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People are upset that the person heading up
the inquiry into the investigation of serial killer Willie Pickton is none other than Wally Oppal, British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell’s former attorney general. Oppal served as attorney general from 2005 to 2009 when he was defeated as an MLA in the provincial election. Many are saying Oppal’s association with the governing Liberals is too close for comfort. Bioblaster1 left a comment on globeandmail.com which read “Oppal.....you must be kidding. This guy has made a career out of sounding like a regular guy while he covers for the law enforcement community. He will do anything to protect the police, the lawyers and especially the courts.” Jamie Lee Hamilton, a sex worker advocate, said in an interview with the Georgia Straight, that Oppal’s appointment “smacks of a whitewash.” The terms of reference of the Pickton Inquiry is also causing some concern, with First Nations leaders and women’s rights advocates saying they were not consulted in the matter, despite having been the groups pushing for the inquiry in the first place. “There should have been an opportunity extended to us to have a discussion about the terms of reference,” said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs. “We’re definitely not happy about this.”
The StarPhoenix reports that a “key player”
in the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan’s 2004 election scandal pleaded guilty Sept. 17 to a charge of conspiracy to commit forgery. Lyle David Lee, 54, received a conditional sentence of two years less a day for a ballot-stuffing scheme and cover up. He is the eighth person to plead guilty to charges connected with the election.
Queen’s Bench Justice Gerald Allbright said the extent of the electoral fraud in the case was “shocking.”
“When an election is demonstrated patently to be a sham, which this one was, it reverberates throughout the entire fabric of society, because what other election becomes next?” Lee was a friend of three of the declared winners of the 2004 election, Dwayne Gerald Roth, Ralph Kennedy and Brian Amyotte. Crown prosecutor Paul Goldstein told the court that Lee stood to benefit from their election success. Lee directed polling clerks in the towns of Marshall and Wilkie to falsify polling books and fill out fake ballots using bogus names. “Many people on the lists were actually dead, some were in prison, names were duplicated,” Goldstein said. “... it was a complete sham.” Lee was soon under investigation with his telephone tapped and conversations recorded as participants attempted to cover up the conspiracy. Lee’s job was “to throw enough BS to confuse the whole issue,” said Goldstein. Lee also worked to secure false affidavits by people who didn’t vote in the election, but swore they had. Some were paid for their lies. There was even a plan hatched to steal ballot boxes because there was fear that the fingerprints of the participants in the fraud would be found on them.
Kennedy, who was elected provincial secretary in the sham, received a one-year jail term. Goldstein told court the main motivation for the conspiracy was financial, with the winners of the election able to control millions of funding dollars and funnel them “quite frankly, for their own use,” Goldstein said.
Others have received conditional sentences, though Amyotte, elected regional director position, will go to trial in late October.
The charges against Roth were suddenly stayed by the Crown prosecutor on Sept. 28, an indication that a conviction was unlikely.
Goldstein told court the main motivation for the conspiracy was financial, with the winners of the election able to control millions of funding dollars and funnel them “quite frankly, for their own use,” Goldstein said.
At http://ilcpblog.blogspot.com you can
read about a group of internationally renowned photographers who have been conducting a RAVE for the Great Bear Rainforest. RAVE stands for Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition. The Great Bear Rainforest RAVE is a project of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP) which has teamed up with Pacific WILD to “expose” BC’s plans to lift the moratorium on tanker traffic along B.C.’s coast. BC’s rainforest is “home to white spirit bears, ancient forests, and stunning marine biodiversity... one of the planet’s most priceless treasures. But overseas oil interests wanting access to western Canada’s tar sands, the second largest known oil reserves in the world, have put the region in threat,” the site reads. “The International League of Conservation Photographers receives dozens of requests a year to bring our photographers and filmmakers to endangered landscapes all over the world, but British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest stands head and shoulders above the others,” said iLCP founder and president Cristina Mittermeier. “The ecosystems here are so interconnected that an oil spill would devastate not only the landscapes and seascapes, but the communities that rely on them for their survival.”
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