Talk:List of Canadian political scandals

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[edit] Time Line

I think this article would be better served as a timeline. It could make a nice feature article with some research and work. I'll see what I come up with over the next few days. -- peterwlowe 17 May 2005 (22:35 PT)

I agree, it should be in a timeline. -- cooltobekind 15 Feb 2006 (14:19 ET)

[edit] So are these scandals?

Timeline's a good idea, but I also think maybe there should be separate pages; at least for Quebec and BC, since there are so many scandals (I've barely taken the lid off BC so far; some scandals never quite had names; which is why I've linked the Doman Scandal to Herb Doman, and this kind of thing is pretty much necessary back in the colonial days (ah, Mr Joseph Trutch, we barely knew ya); scandals including Gov Douglas on four or five counts, including his mistreatment of Gov Blanshard, and also the Douglas Road which involved misappropriation of funds and disagreements with contractees over rates of reimbursement for investments; similarly the later Lillooet Trail fiasco, which also involved misappropriation of funds, as well as being a waste of money like the Fast Ferries (and was the largest capital expenditure of the provincial government until the late 1880s. One very important one from the 19th C. that comes to mind is Lord Dufferin's pronouncements on First Nations policy and other matters during his visit to British Columbia in the 1970s; if the King-Byng affair is in there then surely a political scandal involving a member (or in-law?) of the royal family. By the way has anyone heard of an Admiral Seymour from that period or thereabouts, RN? And other than scandals, there's just general govt ineptitude - which is really what Fast Ferries is; and left out of the list (so far) are such matters as Gustafsen Lake and the Seton Portage Incident during the Oka Crisis and similar events, including ongoing blockades on backroads in BC that other Canadians never hear about (it's not next to a major city is why. Even just in BC the scope of scandal is very wide:

• The Pickton Affair, to euphemize it a bit; using "affair" to refer more to what the real scandal was - the length to which the authorities (including the Crown, i.e. the Solicitor-General) avoided taking action on the rapidly growing roster of disappeared women from the Downtown Eastside.
• Payouts to Clifford Olson's family to locate his victims' bodies
• The lack of success in the Air India case resulting from sloppy work, or the recent revelations concerning the abandonment of hundreds of child-death investigations because of the notorious cutbacks budget brought down after the Liberal landslide that demolished the NDP's standing in the House in - what was it? - 2001? But there was a precedent:
• the Restraint Budget of 1983, which also took advantage of the public will to foist completely unannounced radical agendas on an outraged public. This is summed up in an entry Solidarity (British Columbia) (named because of the way the disambig goes in classifying Solidaritys; text in articles might better say Solidarity Crisis; others to be redirects of course. Tricky subject - "I was there" but as in need of documentation like Oka and other stuff.
• Breaking contracts with doctors is another nasty bit, and not the first time the Liberals have been seen to break a contract - or in the case of the Legislature Raids (is there a proper name for that scandal? I think there is but I just can't call it to mind), the dirt that came out about the BCR becoming the PGE.
• Gordon Campbell's refusal to recognize a Leader of the Opposition - contrary to all constitutional precedent - is already in the Gordon Campbell article, which I haven't looked at, but if not it should be; a mere act of vicious pettiness against the hated enemy, but so typical of the flavour of BC politics that its arrogance and brazenness.
• Powder Mountain (investor claims cabinet collaborating with business competitors (Peter Toigo wasn't it?) over proposed ski development west of Whistler, near where the 2010 Olympics site is, or actually right where it is come to think of it. Hmmmmmm....
• And what was that thing Rita Johnston got caught up in before she booted herself out of office?
• Hary Lali? Isn't there a stream of minor MLA and ministerial chicanery scandals that I haven't even touched yet - and I'm only talking from the 1960s. I know the Carson brothers from Pavilion were both cabinet ministers caught up in scandals (acquitted, I think) around the turn of the century (the other turn of the century, which all of a sudden is a phrase which doesn't mean 1899-1901 anymore, although I guess most people take it that way). Or acquitted scandals out of the ballpark?
• Are civic scandals - i.e. in important cities or if unusual - in political scandals? I'm thinking of the history of political scandal at City Hall in Vancouver and of course Surrey, and occasionaly elsewhere, or lurid stuff like the Ministry of Environmnet fire-ee in Kamloops marching in on his old offices with a gun. Nah, not scandal, but you'd think there'd be a page for it; if only in criminal history in British Columbia or something.
• there's another side of the Glen Clark affair that's even more scandalous than what most of the BC public and certainly almost anybody else also know about: the apparent setup and hounding over almost nothing by BCTV and the RCMP, one of the ex-bosses of which had had interests in a competing Casino to the one that was connected to Clark by a backporch and his kids playing with some other guy (analysis of this in article I have ref for)
• and myself I think the Wilson-Tyabji thing is more of a scandal for the way they were hounded on the matter, which came out to be a set-up to put the present Premier in position to become so; Wilson "won" an election, coming from the ranks of nothing to high standing as Leader of the Opposition overnight, and because he found his hormones acting up he got outflanked for the leadership and tarred and feathered in public for being in love like a goofy teenager. What I mean is a good chunk of what made the affair so ugly was the way the media and the other politicians went at them rather than what they actually did. Being in love, and trying to hide it, doesn't make you unfit for power (well, that he didn't tell his wife before it went public is another side to the scandal, 's true...); the real scandal was the media/party backers ambush on him to get him out of the way so they could place their own choice in the new Opposition, which had miraculously appeared from nowhere with the evaporation of the Vander Zalm Socreds. Anyone still following me? I know, I know, it's complicated and has a "HUH?" aspect to it, but it's all true. I haven't even looked at the respective Wikipages yet; that's what I remember of it and there's way more to it. It's typically juicy BC stuff, as is a lot of the rest of these other items...
• the Salmon War is a sort of scandal; certainly a Premier seen to be stepping outside his bounds, but for a cause; also needs writing up.
• the Grewal Affair (or is that there already?)
• certain disbarment and contempt cases have political overtones, but I'm not willing to risk the wrath of the court by trying to remember them, or name those I do remember

