The previous Liberal government was not wilfully blind to dirty money and has been the victim of an intentionally misleading narrative, former cabinet minister Mike de Jong insisted Friday at the inquiry into money laundering.

“That’s just not true,” he emphasized.

“I never saw, heard, and — I’ve been at this for a while, with some pretty good antennae — but I never saw or heard anything that would suggest people weren’t interested in addressing this or were trying to turn a blind eye. I have had people on the phone in the last few years in tears because of the suggestion that’s what happened or that’s what they did.

“I hope ultimately, Mr. Commissioner, you will be persuaded through the volumes and volumes of documents, studies, actions that there was an attempt, a serious attempt made to not just understand the issue better but to address the issue … I’m one of those people who has felt the sting and the frustration of hearing repeatedly that nothing was done when there are thousands and thousands of pages of evidence that suggest quite the contrary, in my view.”

A former Fraser Valley lawyer, de Jong became a Liberal member of the legislature in 1994 and, when the party won power in 2001, was appointed to cabinet.

At first he served as forest minister for four years, then labour and citizen services, aboriginal relations, attorney general, solicitor general, health and eventually finance minister in September 2012.

After the 2013 election, he retained the finance portfolio but also given responsibility for gaming — “I didn’t ask for it,” he quipped.

De Jong had those responsibilities until the NDP election victory in 2017.

To show what the Liberal administration did, he pointed to briefing notes, ministerial advice and letters of expectation spelling out money laundering and proceeds of crime as priorities.

“The idea the lottery corporation or government was disinterested in tackling or addressing money laundering to generate greater revenue is just wrong,” de Jong maintained.

“I’ve developed a pretty thick hide, but it has been frustrating to hear that again and again.”

Representing the previous government, he said he ensured all cabinet material, “every single document, every piece of information,” was available for the inquiry to see it did the best it could and “officials who worked for the previous government did their best.”

He blamed the absence of law enforcement in casinos and that “crystallized” for him in the fall of 2015, prompting him to have B.C. Lottery Corp. fund the new Joint Illegal Gaming Investigation Team.

“All parties spoke pretty passionately that making progress on (cash swamping casinos) would require a police presence that did not exist at the time and that made a significant impression on me at the time,” said de Jong, now opposition justice critic.

As a result of 2015 measures, there was a significant decline in suspicious cash transactions — dropping from $38 million in July to $6.2 million in December 2015 — a trend that continued through 2016.

“Hindsight is 20/20, but I think quite frankly there was a purposeful attempt to paint a certain picture about what didn’t take place and there’s not much I can do about that except celebrate the fact this commission is in place to examine factually the work that was done and perhaps criticize further steps that could have been taken … The proposition that I purposefully ignored or turned a blind eye is offensive to me.”

Earlier this week, former premier Christy Clark told the same story and Interim Liberal Leader Shirley Bond similarly testified on Thursday, saying that during her tenure she implemented anti-money-laundering measures as recommended.

Bond had responsibility for gaming for about 11 months while solicitor general from March 2011 until February 2012.

Premier John Horgan’s current deputy minister Lori Wanamaker, already a top bureaucrat more than a decade ago, buttressed that view.

She was involved in gaming while it was in the solicitor general’s ambit from 2010 till 2012.

Wanamaker did not recall being told about bricks of $20 bills associated with drug dealers being brought into casinos or suspicious cash transactions being a major priority — gaming was a modest part of the portfolio, 300 people in a ministry of 3,000.

She challenged the claim Larry Vander Graaf, former executive director of investigations for the Government Policy and Enforcement Branch, stridently warned ex-cabinet minister Rich Coleman about what was happening in casinos.

Related

• Former minister tells inquiry money laundering was on B.C. radar, but so were guns, gangs
• Ian Mulgrew: Christy Clark testifies 'we took significant action' against money laundering in B.C.
• Ian Mulgrew: Politicians in crosshairs of B.C.’s money-laundering inquiry

If Vander Graaf had used the kind of language he claimed, Wanamaker said she would have remembered the meeting, and she denied the quote attributed to her: “Rich, we have to do something about (cash flooding casinos).”

“I would never refer to the minister by his given name,” Wanamaker asserted.

Appointed to the committee to oversee the implementation of consultant Peter German’s Dirty Money reports, Wanamaker said she found his first volume too anecdotal and lacking the data and analysis expected.

She raised her concerns with the government, noting German’s recommendations were not slavishly implemented but subjected to independent review and analysis.

