Plus ça change
(plus c'est la même chose)

StoneWally

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Last week Justice Bennett responded to a FOI request by NDP Justice Critic Leonard Krog by releasing 15 out of 17 folders of documents relating to the questionable sale/give away/lease of BC Rail by the man who campaigned on a promise to not sell/give away BC Rail. You are forgiven if this information had escaped your notice. Other than early morning CBC Radio and the Blogosphere (especially BC Mary and Bill Tieleman)it is easy to not hear anything about this development in the seemingly permanent pre-trial state of the BC Rail/Basi-Virk Case.

As far as I can tell the Global/Canwest empire has only acknowledged the event with the embarrassing column in the Times-Colonist by Les Leyne - B.C. Rail case buried in political trivia. According to the lean, or lacking, thinking, investigative skills and reasoning of Mr. Leyne the whole exercise is:

........has turned into a farce.

It's trivia. Politically titillating, yes. Entertaining, certainly. But relative to the case itself, it's just trivia on a grand scale.

I guess when you drink enough Kool-Aid minor things like lying, interfering in fair bidding processes and then even interfering in the follow-up fairness report are just business as usual. Well for the Campbell Crime Family it is business as usual, but that doesn't make it trivial or ACCEPTABLE.

Bill Tieleman sees things somewhat differently in his posting from this week CN, others knew "actual value of bids":

Canadian Pacific Railway alleged that the "actual value of the bids" in the $1-billion privatization of B.C. Rail in 2003 were known by winning bidder Canadian National and others before a decision was made by the B.C. government, according to newly released confidential government documents.

The explosive allegation was made in a letter to Ken Dobell, Premier Gordon Campbell's then-Deputy Minister, on Nov. 17, 2003 - just eight days before the sale of B.C. Rail to CN was announced

.....snip

The documents show that both CP Rail and Burlington Northern Santa Fe - which was supporting the bid of OmniTRAX - sent letters to the B.C. government in November 2003 bitterly denouncing the leak of confidential B.C. Rail information to Canadian National, the eventual winning bidder.

Of course, thanks to the digging by RossK at the Pacific Gazette, we learn that CEO David McLean (neighbor and buddy of Capo Campbell) and CN have donated $127,160.00. I'm not sure if this includes the $8,000 donated in October, 2008 by David McLean, just in time for the by-elections lost by the Campbell Crime Family. Much of this information is easy to access in Ross' posting the Railgate 8000:Was The Fix In From The Beginning?

Another (related) Topic

According to a media expert speaking to the CBC - B.C.'s local news coverage threatened

The global economic crisis could soon reduce the number of local news outlets serving British Columbians, according to an expert on Canada's media.

With media giant Canwest Global on the edge of bankruptcy, CTVglobemedia cutting jobs, and CBC facing a critical budget shortfall, it could soon be harder to get local news, according to Fred Fletcher, a visiting professor at the UBC School of Journalism and one of Canada's leading researchers on the national media industry.

It is difficult for this observer to imagine the citizens of BC being more poorly served in relation to local news and issues than they currently are by the Global/Canwest monopoly. It would be fitting if the BC liaR Party (not the government) bailed out the Canwest Liberal PR Firm. I would suspect that Gordon Campbell and his cabal would miss the Canwest cheerleaders and news hiders more than anyone else. Maybe Les Leyne's article in the Times-Colonist marginalizing and minimizing the public disclosure of Liberal wrongdoing is more of an audition to join the Official Public Relations department than any effort at honesty or journalism. Of course perhaps he is trying to join Mr. Mason and Mr. Spector as winners of the Lead Gyro - though he may be unemployed by the next presentation of the Gyros.

The Aspers and Canwest in general never seem willing to consider that the main reason they are having such financial woes are a combination of going too far into debt, trying to monopolize media in Canada (and BC in particular), and producing a product that one can only generously characterize as CRAP! I must admit that the previous sentence kind of gives crap a bad name.