I've only partially covered a few things I didn't mention already in my additions to the list, which amazingly there were a lot of standing links for already. It's a question of what's a scandal or not; I'm asking for input here; the native blockades and semi-wars, the budgets and the protests that came back at them

So as you can see even in the case of BC I've only begun; I've never studied the Bonner Affair, which is a biggie, and there are others from back then, and before. And it's been a while since the BCRIC Scandal but I should be able to find something on line. Whose government was it that was so bad? Not Pattullo's, or Hart's. Boss Johnston's I think but I'm hazy on that era (19th C is my specialty).

The 19th C., speaking of which, is trippy with scandals, including all high-ranking colonial and early provincial officials, and at one time or another a good proportion of the Members of the House over the years. The crux of something called McGowan's War, which I've got to get around to writing and which is pivotal in the early history of the Crown Colony of British Columbia, involved the wheedlings and misdealings of the first two British commercial officials and magistrates appointed after the colony's inauguration (other than native chiefs already appointed as magistrates in recent months). Selling of benefits, running liquor and operating companies and monopolies and still billing the government for expenses, then the whole legal buffade of McGowan's War that nearly tangled the Colony in a full-scale revolt by American miners only to be played away like a card bluff by the eponymous antihero; fascinating stuff and hard to condense which is why I haven't written it yet; and my Fraser Canyon Gold Rush thing and its cousins all need work, and more input; but they're subjects that had to be put up in order to qualify other articles that already existed, i.e. in references to their history.

Other scandals that aren't in the usual sense but certainly are now:

• the Head Tax Redress issue (probably already in wikipedia as are some of the rest of these)
• the Japanese Redress resolution and the Italian, Ukrainian and German internments and deportations and associated confiscations of property
• the Komagata Maru and its equivalent in the St. Lawrence whose name I've forgotten
• the residential school system,
• Placer Dome is a private scandal but so large as to be public; and don't even get me started about the VSE or its predecessor the old curb exchange down at Cambie and Hastings (Victoria Square is where the Court Offices and Inns of Court used to be, plus all the brokerages and trusts which were housed in the Dominion Building; the collapse of the Dominion Trust in 1913 - 1911? 12? - somewhere in there
• the Yellowstone Mine strikebreaking by Royal Oak Mines, and the ensuing bombing in the mine and ensuing court case and investigation scandal. Oh, not political? Has to involve parties? What about party backers? I don't get the difference? Especially when the Pinkertons that were brought in were off-duty feds, or so the story goes (it's so long ago I won't be able to find the reference, unless some clever scribe there has it in something other than hard-to-get-at newspaper files; same with all those hours of videotape, the nightly "live from Oka" that made NewsWorld so amazing for a while until the Military shut the cameras down and forced the CBC to air talking heads....again, touchy subject but definitely a scandal.
• And I'm not sure what to do with things like the Nugent Affair during the opening of the Gold Rush (complicated thing involving the American consul and an escaped slave boy the Americans were trying to extradite; the case decided on the boy's right to remain free, once having acquired that status.
• Other colonial scandals included the cost/revenue fiddling on the Douglas Road - and on the RE's subsequent expenses fixing it later because it hadn't been done right, and it was largely a waste of money due to its ultimate abandomment and only illusory strategic value (the route has been too costly to build a road until modern engineering techniques have made it possible; a highway via the lower part of the route, completing the old frontier-era circuit, will be open by 2009; the Sasquatch Highway no less. Along the same general route was another financial fiasco-cum-boondoggle, the Lillooet Cattle Trail, which lived on as the Howe Sound Trail and was followed by the [Pacific Great Eastern}PGE]]; remnants of it exist but are unprotected; archaeological/heritage protection and park protection "softness" are a major scandal but the media doesn't treat it that way; they'll report on it, but they don't get alarmist about it.