Attorney General David Eby, who established the inquiry two years ago, will testify Monday.

imulgrew@postmedia.com

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VICTORIA — Despite the record spending, deficit and debt in  Tuesday’s provincial budget, Finance Minister Selina Robinson spent much of the week defending some major holes in the NDP plan for the next three years.

The absence of paid sick days for B.C. workers was the biggest lapse, given how Premier John Horgan has been talking up the need for such a provision throughout the pandemic.

“Shocking,” was the verdict from Alex Hemingway of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The B.C. Federation of Labour expressed disappointment that the New Democrats hadn’t been persuaded by a case that was, to the Fed’s way of thinking, blatantly obvious.

“Paid sick leave saves lives,” said the statement from president Laird Cronk. “We will continue to advocate for the over half of B.C. workers — and nearly 90 per cent of low-wage workers — who don’t have paid leave and are at higher risk of exposure.

Robinson suggested the fault lay with the federal government, which omitted paid sick leave from its budget, delivered Monday

“I was disappointed that the federal government chose not to do that and we’re going to encourage them to move forward on that,” she told reporters. “It is the best way to go. It is the most efficient way to go.”

The buck-passing probably has to do with the undisclosed cost of paid sick leave. Plus a reluctance by politicians to pick up the tab themselves or pass the bill along to pandemic-battered employers.

Another surprise in the B.C. NDP budget was funding for child care, which fell well short of the party commitment in its election platform.

“Lacklustre,” was the characterization of Sharon Gregson from the Coalition of Child Care Advocates in B.C., which has led the drive for $10 a day child care.

“The budget yesterday was fairly disappointing for child care,” said Gregson. “There was a commitment in the recent provincial election to $1.5 billion of spending over three years on child care, and we saw a commitment instead of $233 million.”

Robinson indicated B.C. is holding off for its share of the ambitious child care plan that the federal government laid out in its budget.

“It is great to have the federal government now jumping into this arena because what it means is we can deliver faster on the affordable, accessible child care,” Robinson told Lynda Steele on CKNW radio. “Once we dig into the federal commitments we’ll have a better sense of how quickly we’ll be able to deliver on that commitment.”

The federal commitment was $30 billion over five years. On a per capita basis, B.C. would presumably be in line for $800 million a year or $4 billion over the five years.

The B.C. budget showed the New Democrats reaping a revenue windfall from a surge in housing prices — to the dismay of those who were counting on NDP policies to make housing more affordable.

One of those was Paul Kershaw of UBC’s school of population and public health, who founded Generation Squeeze to highlight inequities for young people in housing affordability and other matters.

“In previous budgets with the NDP government, you would have heard Finance Minister Carole James talk about moderating house prices,” Kershaw told Simi Sara on CKNW radio. “But we lost that in yesterday’s budget and that surprised me because Minister Robinson is the former housing minister.

“I know that she is concerned about housing affordability, but it’s almost as if yesterday’s budget was bragging that surging home prices are buttressing our economy, and that’s just not a great way to build an economy to come out of the recession because it once again further erodes affordability.”

Robinson’s successor as housing minister, David Eby, did announce a $2 billion fund to encourage construction of non-profit and private sector rental housing.

He estimated it was enough to build 8,000 units over three years.

“That’s good,” said the CCPA’s Hemingway, “but it’s not on the scale of the challenge that we face here on the housing front.” The centre recently identified a need to develop 10,000 units of affordable and non-market housing in B.C., each and every year.

“We’re not close to that at this point,” said Hemingway. “We need to be looking at the demand side of the issue as well, as prices have taken off in this very short period of time, again, during the pandemic.”

When asked about demand-side measures to moderate housing prices, Robinson deferred to the federal government and its revised stress test for mortgage approvals.

“We expect that the changes in the stress test are likely to reduce the demand,” she said, not mentioning what B.C. might do if prices continue upwards.

The finance minister is also looking to Ottawa for a helping hand on the Massey tunnel replacement and the Surrey-to-Langley SkyTrain extension.

The New Democrats are committed to both projects. But neither is costed in the provincial capital plan because negotiations continue on cost-sharing with Ottawa.

The province has good reason to assume federal dollars will be forthcoming for one or both projects, depending on when the federal Liberals find an opening for an early election call.

Along with B.C.’s expectations on sick pay, child care and housing, those hoped-for infrastructure dollars help to explain why the New Democrats have refrained from criticizing Ottawa on border controls and the vaccine rollout.

vpalmer@postmedia.com 

There is enough evidence of China’s genocide of Uyghur and Turkic people that last month Canadian parliamentarians joined those in at least 39 other countries to denounce it.

