup spending over the next three years.  

Pickup said his office is always “keeping an eye to new programs where significant expenditures are occurring,” but chooses its targets. 

“If you look at government as being a 70 billion-plus organization, and our capacity to do X number of performance audits a year, clearly, it goes without saying, that we can’t be everywhere doing everything,” Pickup said. 

Pickup was pressed further, about how his predecessors followed the Olympic money, and asked whether he is concerned about the lack of transparency and the risk of fraud around the next mega-event. Instead of a direct answer, he launched into a lengthy commentary about the variety of work produced by his office, especially around pandemic spending and government-wide fraud surveys. 

“As I hit three years in this job at the end of July, we will at that point have tabled 32 reports in the three years, that’s close to 11 a year,” Pickup said. “That’s a huge volume of work, that the people in our office should be proud of having been able to achieve during a period of COVID, during a pandemic.”

He went on to say “Independence has never been an issue here, and nor is access to things that we need.”

“I have no concerns that if there’s something that we want to audit, and we make that decision based on our analysis of the environment to select a topic, we will share that in due course with folks, and that we will get what we need to be able to do that,” Pickup said.

Previous Auditors General Wayne Strelioff, Arn van Iersel and John Doyle each reported on Vancouver 2010 spending. Their reports included concerns about construction inflation, foreign exchange rate fluctuations, medical and security costs, and the size of the province’s contingency. 

In 2008, the Great Recession hit. Sponsors cut back, so governments came to the rescue with bailouts. 

By the time it wound-up in 2014, VANOC, the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee, claimed it balanced a $1.9 billion operations budget. 

FIFA’s 2026 World Cup logo for Vancouver (FIFA)

The Games were believed to have cost as much as $8 billion to build and operate.

Doyle never did a post-Games audit, the freedom of information law did not apply to VANOC and it shifted all of its files to the Vancouver Archives under the condition that board minutes and detailed financial reports be locked away from the public until the fall of 2025. 

At least five World Cup matches are coming to B.C. Place Stadium in June 2026. But the freedom of information offices at the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport, B.C. Pavilion Corp., and Vancouver city hall have refused to release copies of the hosting proposal to FIFA, host city contract with FIFA and business plan. 

Almost a year ago on June 16, 2022, when Vancouver was named among the 16 host cities in Canada, U.S. and Mexico, the province said it would cost $240 million to $260 million. In January, it said Vancouver city hall was responsible for $230 million and gave it power to levy a 2.5% tax on accommodations until 2030. Security and safety, at $73 million, is the biggest anticipated cost. 

The province has not revealed how much it plans to spend at B.C. Place, which will need a temporary grass pitch. New broadcasting facilities and expansion of luxury suites are being discussed internally. 

Additionally, the Pacific National Exhibition is aiming to build its $65 million amphitheatre in time to be the centrepiece of the city’s $20 million FIFA fan festival party zone. 

All of this spending to subsidize the Zurich-headquartered FIFA, which reported record gross revenue of US$7.6 billion for the 2019 to 2022 cycle and forecast US$11 billion for the 2023 to 2026 period. 

Sports economist Victor Matheson’s “Mega-Events: The Effect of the World’s Biggest Sporting Events on Local, Regional, and National Economies” report found large sporting events tend to supplant, rather than supplement, the regular tourist economy. 

“In other words, the economic impact of a mega-event may be large in a gross sense but the net impact may be small,” Matheson concluded.

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Bob Mackin At somewhere around a quarter-of-a-billion-dollars, hosting

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The NDP ministerial aide under investigation for breaking a municipal election law has been suspended, according to Premier David Eby. 

B.C. Prosecution Service (BCPS) announced Friday that a special prosecutor had been appointed to decide whether to charge Gurveen Dhaliwal, the New Westminster School Board chair who attended a Queensborough polling station to act as a scrutineer last Oct. 5.

Gurveen Dhaliwal (Twitter)

The Local Government Act says candidates may only visit a voting place in order to vote. The maximum penalty is a $5,000 fine and a year in jail. 

Before he left May 27 for a trade mission to Asia, Eby provided few details.

