This week, Public Eye exclusively revealed:
* one of the Oil and Gas Commission's senior employees was temporarily assigned to work for Encana Corp., Canada's largest natural gas producer;
* former provincial cabinet minister Rick Thorpe has registered to lobby the Campbell administration on behalf of a subsidiary of Canada's largest investor-owned gas and electric utility company; and
* New Democrat MLAs will be organizing Our Province Our Future events in their ridings.
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Kash Heed may no longer be in charge of the province's law enforcement policies. But the former solicitor general appears to have been helping influence them south of the border, Public Eye has learned. The former West Vancouver chief constable was a scheduled panelist at two recent conferences sponsored by the New York-headquartered Drug Policy Alliance, which works to "advance policies that reduce the harms of both drug misuse and drug prohibition." The conferences - one of which took place in
"They don't look like they're in step with a lot of economic times people are facing." That's what Community and Rural Development Minister Ben Stewart said when the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. asked about Port Coquitlam's decision to increase the salaries for its mayor and councillors by 27 percent and 42 percent respectively. "However, in a community like Port Coquitlam, where they haven't dealt with this issue for 15 years, they need to establish more regular reviews of it and not leave it for so long," the minister said, having earlier told The Vancouver Sun's Kelly Sinoski he had asked his staff to review the raise. That brouhaha has made headlines and broadcasts across the Lower Mainland. But, put in context, it has also been a source of amusement for the chattering classes. Consider this: