“I Just Don’t See John As A Threat” Plecas Tells Globe

Neophyte BC Liberal candidate Darryl Plecas says John van Dongen isn’t much of a threat according to a story in Sunday’s Globe and Mail.

“I Just Don’t See John As A Threat” Plecas told the Globe.

Plecas was parachuted into the riding by party brass represented by two of the last powerful cabinet members of the BC Liberal government, Mike de Jong and Rich Coleman, over the objections of the riding association which had democratically chosen veteran Abbotsford City Councillor Moe Gill.

The riding association resigned en masse and Gill is running as an independent against Mike de Jong in Abbotsford West.

Van Dongen, sounding a little more civil and grown up than Plecas and demonstrating a bit deeper understanding of politics and his riding, told the Globe that the split between Plecas and himself could conceivably lead to the NDP’s Lakhvinder Jhaj coming up the middle and winning the riding. “This is a free-enterprise riding, but if you take my vote last time [58 per cent], and it divides 30-30 between Darryl and me, both of us could lose,” Van Dongen told the Globe.

Before jumping into provincial politics, at what appears to be the tail end of the BC Liberals rein in Victoria, Plecas made a name for himself as the RCMP Chair of Criminology at the University College of the Fraser Valley (now UFV) where he published papers suggesting municipalities and police forces in the Fraser Valley should get around the criminal code and the constitutional requirement for warrants to search private property by having electrical inspectors precede the police through the door.