New Level of Partisanship by BC Liberals

Government resources are to be used only for government activities. Again, the BC Liberals have used government resources for partisan purposes as my former colleague David Schreck points out here.

Christy Clark, Premier Photo-op

In an astounding display of bad judgment, Premier Clark's response to the April 19th by-elections was posted to the government website. That may have been appropriate had she limited her remarks to congratulating the candidates, but most of the response was a rant about how to defeat the NDP with a coalition.
That kind of partisan nonsense belongs on the BC Liberal website, not on a site paid for and maintained with taxpayer resources and the contact person for that kind of response should be a Liberal party official not an employee in the Premier's office, Communications Director Sara MacIntyre. 

The BC Liberal government and caucus have broken the rules before. Back when Christy Clark was in opposition, the BC Liberal caucus used government funds to send out an extremely partisan mailer I wrote about here in connection to the ongoing and disturbing robo-call and election fraud cases.  

Stewart Braddick resigned after the Auditor General of BC found the householder to be a misuse of Taxpayers money, almost one million dollars.  The scandal went even deeper than that.  Braddick personally chose Jan-Paul Shason's company to print the householder, the owner of Gastown Printers at the time and a very close friend and political ally of Gordon Campbell.  Braddick also paid a consulting fee from Caucus funds to Greg Lyle, owner of Navigator in Toronto.  Lyle was paid $5,000 to provide advice for the householder. Lyle subsequently went on to work for the Manitoba Conservative government of Gary Filman.  More on Braddick'c connection to the federal Conservative Party here.

Braddick of course is contracted to provide services to the Federal Conservative Party.  

Harper and Bossenkool in 2001

Schreck also noted other breaches of partisanship on the taxpayers dime. Ken Bossenkool, the Premier's chief of staff making some $200,000 per year, was calling BC Conservative operatives to discuss a coalition with the BC Liberals. I want to see his government issued cell phone. If he can blatantly tell the Globe and Mail he is doing this on taxpayers time, what is he doing that we don't know about?  Bossenkool was a senior advisor to Prime Minister Harper, and a lobbyist for Enbridge.  

Now back to that posting on the Government's website today.  The person who likely approved it was Sara MacIntyre.  MacIntyre was until recently employed as a media contact for Harper.  Here's a screen grab of the post on the government website. 

This is clearly something that belongs on the BC Liberal website, not the one taxpayers pay for. I have never seen this kind of post on a government website in Canada before.  I may have to go through the BC Government's site to see if they posted anything like it before.  Check out this video, I'm sure you have seen it before, its Ms MacItyre's introduction to BC Media...  Its a little hard to watch...

It's clear that Christy Clark and the BC Liberals have seen the threat to their coalition for awhile.  They have gone out and bought Gunslingers with Cred in Conservative circles.  Its going to get messier.