THINKING ABOUT THE UPCOMING ELECTION:B.C. RAIL

[Alan Rudrum <alanrudrum@gmail.com>]

I should have sent this as a prologue to my previous post; it is from the beginning of the long submission on http://bctrialofbasi-virk.blogspot.com/


Questions nag ... and nag
... about the corrupt sale of BC Rail. Corrupt. Gordon Campbell made an
election promise not to sell BC Rail. Then the Campbell forces set
about, semi-secretly, to break trust, under terms which excluded BC
interests and that used a process which two participant bidders
described as unfair.

CPR and BNSF withdrew, the latter citing
"serious questions of ethics and fairness". BNSF (November 24, 2003)
also complained of the "failure of CIBC to follow the process that CIBC
and the government said would be followed".

Paul Nettleton,
thrust out of Liberal caucus for fighting the dismemberment of BC
Hydro, remarked about the sale of BC Rail on January 6, 2004, on CKPG
that "the process wasn't fair. It wasn't open. It wasn't transparent".

When,
out of a hat, the Campbell forces pulled a U.S. corporation "to
complete" a "fairness report" (Charles River Associates), satisfaction
was not achieved. Peter Rickershauser, for BNSF, found the report
unsatisfactory on many counts - one of the most obvious: Charles River
Associates didn't bother to interview the bidding companies involved!
Also BNSF recorded that the Gordon Campbell forces did not reveal to
bidders a major term of consideration.

That last fact was
spotted by the Alberta/B.C. company Ferroequus which refused even to
bid because, it appears, it believed it was being misled about
government requirements (in order to get lots of bidders who could be
said to have "failed" in the bidding?).

A reasonable observer
might conclude that the sale of BC Rail was seriously tainted because
the Gordon Campbell forces were determined to misrepresent its real
state, to pretend it was a huge liability, to organize civil servants,
management of BC Rail, perhaps CIBC World Markets, perhaps many others
to propagandize, on the basis of "cooked" information, for a sale, and
then to sell it to political friends - whatever the cost to B.C.

Over
and over, at the time, critics accused the Campbell forces of using
accounting tricks to claim BC Rail was losing money and of setting it
up, falsely, for destruction. Paul Nettleton backs up their position.
On January 6, 2004, Nettleton (on radio) told an interviewer this:

"The
inner working of the Campbell administration really is all about
micromanagement, control over cabinet [and] caucus, with a healthy dose
of intimidation. They certainly tried to intimidate me. When they
failed they resorted to enticement from the highest levels in an
attempt to silence me. The person they used was David Basi."

In
the hand-written pages by Yvette Wells, Director of the Crown Agencies
Secretariat, light shines through, revealing a group building a
propaganda case for destroying BC Rail while pretending not to do so.