“We take this investigation incredibly seriously,” Eby told reporters. “As soon as we learned about it, we placed the staffer on administrative leave. And, at this point, it’s in the hands of the special prosecutor and certainly, we’ll continue to monitor the situation, but the staffer was immediately placed on leave.”

BCPS announced at 2 p.m. last Friday afternoon that it had appointed lawyer John Gordon on May 4 to act as special prosecutor. BCPS refused to explain why it did not issue a news release on May 5 or the following week, the last week of the Legislature’s spring session. 

Dhaliwal was appointed May 1 by cabinet order to work as the ministerial assistant to Health Minister Adrian Dix. It was not her first posting in government. In February 2021, cabinet appointed Dhaliwal to be an aide to Minister of State for Infrastructure Bowinn Ma. 

Eby was contacted by a reporter via text message in the morning of May 4, asking if he was aware that Crown counsel was considering whether to charge Dhaliwal based on the New Westminster Police Department investigation. Eby did not respond. However, in late afternoon, Eby’s deputy communications director Jimmy Smith did.

“As noted in the media, Ms. Dhaliwal has expressed that she regrets the error, and the issue has been resolved with local elections officials,” said Smith’s email.

Last October, Cheryl Greenhalgh, the chair of Dhaliwal’s Community First party — not Dhaliwal herself — issued a statement that said Dhaliwal regretted her mistake and she had intended to observe the process and provide information to other volunteer scrutineers. As for the local election officials, they told witness Jason Chan, campaign manager of the rival New West Progressives, that they had limited power and referred him to police. 

Dhaliwal won a second term on New Westminster School Board in the Oct. 15 election.

Nobody in the NDP government has explained why cabinet shuffled Dhaliwal on May 15 out of Dix’s office and into the office of Labour Minister Harry Bains. 

Dhaliwal has not responded for comment. Nobody in Eby’s office responded Monday to queries about the timeline or whether Dhaliwal remains on the payroll.

Gordon will have to decide, based on the BCPS criteria, whether it is in the public interest to charge Dhaliwal and whether there is a substantial likelihood of conviction.

Aides misbehavin’

Over the years, aides to B.C. government politicians have taken unethical risks to advance their careers or taken the fall to protect their superiors. 

Before he became an MLA, Dix was famously fired from his position as an aide to Premier Glen Clark in 1999 for backdating a memo. A Clark neighbour had allegedly fixed a deck at Clark’s house in exchange for a casino licence. Clark resigned after a conflict of interest investigation, but was acquitted of a breach of public trust charge in court. 

Dix led the NDP in the 2013 election against the BC Liberals, who often reminded him of the backdated memo scandal. Dix, however, promised an NDP government would call a public inquiry into the most-famous and costly incident that involved political aides. 

Brian Bonney, after his Jan. 31 breach of trust sentencing hearing. (Mackin)

BC Liberals Dave Basi, an aide to Finance Minister Gary Collins, and Bob Virk, an aide to Transportation Minister Judith Reid, copped a plea bargain in 2010 that stopped a trial into their role in the BC Rail privatization scandal, before Collins was due to testify in B.C. Supreme Court.

Basi and Virk, who had claimed innocence for six years, served two years of house arrest and probation. In return, the province agreed to pay their $6.2 million legal bills, despite a 2005 agreement that stated defence costs were paid in the form of a loan that must be repaid in the event of conviction.

Premier Gordon Campbell had promised to clear the air about the whole scandal, but never did. His successor, Christy Clark, simply pointed the finger at Basi and Virk. 

Dix lost an election many thought he would win. No public inquiry.

Only one charge was laid after the BC Liberals’ 2015 Triple Delete scandal, and it wasn’t for mass-deleting email. 

George Gretes lost his job in Transportation Minister Todd Stone’s office and found guilty in 2016 of lying under oath to Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham during an investigation of email purging across the Clark administration. Gretes was fined $2,500. 

Denham’s report didn’t mention Evan Southern by name, but the Clark staffer who famously kept track of FOI requests on post-it notes, rather than a computer, was subsequently transferred to party headquarters to work as director of operations. 

Southern briefly returned to Clark’s office before the NDP took over in 2017, to pick-up a $74,000 golden parachute when more than 130 BC Liberal appointees were laid-off. 

In 2018, a Provincial Court judge gave government communications director Brian Bonney nine months of house arrest after he pleaded guilty to breach of trust. 

