Are the BC NDP full of crap?

Yeah, sort of, they are.

They’ve gone bananas about the fact that Elections BC is asking the governing party about fundraising stuff. What they’re not telling anyone is that they’re being asked, too.

And John Horgan’s crew aren’t enthusiastic about anyone probing BC NDP fundraising practices. There’s a history, you see.


Look, no one I know loves to do political fundraising. But, until the media agree to give political parties free ad space, political parties have no choice but to fundraise. And, to put a fine point on it, there’s nothing illegitimate about political fundraising. It happens in every democracy. It happens in every political party.

As the sterling examples of Ross Perot and Pete DuPont always remind us, however, you don’t win elections with money. You win ’em with great leaders, great teams, great ideas. That’s why the BC Liberals are doing well on the fundraising front, I think: Christy Clark’s got the hottest economy in Canada, people like her, and she’s competitive. So BC voters are expressing support in the polls, and with their chequebooks, too.

Politics ain’t free. Modern political campaigns, of every stripe, demand that political parties develop deep grass-roots networks, to communicate with voters, to develop and learn from voter data, to use social media tools to its advantage, and so on. Advertising, too – lots of it. That’s what any party’s fundraising is used for. In some campaigns, 90 per cent of fundraising goes to ads in the media (the selfsame media crying “scandal,” I note without ironic comment).

I’m out here in the Centre of the Universe, and I haven’t been to BC in a long while. But, if I were, I’d say this to Clark’s BC Libs: you shouldn’t take any ethics lessons from the party that skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars from charities over a 20-year period. You shouldn’t take any civics lessons from the BC NDP, which operated lotteries and bingo games with the proceeds going to them, not to local charities.

I was there when it all went down: the BC NDP was, in my experience, the most corrupt political party I’d ever seen. Ripping off charities to fill their coffers?  Seriously?

That’s a scandal. Was then, still is now.


I hate greedy lawyers

Crass, misleading advertising.  Lousy advice and representation.  Disgusting, usurious fees.

These are some of the things that have helped to destroy the reputation of trial lawyers – even among those of us who used to be trial lawyers.  I’ve written about this many times before.

For months, the Toronto Star’s Michele Henry and Kenyon Wallace have been hammering ambulance-chasing, bottom-feeding members of the “personal injury bar” (that’s what they call themselves, without irony).  They have done an amazing job, and deserve a Michener nomination for it.

This morning, they revealed this:

Meanwhile, at Queen’s Park, Liberal MPP Mike Colle (Eglinton-Lawrence), inspired in part by the Star’s investigation, tabled a private member’s bill calling for all contingency fees to be capped at 15 per cent of the settlements awarded to accident victims.

Titled the Personal Injury and Accident Victims Protection Act, the bill requires contingency fee agreements to state clearly how lawyers will get paid, calls for a ban on lawyer referral fees, and makes all advertising by personal injury lawyers subject to pre-approval by the Law Society of Upper Canada. In addition, clients who have signed up with a personal injury lawyer would be granted a 10-day cooling-off period in which to cancel their agreement. The Law Society of Upper Canada recently made a series of recommendations regarding the same subject.

Private member’s bills rarely become law but Colle said the idea is to raise awareness of issues he is hearing about from accident victims and “put heat on the government to do something in this area.”

“For these accident victims who have been essentially hit twice, I’m trying to protect them,” Colle said.

Hit Twice is right. Various PC and Liberal MPPs have been musing about this kind of move for a while, but it has taken Mike Colle – who, in my experience, has guts to spare and isn’t afraid of the Greedy Lawyer Lobby – to do what Liberal, PC and/or NDP governments should have done long ago.

I’m a lawyer, and I’m fed up with innocent accident victims getting hit twice. And I’m fed up with the appalling greed that has helped to destroy the reputation of a once-great profession.

Want to get yourselves (re)elected, political parties? This is the kind of populist stuff that’ll do it.  Every time.

GreedyLawyer

 


An open letter to Ontario Liberal mutineers

Dear Mutineers:

My experience is that this sort of thing doesn’t ever work.  If leaders are going to take a walk in the snow, you gotta let ’em do it on their own, boys and girls.

My Boss would’ve left a lot sooner if the Martinite minions hadn’t tried to force him out.  And then, when Team Juggernaut finally got in, all they’d succeeded in doing was blowing to bits the most successful political party in Western democracy.  Prime Minister Blip, bon soir.

(And, is it deeply ironic that the Martinite campaign folks who tanked the party in Ottawa are the selfsame Martinite campaign folks who are now tanking the party in Toronto? Why, yes.  Yes, it is indeed ironic.)

Anyway. Will Kathleen Wynne go?  Beats me.  But it’s up to her.  My hunch: if the 25 per cent Hydro cut – and the balanced budget, and various other budgetary goodies – don’t move the needle in the right direction, she won’t want to go down with the ship.  Who would?

That said, Crawley is below, and the link to this (clumsy) web site is here.