the buying of elections by obvious benefactors (I'd rather not list them because of the way I worded that)

• mis-alienation of lands on Burrard Inlet during the original surveys of Burrard Inlet's south shore that were overturned later; the scandal had included conflict of influence and concealment by Joseph Trutch, then Colonial Commissioner of Lands and Works and one of the alienators of the claim. Trutch (former Gov. of the Falkland Islands, I believe) had used his powers as member of the Executive Council and Deputy Governor (or whatever the exact title was) to disown the chief of the Tsleil-wau-tuth and Capilano (then a joint chieftaincy) of his lands; he did so by declaring free all the chief's slaves, (thereby breaking his prestige/authority and the loyalty of his warriors). Trutch was noonetheless later Lieutenant-Governor ; there were other issues with this but I haven't studied the case. Seymour was a Liberal by comparison, empathic towards the "siwashes" he still despised but not "out to get them" in the same way that Trutch or de Cosmos were; Douglas was a radical by comparison in his approach to the native issue. There's lots of dirt from the colonial period; almost too much to list here if ever in the main article of a BC political scandals page; better to have a separate list just for the colony
• the ongoing mainstream corruption by government agents and local magistrates and, similarly, police violence and misconduct against the poor and native people historically and at present; yes, that's scandal, how could it not be? These include the various questions and cases arising from the unemployment/labour unrest in Vancouver in the 1930s, and the use of martial law and police action there.
• there's more Welfare scandals than I can keep track of; the closed-files thing with the Children's Ministry right now is the first that came to mind, but it's endless once you start poking through the newspaper backfiles
• the Fraser Canyon War was a scandal of negligence but not otherwise a scandal in the usual sense (another intricate matter I have to get around to writing). And, last but not least, the failure of the provincial government to recognize their responsibilities concerning treaty resolution for over 130 years despite being told loudly to do otherwise by natives, the feds, the churches and (no less) Lord Dufferin, which is more or less where that particular scandal gets filed.
• The mis-apportioning and procedural inequities of Indian Reserves by the various Commissions (even within their own parameters they were failures and came far short of their assigned goal; the commissioner involved got a fat sinecure and later a pension in reward for not doing anything but touring around, and avoiding negotiations at all turns.

• I suppose the Canon War is part of the British Columbia Land Claims thing, properly, as is all the treaty resolution stuff just mentioned which is its foundation.
• There's something called the Government Reserve that I was going to write an article for; it was set aside in British Columbia - about 85% of the land surface, shelved for later negotiation in the settlement of the non-treaty status of primordial British Columbi; in 1975 the forest companies backed WAC Bennett's son to replace the Grand Old Man and the next year Bill assigned the whole of the Govt Reserve over to the Ministry of Forests as Timber Supply Areas and Timber Berths and Licenses; the new Forests Act of 1976 which mega-sized the lumber and pulp industries. Citable but never treated as a scandal; totally scandalous; but who provides the newsprint? Oh yeah....

• Vancouver and Victoria society murders often have scandalous overtones just because they're society; and somewhat poitical.
• purely unpolitical was the Rattenbury Case and it happened in London, but still part of the scandal fabric in BC society
• I don't have the name for the affair as I don't know the names involved, but there's this guy in a tuxedo who still walks the halls of this converted house I once lived in, apparently the ghost of a then-famous scandal when the small apartment building in Vancouver's West End was a newly married couple, both of wealthy families, in which he murdered his wife and her lover - and he cut her head off. Don't know much more about it except that it was big news.
• Is the Butterbox Babies thing already in-place? Or are police sloppiness scandals not political scandals?
• Whatever it was that went on at Woodlands in New West that was so nasty; administrative sloppiness but the minister of the day was retroactively implicated
• Then there's the Joe Filippone stuff, which I don't really want to get near, nor certain other similar topics, and some connected with it like the British Columbia Provincial Police, which needs to be written. But definitely in the ranks of scandal-laden stuff/ maybe more to do with police matters than political, but still highly public stuff; OK, OK, not a scandal but still interesting and, um, political?

One last question - Is there a page on scandals in Vancouver or should any of that stuff just go on some existing Vancouver-related page. (civic and public combined maybe, if not?) A celebrity vacation, murder and deaths in BC page? Where else to put Errol Flynn? Malcolm Lowry? Dorothy Stratten? Bob Hope and Bing Crosby getting sloshed while fishing at Painter's Lodge (up by Campbell River) for years? Ben Affleck getting a lap dance and a massage at "Brandi's" (on tape)?

Skookum1 07:06, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Skookum1 06:10, 21 November 2005 (UTC)