Bonney was a middleman in the BC Liberals’ so-called Quick Wins scheme aimed at winning swing ridings in the 2013 election by targeting voters from ethnic groups. Court heard that veteran politico Bonney was not the mastermind and that two former cabinet ministers, John Yap and Harry Bloy, did not cooperate with the RCMP investigation, on advice from their lawyers. 

Going further back, Social Credit Premier Bill Bennett won another term in 1979. But it turned out that party members had been schooled before the election on how to write letters to newspaper editors, in praise of the Socreds, but under pseudonyms. 

George Lenko, the executive assistant to Deputy Premier Grace McCarthy, quit in November of that year, in what was then known as “Lettergate.”

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Militarized RCMP officer from the emergency response team and a B.C. Ambulance Service paramedic on the Edgemont overpass on May 29 (Mackin)

Gridlock on the Upper Levels Highway in North Vancouver on May 29.

Drama beneath. 

North Vancouver RCMP officers were called to the Mosquito Creek Trail around 9:30 a.m. An RCMP source tells theBreaker.news that a man was exposing himself on the trail, which is under the parallel bridges for the Upper Levels. 

The source said that when police arrived, the man fled to a high area under the two bridges. 

Emergency response team officers cross the Upper Levels Highway’s Mosquito Creek bridges on May 29 (Mackin)

The Upper Levels, part of the Trans-Canada Highway system, was closed both ways between Capilano and Delbrook for 90 minutes while more than a dozen police vehicles parked on the side of the highway and the Edgemont overpass. 

A news release from the North Vancouver RCMP said the man had makeshift weapons, became aggressive to officers and threatened harm. 

RCMP sent their integrated emergency response team and a psychologist to the scene. 

Throughout the incident, the man was yelling, but his words could not be understood from the Edgemont overpass. 

Around 1:03 p.m., a loud explosion came from under the bridges. Followed by a series of firings of projectiles.

Memorial plaque to Ryan Morales De La Costa and Douglas Lenard Glenn under the Mosquito Creek bridge (Mackin)

The man was arrested after 1:30 p.m., taken out of the trail near the William Griffin Park and Delbrook community centre and transported to Lions Gate Hospital by B.C. Ambulance Service paramedics. He was apprehended under the Mental Health Act.

The site of the incident is marked by a plaque in memory of Ryan Morales De La Costa and Douglas Lenard Glenn, two young men who died in 2002 and 2003, respectively, after falling through the gap between the bridges. 

CLICK BELOW AND WATCH VIDEO FROM THE INCIDENT

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Bob Mackin [caption id="attachment_13265" align="alignright" width="370"] Militarized RCMP

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For the week of May 28, 2023:

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s family friend David Johnston, the ex-Governor General, said no May 23 to a public inquiry into China’s meddling in Canadian elections.

Henry Chan (ParlVu)

Canadians concerned about Chinese Communist Party’s interference were shocked by the first report of the “special rapporteur.” One of them is Henry Chan, the co-founder of Saskatchewan Stands With Hong Kong. He joins host Bob Mackin on this edition of thePodcast. 

Listen to the interview. Plus Pacific Rim and Pacific Northwest headlines. 

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 May 28, 2023: Prime

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An official in the Attorney General’s ministry quietly appointed a special prosecutor for the investigation of an election violation by the New Westminster school board chair who was named an aide to Health Minister Adrian Dix.

Gurveen Dhaliwal was appointed by cabinet order on May 1 to work as a ministerial assistant in Dix’s office. Two weeks later, another cabinet order announced her transfer to the office of Labour Minister Harry Bains. Dix, Bains and Premier David Eby did not respond for comment about the reason for her transfer. 

On May 26, the B.C. Prosecution Service announced that Assistant Deputy Attorney General Peter Juk had appointed lawyer John Gordon on May 4 to provide legal advice to investigators and decide whether Dhaliwal should be charged. The prosecution service did not explain why it chose a Friday afternoon, almost three weeks after Gordon’s appointment, for the announcement. 

