After landing in Maui, 'a punch in the stomach'

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Gary Collins, British Columbia's finance minister, a possible future premier, a man courted to be Paul Martin's top lieutenant in the West, was a political star on the rise when he boarded a jet in Vancouver on the morning of Dec. 28, 2003.

Before he landed with his family in Hawaii, his career would be in a tailspin, caught in the turbulence of a political corruption case that would be before the courts for seven years before he was finally exonerated.

"It was like a punch in the stomach," Mr. Collins said in an interview this week, recalling the moment he learned police had raided the legislature in Victoria while he was flying away for a long-awaited family vacation. "You could have knocked me over. I was speechless for a while."

The BC Rail case, so named because it involved the leaking of confidential government information related to the sale of the railway, has troubled British Columbians for years because of the ethical questions it has raised about politics on the West Coast. And no politician was hit harder than Mr. Collins, a charismatic former pilot who was on the verge of jumping to federal politics when television news cameras captured police coming out of the legislature with boxes of seized files. Within a year he had left politics.

RCMP documents that were released by the court this week in response to an application by The Globe and Mail and CTV show that no elected officials were implicated in the corruption of public service that involved two ministerial aides, Dave Basi and Bob Virk.

Mr. Basi, who worked for Mr. Collins, and Mr. Virk, who assisted then B.C. transportation minister Judith Reid, were sentenced last fall to two years less a day under house arrest for breach of trust and accepting bribes. The two men conspired to leak to lobbyists confidential government documents concerning the 2003 sale of BC Rail to Canadian National Railway for $1-billion. Through six years of pretrial hearings they claimed innocence, maintaining they were only doing the bidding of their political masters.

But the documents show they were a team of two, working with a small group of lobbyists, including one who was paying bribes to Mr. Basi.

In the interview, Mr. Collins recalled the turmoil of the day he learned about the legislature raid and talked about the frustration of waiting years for his day in court. Just before he was to testify, the two accused entered guilty pleas, bringing the case to an abrupt halt.

"I was quite looking forward to getting in there," Mr. Collins said of the courtroom where for years defence lawyers had alluded to the culpability of elected officials. "I wanted to deal with this - and set the record straight."

The police files show that at first investigators suspected Mr. Collins of colluding with Mr. Basi, but their doubts were removed by two lengthy interviews they had with Mr. Collins, and by evidence they found that corroborated his claim to innocence.

It wasn't until he sat down with investigating officers in 2004 that Mr. Collins began to get a grasp of what the case was about. He knew, as had widely been reported, that the RCMP had started investigating drug dealers in Victoria, had caught Mr. Basi on wiretaps, and then, based on what they heard, had opened a criminal investigation into suspected breach of trust.

"The police came to see me. I spent two or three hours being interviewed. As it progressed I became more and more sad, angry, depressed - I don't know what word to use. That feeling grew as they laid this stuff out. They showed me e-mails and I listened to wire taps. It was pretty hard to take," Mr. Collins said.

Mr. Collins was shocked because not only had Mr. Basi been a trusted aide, he considered him a good friend.

"I brought him into politics," Mr. Collins said. In fact, Mr. Collins liked Mr. Basi so much he was going to ask him to go with him to Ottawa in 2004, when he was planning to jump to federal politics.

Mr. Collins boarded a flight one hour before the police raid on the legislature, and when he arrived in Hawaii he left his cellphone off. He didn't know anything about the scandal that had rocked B.C. until he awoke the next morning.

"I got to Maui that night with a screaming kid with a cold. We all tried to go to bed," transcripts of the police interview show Mr. Collins told investigators.

"Got up the next morning and turned my cellphone on and you know, it starts going nuts. … Everybody in the world's looking for me. A lot of politics going on so that's generally not a good thing."

Mr. Collins called his office, where he learned "Dave's house had been search[ed] The office had been searched. Bobby's office had been searched. … I said, 'Oh great, it's been a hell of a year,'" he said.

During the first of two police interviews, RCMP Sergeant Ian Lawson asked if Mr. Collins had ever given Mr. Basi permission to receive a gift.

"Absolutely not," Mr. Collins said.

"Our investigation has shown lobbyist Erik Bornman who had been working for Pilothouse [a Victoria lobbying firm]… had been paying David Basi money over approximately a two-year period for the referral of clients' assistance with matters of government. This arrangement included regular monthly payments of approximately $1,500 that totaled $28,205. Are you aware of these payments?" Sgt. Lawson asked.

"No," Mr. Collins said.

"Was Dave Basi allowed to receive these payments?"

" No. . . I think when you work for government you work for government you don't work for anybody else," Mr. Collins said.

Then police asked him about a dinner meeting he had, after the BC Rail sale was announced, with two officials from OmniTRAX Inc., a U.S. company that had bid for BC Rail.

Mr. Collins said he went to the meeting hoping the OmniTRAX officials could get over their disappointment and find other ventures in which to invest.

Police had wiretaps of Mr. Basi telling Mr. Bornman the dinner was so Mr. Collins could give OmniTRAX "a consolation prize," possibly an untendered bid for Roberts Bank, a BC Rail port facility, as a way to thank them for staying in the bidding process and driving up CN's offer.

"There is no bloody way that I would ever have led anybody to believe that they were getting special attention," Mr. Collins said. "If those guys showed up thinking that I was going to offer them some sort of special thing then, you know, I mean they've been screwed too."

During the investigation police found an e-mail from OmniTRAX to Pilothouse complaining that Mr. Collins made no offers at the dinner and accusing Mr. Basi of being "duplicitous" in setting up a pointless meeting.

When they played wiretaps of Mr. Basi promising his boss was going to give OmniTRAX a prize, Mr. Collins said more than anything else he felt sad. A trusted "political friend" had sold him out.

A month after that interview, Mr. Collins announced he was quitting politics. He is now senior vice-president of the Belkorp Group of Companies in Vancouver, and has no plans to run for office again.