NDP lobbied by the daughter of one of its top strategists

[Gone_Fishin]

And guess what? A solid link to Chinese money.

And, guess who's changing official registry records when the poop hits the fan? Moe Sihota.

ARGH! What a twisted NDP mess that smells of corruption.

B.C. premier's office was lobbied by the daughter of one of its top strategists


B.C.’s Office of the Premier was lobbied by the daughter of one of its top strategists, Glacier Media has learned.

Records obtained through B.C.’s lobbyist registry and freedom of information law show Bob Dewar — by some accounts the architect behind former premier John Horgan’s rise to power — was actively billing the Office of the Premier up to $1,000 a day for his services as a special advisor, while his daughter, Maeghan Dewar, lobbied that same office to gain favour for the forestry giant Paper Excellence.

“I think that kind of situation can raise a red flag,” said Stewart Prest, a Vancouver-based political scientist lecturer at Simon Fraser University.

“It's a politically sensitive issue because the people are so senior.”

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But Prest said two close family members — working as a senior political advisor on one side, and a lobbyist on the other — can raise the perception of a conflict of interest and can have serious implications for trust in government.

“It's a difficult one to deal with because you don't want public officials constantly looking over your shoulders,” said Prest.

“But you also really, really need to have a public that can have confidence that decisions are being taken in the public interests of the province without even the appearance of impropriety.”

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A long-time NDP strategist, Bob Dewar first served Horgan as his 2017 campaign director. He also served as Horgan’s chief of staff and special advisor. A contract released in a freedom of information request indicates his high-level strategic advice was “critical” to the premier.

“I don’t think we would have had the success we’ve had without Bob, without a doubt,” Horgan told political columnist and author Rob Shaw in 2021.

The son of former federal MP and Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar, the BC NDP recruited the senior Dewar from Manitoba. Dewar had previously served several years as chief of staff for that province’s NDP premier Gary Doer.

Bob Dewar’s daughter, Maeghan, also worked as a senior advisor for Doer, and “was a key part of Jack Layton’s team during the 2011 federal breakthrough,” according to a biography posted to the Vancouver-based public relations firm Longview Communications Inc., where she still works.

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The investigation — which included media partners the CBC and the Halifax Examiner in Canada, and Le Monde and Radio France in Europe — examined leaked communications and more than 15 years of corporate and public records linking Paper Excellence with the conglomerate Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and its corporate parent the Sinar Mas Group.

Asia Pulp and Paper has been accused of widespread deforestation and a number of human rights abuses spanning decades. APP told Glacier Media it has moved to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain and resolve conflicts with local communities. Both companies say they are independent of one another.

Interviews with former employees as well as shipping and financial records suggest Paper Excellence has built a fibre pipeline shipping Canadian and French wood pulp to APP mills and affiliated logistics companies in Indonesia and China.

Land title documents, meanwhile, show Paper Excellence received $1.5 billion in credit from the China Development Bank, the overseas lending arm of the Chinese government and a major financial tool to cement control over infrastructure and natural resources, experts say.

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“We need a good investigation to determine the links between the foreign domination and corporate control of the industry,” said Worth.

“Is China going to have our access to our resources through the backdoor?”

Charlie Angus, who has led the federal push to investigate Paper Excellence, said people are looking for answers to reasonable questions of ownership over public resources.

“There’s a questioning period right now,” he said. “This is a very big company that people know very little about.”

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The B.C. lobbyist registry was among dozens of sources linking Paper Excellence with APP or its parent company the Sinar Mas Group.

For nearly two and a half years, Sihota reported to the registry the Sinar Mas Group was an “affiliate” of Paper Excellence. On Nov. 1, 2022, only a week after a damning report linked Paper Excellence with the Sinar Mas Group, Sihota removed the affiliation in his self-reported filing.

Sihota told Glacier Media he mistakenly listed the Sinar Mas Group as an affiliate of his client, Paper Excellence. He said he removed the link after he “was approached.”

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