B.C. NDP attorney general critic Leonard Krog and federal NDP Olympics critic Peter Julian have blown the whistle on two of Premier Gordon Campbell's closest allies.
"When Washington State went looking for a piece of the Olympic pie, it hired none other than Gordon Campbell insiders, Patrick Kinsella and Mark Jiles, to lobby the federal minister (David Emerson)," Burnaby-New Westminster MP Peter Julian said in Question Period on June 9. "There is only one problem -- they are not registered to lobby, which means it is illegal for them to lobby."
Kinsella masterminded B.C. Liberal election victories in 2001 and 2005. Jiles managed Campbell's successful Vancouver-Point Grey campaign in 2005. In 2006, their Progressive Group scored a gig with the State of Washington to lobby key Olympic decision-makers, including cabinet ministers and VANOC executives, and find Olympic-related contracts for Washington companies.
Jiles boasted in one document that Progressive had "an office in the heart of Vancouver, a hand in British Columbia's provincial capital of Victoria and a foot into the 2010 Organizing Committee."
Julian asked federal lobbyists' registrar Michael Nelson to investigate. Krog did the same provincially with B.C.'s information and privacy commissioner David Loukidelis. Jiles told 24 hours Vancouver that Progressive's work was simply "sports marketing."
Read more about this, including the scandalous Washington State documents, on Victoria journalist Sean Holman's Public Eye blog.
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