Yet a denier of this genocide is a director of the Chinese Canadian Museum to which the B.C. government has committed $10 million. His presence threatens the integrity of the nascent museum, and Premier John Horgan has done nothing about it.

Horgan continues to ignore the demand of 13 prominent human rights activists that Bill Yee be removed as a director, as well as co-chair of the provincial Chinese-Canadian Community Advisory Committee.

In their initial letter, the activists described Yee as a “mouthpiece” for the Chinese government. A second letter came after a member of the Concern Group of Chinese Canadians on CCP Human Rights received death threats earlier this month.

In the second, more strongly worded letter to Horgan, they outlined what has been documented here and in other countries such as Australia. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government in Beijing, through its United Front department, recruits prominent overseas Chinese individuals and organizations to amplify its messages.

While “deeply appreciative” of the value of the museum, they wrote: “It is paramount that those individuals empowered to steer this process are not deniers of true history, or CCP helpers (who) turn our history into part of CCP’s propaganda.”

Yee has refused to comment on the controversy, but a change.org petition started this week says it is “undemocratic to ask our government to prohibit dissent by removing a trusted member with a different opinion on the truth from service in our community advisory board.”

What sparked this were Yee’s comments last month on a Cantonese radio station. Parroting the party line, he denounced Canadian parliamentarians as liars with “ulterior motives,” who had no legal basis or proof that China has committed genocide.

Yee is a retired provincial court judge, a former Vancouver city councillor, and former president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. As association president in 1989 and after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Yee questioned the motives of the leaders of the pro-democracy movement and empathized with the Chinese government faced with domestic unrest.

Since Yee’s tenure, the Chinese Benevolent Association has maintained close ties to Beijing. Its former chairman, Hilbert Yiu, was selected as a delegate to the 2017 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which brings together hundreds of important state supporters from both inside and outside China.

Starting in 2019, the association has also contributed to ads in both Chinese- and English-language newspapers, including The Vancouver Sun, denouncing the 2019 pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, supporting the imposition of the draconian National Security Law, and invoking what the South China Morning Post called “blood loyalty” to China.

B.C.’s minister of state for trade, George Chow, selected Yee for both the advisory board and the museum steering committee in 2018. Chow is also a former Chinese Benevolent Association president and, in public at least, has rebuked Yee in the mildest of terms.

In an emailed response to my questions this week about Yee’s continued presence on the museum board, Chow said Yee’s comments were “concerning” since the B.C. government supports Ottawa’s denunciation of China’s genocide.

But Chow said, “Mr. Yee was expressing a personal opinion in the radio interview. And we have asked Mr. Yee to clearly distinguish his personal opinions from that of the work of the Chinese Canadian Museum board.”

Yet it’s hard to imagine that the province wouldn’t do something if a director of the Royal B.C. Museum rejected the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It’s also hard to believe that Chow and the province weren’t hyper-aware of the potential for problems after public consultations in 2018 helped set the museum’s direction.

One issue deeply divided the more than 500 people who took part, according to the

report

on those consultations: “Participants did not agree on whether the museum should include or avoid politically controversial issues,” it said.

Among the topics listed were: Falun Gong (a religious movement banned by China) as well as “topics surrounding China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.”

Concerns were also raised about whether the museum would accept donations — monetary or otherwise — from the Chinese government.

(By 2018, the Chinese government already had a 12-year foothold in B.C. public schools through its Confucius Institute partnerships. While the first school at the B.C. Institute of Technology is now gone, the Coquitlam School District continues to host one.)

During the museum consultations, the report noted that there was “an undercurrent of tension among some contributors expressing concern around the current political climate between China and Canada.”

It bears reminding that this was before Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou’s arrest and the arbitrary detention of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, before the crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, before widespread reporting of the Uyghur genocide, before the pandemic, and, yes, before the recent spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

But it is in this current context that the premier needs to take a hard look at who is steering this publicly funded museum and take seriously the concerns being raised.

British Columbians need to be confident that while the museum’s directors may differ in their interpretations of history, they don’t deny the truth of it, and that they share the values and aspirations of everyone living in Canada’s diverse society.

As Emmanuel Arinze, president of the Commonwealth Association of Museums, has said, a museum “houses the cultural soul of the nation” and is “the cultural conscience of the nation.”

