Corruption in the provinces

"B.C. Solicitor-General John Les has resigned his cabinet post pending the outcome of an investigation into his dealings with developers while he was mayor of Chilliwack."

The only time in my life I’ve felt a real sense of place was living in Chilliwack BC. Sure the corruption in Canada’s most western province is blatant and seldom prosecuted with any success. It’s sort of a Wild West thing; a mans gotta do what a mans gotta do!

My few brief meetings with local MLA John Les confirmed his adoption of that attitude; if you can’t see anything wrong with an issue it is easy to slip into bland denial. Les grew up on a dairy farm, land locked into the provinces Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR); an effort to preserve productive land for farming.

No one can blame Les and his brothers for wanting to escape farm life; it’s more an issue of the ethics of moving from dairy to development. Much of the old Les farm is now flood plain housing development, so that rich agricultural land has somehow been parleyed into marginal housing blocks.

John Les insists that he will be cleared of any wrongdoing, and when his government holds the numbers t crush opposition he might well be right. His provincial arty call themselves Liberals but they are, like Les, essentially conservatives too gutless or crooked to even be honest about that.

Les’s blatant use of position, first as mayor then as MHA has not gone un-remarked over the years, it is more a matter that no one has had the will or power to challenge him before. With control over the ALR the power brokers like Les can easily determine that development occurs in their favour.

The big problem now is that Vancouver’s food bowl, the Fraser Valley is also under demand for housing as the city grows. Chilliwack City council, along with others are approving developments on the unstable murrains which line the valley. These are not mountains as such, but detritus bulldozed up by old glacial activity.

Much of the agricultural lowlands are recovered lake bed of flood plains of the Fraser and Chilliwack rivers. In many ways driving growth in the valley is a disaster waiting to happen, especially given the valley sits on top of a massive subduction fault zone. With a major quake long overdue increasing population density in the area already borders on the criminal.

But while the easy dollars are on offer good Christians like John Les are not going to be concerned about things like human disaster on a massive scale. In fact they are not the slightest bit concerned with the quality of life in the region. For these guys, destroying remnant urban native bush, fish nurseries and water quality is just business as usual.

My betting is that Les will be true to his word and escape any charges. He will continue raping his section of the Fraser Valley to increase his personal wealth. Corruption and power travel hand in hand, and John Les has shown himself to be a master at the disgusting, self serving game.