(This column was
published in the North Shore News on Jan. 14,
2004)
Fraud plays a big part in political campaigns
By
Leo Knight
THE unfolding scandal which began with police executing search warrants in the legislature is beginning to look as though it will be more significant to Prime Minister Paul Martin than to the government of Gordon Campbell who hired David Basi and Bob Virk.
While we know a great deal more today than we did last week, we still don't know why RCMP Sgt. John Ward made the remarkable statements about the insidiousness of organized crime and how in British Columbia, the situation "has reached critical mass."
Not that anyone with any degree of expertise on the subject would disagree with him, it was just surprising to hear someone in authority actually saying it.
Unfortunately, he said little else of significance, leaving the baying media hounds to trip all over themselves, turning up snippets of information and trying to knit them all together into some sort of patchwork quilt which might somehow explain what the police believe are the links between organized crime and two ministerial assistants in Victoria.
We know from Global TV reports that there are family ties to trucking companies that have had vehicles seized in drug smuggling investigations.
We know from TV reports in Ottawa that there were more than 37,000 new Martin memberships signed up that were apparently not paid for by the new party inductees.
And that a 737 was chartered to fly leadership convention delegates from Vancouver to the centre of the universe paid for by "two or three generous benefactors" that, oddly enough, a spokesman for the federal Libs declined to identify.
We know that organized crime is involved and so too, are drugs and the poison they represent in our society. We also know that another family member is a suspended Victoria police officer.
My sources tell me the investigation which resulted in the suspension had, as its genesis, an internal probe by the Victoria Police Department into the possibility that information in major drug investigations was somehow getting leaked to the targets of the files.
And, on Monday, we learned that Mandeep Sandhu another relative and a federal Liberal riding executive member in Esquimalt - Juan de Fuca, was arrested as part of this probe.
All of this is tawdry, likely illegal (hence the police investigation) and undoubtedly politically scandalous. But I think what is really infuriating is the manner that politicians like Martin or the backroom boys like Bill Cunningham simply shrug off the membership irregularities as a boys will be boys thing.
Well it's not. It's criminal. Fraud and forgery done anywhere else except in political membership campaigns bring forth criminal charges.
Look at the shocking revelations that came out in the wake of Ujjal Dosanjh usurping the NDP leadership after he bladed Glen Clark. More than 1,000 instances of fraud and forgery were identified in membership sign-ups for his benefit and nothing was done.
And, I should add, he was the attorney general at the time, the province's chief law enforcement officer. Yet, barely a tongue was clucked.
In this case, Basi was initially an intern back in the days when Gordon Wilson was the leader of the Opposition.
But at the end of the day it wasn't Basi's expertise in economics that got him his job as ministerial assistant to the finance minister. Nor was it the vast political expertise gained over less than a decade as an unpaid intern or a low-ranked civil servant.
No, it was his ability to deliver memberships to the party to support this cause or that person.
He practiced the sort of racism this country allows and signed up huge numbers of the Indo-Canadian community and expected them to vote as a block.
This gave him his position of power. Basi was put into his influential job by Martyn Brown, chief of staff to Premier Gordon Campbell. By Brown's own admission Basi was never checked out.
"Typically, political appointees are people who have been known to the elected officials, known to the party or have served in some capacity with the party, caucus or government," Brown reportedly said in a newspaper interview.
"You do your best due diligence. At the end of the day, it's a judgment call to hire the best people you can, based on their references and credentials," he concluded.
I call him on this part. They hire those people who can give them the most politically expedient results. If, as in this case, it appears to be Indo-Canadian bums in chairs at nomination meetings, then so be it.
But all of this really is moot isn't it?
I think that fraud and forgery offences were committed in the name of the prime minister. As a Victoria newspaper reported, there's a Labrador retriever named Gregg who has been dead for five years that is a party member and gets Christmas cards from the PM and wife Sheila. Oddly enough, I think there is a problem with that. Now, if only those in a position of power did.
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