And this is a Canadian museum that is being built, not a Chinese one.

dbramham@postmedia.com

Twitter: @bramham_daphne

VICTORIA — During the NDP government in the 1990s, Mike Farnworth earned the nickname the “janitor” because he was routinely called on to clean up other people’s messes.

Local government, economic development, gambling … several times he was handed cabinet portfolios where a predecessor had stumbled.

Farnworth was pressed into cleanup service for the current government this week. The assignment being to clarify the third-wave-of-the-pandemic travel restrictions announced Monday by Premier John Horgan.

Horgan said government would be issuing orders at the end of the week under the Emergency Program Act “to restrict people’s ability to leave their health authority … There will be a fine if you are travelling outside of your area without a legitimate reason.”

He also indicated that the police would enforce the restrictions on travel among the five regional authorities via what he called “random audits.”

The premier said he preferred not to use the term “checkpoints.” But he explicitly compared the audits with CounterAttack, the drunk-driving road blocks mounted by the police during the holiday season.

“Everyone who goes by will be asked where they are going and where they came from,” vowed Horgan. “It will be done in a way that includes everyone in a particular place at a particular time and there will be consequences if you are outside of your area on non-essential business. We’re going to be randomly checking all vehicles for a period of time on a piece of highway somewhere in B.C.”

The ban on non-essential travel would likewise be enforced on B.C. Ferries, via restrictions on travel by recreational vehicles and stopping the usual practice of extra sailings on holiday weekends.

The premier’s half-baked summation raised more questions than it answered. Civil libertarians were incensed. Police wanted to know what they were supposed to enforce.

People who live in one health region and work in the one next door wondered if they should expect to encounter the premier’s “don’t-call-them-checkpoints” en route to work.

Farnworth, who is scheduled to roll out the new restrictions April 23 in his capacity as solicitor-general, had to spend some time defusing the controversies.

“We’re very mindful of the issue around Fraser Health and Vancouver Coastal because the interchange between the two is quite significant — so they will be treated as a region,” he told broadcaster Simi Sara on CKNW radio Wednesday. “There’s not going to be roadside CounterAttack-style checks in the Lower Mainland. But we’re looking at those points where you would go from the Lower Mainland up into the Interior, like Highway 1 or the Coquihalla, or the Hope-Princeton, for example.

“This is not going to impact people going to work. It’s not going to impact health appointments,” he continued. “This is primarily about recreational travel.”

In a subsequent media scrum he indicated that voluntary guidelines would continue to apply to travel within regions, citing an example from the Vancouver Island Health Authority.

“So for example, if you’re in Victoria, don’t go up to Nanaimo. If you’re in Nanaimo, don’t go up to Port Hardy.”

The non-checkpoints could also be set up at B.C. Ferry terminals. “It’s a logical place to be able to check and say, ‘This is recreational travel and, “no”, you’re not going to the Island,’ ” Farnworth told reporters.

Horgan had also said B.C. “will be putting signs along the Alberta border, reminding travellers that unless they are coming for essential business they should be back in their home communities. We will be saying to those who are trying to book accommodation from outside B.C., you won’t be able to do so.”

This managed to anger and confuse residents of a second province, as I discovered doing a phone-in show with a Calgary radio station Wednesday.

Farnworth clarified that Albertans wouldn’t be stopped at the border. But if entering B.C. for non-essential reasons, they shouldn’t expect to be able to travel all the way through — for example — the Interior Health region to the Lower Mainland or the Island.

Farnworth was still clarifying the restrictions when the legislature convened for Question Period on Thursday. But by then he had managed to get some of it down to one-word answers.

Question from the B.C. Liberals: “How many police resources will be diverted away from stopping this dangerous gang war in the Lower Mainland?” Answer from Farnworth: “None.”

Q: “Will people have to produce sensitive, personal information at these checkstops?” A: “No.”

Farnworth also provided the House with an executive summary of the premier’s intentions.

“What the premier did appropriately was to foreshadow that we are having to take this step,” explained Farnworth, doing double-duty as NDP House leader. “He would rather not have to take this step, but the virus and the variants are spreading through this province, and travel is one of the ways in which they are transmitted. And one of the most effective ways to deal with that is to bring in travel restrictions, and the provincial health officer (Dr. Bonnie Henry) has indicated that between health authorities is the most effective way to do that.”

Such clarifications are becoming a common ritual with the Horgan government. Several times during the pandemic, Health Minister Adrian Dix has had to do the honours. This time it was Farnworth.

Each time the challenge was the same: explain “what the premier meant to say” when Horgan has wandered beyond the safe confines of his message box.

vpalmer@postmedia.com