Robin Mathews Column

Brigette DePape, the courageous page who stood with a "Stop Harper" sign in the Senate Chamber reading of the budget, has a message for Canadians.  It is half right and half dangerously wrong!

The "tidy-up" hearing in the Basi, Virk, and Basi case [the BC Rail Scandal] in the B.C. Supreme Court opens more questions than it answers.  What to do with the (expensive) thousands upon thousands of pages, tapes, etc. brought together at great cost and with great diffuculty over more than four years?  Was the judgement on the matter credible?  Did Associate Chief Justice Anne MacKenzie serve the people of B.C. ... and "justice"?

Under the gavel of Associate Chief Justice Anne MacKenzie of the B.C. Supreme Court the (BC Rail Scandal) Basi, Virk, and Basi trial came to a horrendous, aborted end.  The Gordon Campbell government which effected the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to CNR paid all the costs ($6 million) of the Defence even though two of the three accused were convicted. Who is Anne MacKenzie, and what was the milieu in which she worked?

The early death of James Travers, national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star, at the early age of 62, has evoked genuine grief and mourning.  An award winning column Travers wrote in 2009 has been reprinted - and it opens the whole, ugly question of the failure of the Mainstream Press and Media in our time.

The latest development in the BC Rail Scandal suggests a complete breakdown in BC society.  Social media fight Mainstream Media openly - mirroring a breakdown of confidence in the courts, the RCMP, government probity.

In recent days RCMP officers met with and gave information (or disinformation) about major figures in the BC Rail Scandal to a Vancouver blogger, some of which has been (internet) published.  The behaviour of RCMP officers is surprising and may be seriously unethical.

The present shake-up of the RCMP - setting the scene to remove present Commissioner William Elliott - may not be a move to clean-up the soiled Force but to entrench the worst kind of RCMP behaviour.

Major facts are being scrambled in the public domain.  Major information is being masked and confused about the BC Rail Scandal.  Is there a determined effort by the Mainstream Press and Media, the Courts, and the B.C. Liberal cabinet to confuse the public about the facts of the BC Rail Scandal?

A new book, MAKING WAVES, attempts to canvas the literary community in British Columbia for the last fifty years.  It fails, however, to reveal that "culture" (quite amazingly) was the site of a major battle to take B.C. out of Canada into the heart of the U.S. Empire.

The Gordon Campbell Liberal government of B.C. is increasingly exposed - in deep corruption and inner conflict. The NDP should sweep to power in the election to come, with a new leader and clean hands.  But unless it can re-make itself as a dynamic party with a platform of genuine renewal and a credible determination to pull up the rooted corruption, the election will go by default to the Mainstream Press and Media supported Liberals.

The role of the Mainstream Press and Media in relation to the corruption in British Columbia is mostly negative.  PART FOUR argues - using the BC Rail Scandal Basi, Virk, and Basi case as example - that "the Fourth Estate" supports and/or covers for corruption in the province.

The role of the RCMP in corruption in British Columbia open questions that will not go away. A focal point for examination is the BC Rail Scandal - and, particularly, the case conducted against "the three brown men": Dave Basi, Bob Virk, and Aneal Basi.

The judiciary seems more and more to be separated from its obligation to the larger population.  Is that the result of isolation, or is it a sign of (even unconscious) collusion with corrupt government and private corporations?  The role of the judiciary in the BC Rail Scandal (Basi, Virk, and Basi) trial is disturbing, failing to inspire confidence and suggesting dark shadows in its future.  

After the brutal shut-down of the BC Rail Scandal trial in Vancouver, the subject of the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR won't go away.  New material - and new manipulations to prevent investigation - keep surfacing. The sores of a corrupt province keep bleeding.

A new Quebec novel by Louis Hamelin opens a window wide on State chicanery in the 1970 FLQ crisis.  It suggests a wholly manufactured crisis,a beginning of a New Democracy in Canada governed by elites, Corporations, and a mass media dedicated to 'manufacturing consent'.