(Aired on May 5, 2010)
Following the ongoing saga of Kash Heed is becoming a little like watching a ping pong match. As of the taping of this segment Heed is out once again as the province's Solicitor General and Minister of Public Safety. That could have changed three or four times before air time, though.
Officially, Heed resigned early in April while police investigated a controversial pamphlet from his election campaign. He was reinstated yesterday, shortly after being cleared of all wrongdoing by a special prosecutor. Then after the reinstatement, that prosecutor - Terrence Robertson - decided to tell the world that his law firm donated a bunch of money to Heed's campaign. You'd think that might have occurred to him before he accepted the job of investigating heed.
So now Kash is out again, resigning this morning, saying he anticipates another special prosecutor will be assigned and the investigation will be redone.
This is extremely embarrassing on a number of different levels. First, it's embarrassing for the Liberal government. Heed was Gordon Campbell's star candidate in the last election, resigning from his post as head of the West Vancouver Police Department. He won his seat by a slim margin after a tough battle. But now the government's Solicitor General has resigned four times in just over two years, dating back to John Les and John van Dongen. It's not that hard to imagine a by-election taking place in Vancouver-Fraserview in the near future.
Second, it's embarrassing for Heed himself - both as a politician and as a law enforcement professional. Conceivably, Heed would have possessed the instincts to recognize the wrongdoing or appearance of wrongdoing taking place around him. Instead, his political career has turned into one big chaotic mess. If Gordon Campbell has learned his lesson from this fiasco, he will plant Heed firmly in the back benches, and we won't see Kash back for a long time.
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As a parachute candidate, Heed may not have selected any of his campaign team - they probably used whoever they had working on Wally Oppal's campaign in 2005. The conventional wisdom on campaigns is to keep the candidate out of the campaign office as much as possible to keep him from trying to run the campaign (that's the campaign manager's job, and the candidate should be campaigning, anyway). Coupled with not having a political background, it wouldn't surprise me if Heed genuinely didn't know what was going on.
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