Dhaliwal won re-election last fall with the Community First New West party. But, during the campaign, the campaign manager for a rival party, New West Progressives, spotted Dhaliwal at the Queensborough polling station. Jason Chan confirmed that Dhaliwal was acting as a scrutineer, contrary to the Local Government Act section that states candidates may only attend a polling station to vote. The law sets a maximum $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail upon conviction. 

Dhaliwal has not responded for comment. Before election day, party chair Cheryl Greenhalgh blamed Dhaliwal’s scrutineering on a “lapse of memory” and she regretted “the mistake.”

New Westminster election officials referred Chan to the New Westminster Police Department, which investigated and forwarded a report to Crown counsel for charge assessment. 

The prosecution service’s website said: “Historically, special prosecutors have been appointed in cases involving cabinet ministers, senior public or ministry officials, senior police officers, or persons in close proximity to these individuals.”

Dhaliwal was also subject to the School Act’s oath of office, which states: “I have not, by myself or any other person, knowingly contravened the School Act respecting vote buying, intimidation or other election offences in relation to my election as a trustee.”

Dhaliwal is a former constituency assistant to Burnaby-Lougheed NDP MLA Katrina Chen and she worked on Richmond-Queensborough NDP MLA Aman Singh’s 2020 campaign. Her current pay rate has not been announced, but the cabinet order indicated the annual compensation range is between $66,900.01 and $94,600.06.

A February 2021 cabinet order announced her hiring as executive assistant for Minister of State for Infrastructure Bowinn Ma at $66,300 a year. 

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Nine bureaucrats are joining B.C.’s NDP premier and three cabinet ministers on the May 25-announced trade mission to Asia.

But Premier David Eby’s director of communications refused to release the budget for travel, accommodations and hospitality. 

Minister of State for Trade Jagrup Brar arrived in Vietnam on Thursday. He will join Eby, Energy and Mines Minister Josie Osborne and Jobs and Economic Development Minister Brenda Bailey in Japan on Saturday. The quartet and the support team will shift to South Korea May 31 through June 3, then Eby will visit Singapore until June 7. 

The delegation includes Intergovernmental Relations Secretariat Deputy Minister Silas Brownsey and Assistant Deputy Minister Leslie Teramoto, plus Eby’s Deputy Minister Shannon Salter, Chief of Staff Matt Smith and Senior Advisor of Intergovernmental Relations Jessica Smith. (The Smiths are unrelated.) 

Osborne is accompanied by her Chief of Staff Andrew Cuddy. Deputy Minister Fazil Mihlar and William Hoyle, the executive director of B.C.’s trade mission office, are accompanying Bailey and Brar.

“Each minister has an individual program with some overlap with the premier’s meetings,” said George Smith, spokesperson for the Premier’s office. “Simultaneous programming will maximize the province’s ability to connect with diverse groups, businesses and government counterparts. The premier’s program alone contains more than 40 individual events.”

The government’s Core Policy and Procedures Manual requires a pre-trip budget approval for all out-of-country travel, but the NDP is keeping the budget secret. 

“The cost of the trip will be included in public accounts,” George Smith said. “The delegation does not include spouses and does not include B.C. businesses or other stakeholders.”

In May 2016, during their final year in power, the BC Liberal government of Premier Christy Clark disclosed nearly $1 million in spending on travel in 2015 to promote B.C. trade. 

The total cost of 17 missions and investor trips for that year was $961,715. The biggest expense was for Clark’s nine-day fall trade mission to Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong at $289,191. 

International Trade Minister Teresa Wat and Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson’s 13-day China and Indonesia junket in spring 2015 cost taxpayers $164,639. 

This spring’s four-country trip is the biggest by the NDP since early 2018 when Premier John Horgan and three cabinet ministers visited China, Japan and South Korea. Eby and company are skipping China due the to cooling of Canada-China relations and the federal Indo-Pacific Strategy that encourages diversifying trade with other Asian countries. 

However, a 2010-published study from the Sauder School of Business at the University of B.C. cast doubt over the effectiveness of trade missions. 

Keith Head and John Ries analyzed Canada’s bilateral trade data from 1993 to 2003 in “Do trade missions increase trade?” and concluded the answer was no. 

Eby’s office has more to spend on travel after increasing the budget by more than 9% to $16.05 million. The Office of the Premier’s budget has climbed $4.75 million since the 2020-2021 fiscal year. 

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