2010:

Six years after a police raid on the BC Legislature, the fraud and breach-of-trust trial of Dave Basi and Bob Virk seems poised to begin in BC Supreme Court. Unfortunately, after what the Vancouver Sun deems “last-minute snags” (which can’t be reported on due to a publication ban), the proceedings are postponed by one more day.

After years of similar delays, Basi and Virk (ministerial aides to Finance Minister Gary Collins and Transportation Minister Judith Reid) stand accused of leaking confidential government documents related to the privatization of BC Rail to lobbyists, in exchange for money and favours. The case is alleged to stretch much further into the Liberal Government than simply Basi or Virk, and the witness list provided by the Crown includes many of the key players in the first Campbell administration. However, by October, after the testimony of only two witnesses, both Basi and Virk will suddenly plead guilty, receive two-year house arrest sentences, and have their $6 million dollars in legal fees will be passed on to BC taxpayers. Much of the evidence in the proceedings (pointing to far deeper involvement in corruption, bribery, nepotism, and media manipulation by Gordon Campbell and the provincial Liberal Party) will never see the light of day.

“David Basi and Bob Virk are guilty alright — guilty of being unwitting pawns in a much bigger chess game where all the other players came out winners,” reporter and trial observer Bill Tielman will later write, in an article for The Tyee.

Tielman will add that “Basi and Virk do not deserve to spend a single day under house arrest, let alone the two years less a day they were sentenced to last week under a guilty plea bargain agreement,” going on to liken them to “the ill-fated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — a pair of minor actors working for the corrupt King Claudius who are sent off unsuspectingly to their deaths by the scheming Danish prince Hamlet — Basi and Virk were simply hung out to dry after police raided the B.C. legislature.”

After the abrupt end to the trial, and with mounting evidence of direct intervention in the judicial process by Gordon Campbell, deliberate mishandling of the case by the RCMP, the involvement of  Bruce Clark (brother of Christy Clark), and the appointment of a Special Prosecutor who had ties to the Liberal government, Tielman, and others, (including Dave Basi himself), will continue to call for a public inquiry. These calls will go unheeded, and none of the other corporate or political players involved in the process will be charged, or penalized.

“I want my kids to know that their dad had integrity, that their dad does sleep with a clear conscience at night,” Basi will say, at the conclusion of the trial. “I know some people who don’t, I’ll tell you that much, and they’re very relieved today.”

 

Image: A mock trial, being performed by members of Vancouver Heights Presbyterian Church, circa 1922. Image Courtesy of the Vancouver Archives.