Monday, November 16, 2009

Rich, Geoff here - can we talk liquor policy?

Rich Coleman and Geoff Plant spent five years in opposition battling the NDP, and four more years in cabinet as the solicitor general and attorney general respectively.
And now a big private liquor store owner has hired Plant to lobby Coleman for changes that would boost the company's profits.
Plant is a lawyer and smart. Perhaps he would be in demand for such jobs based on his experience and those qualities alone.
But if I were a smaller liquor company, or a community group concerned about increasingly wide open alcohol sales, I'd wonder if Plant also had better access and influence than most to Coleman, after the two spent nine years working together.
And whether that meant I needed to hire someone else - another insider - to make sure I had the ear of the powerful.
You can read it more at publiceyeonline.com, where Sean Holman had the story first. (He does that quite a lot.)

1 comment:

RossK said...

Well, on the bright side, at least Geoff wasn't first hired to write a report that concludes that all public liquor stores should be shuttered yesterday before he went to work for that public liquor distributor.

(which, of course, is an allusion to a different story broken first by that other guy, whose last name is McLeod, who seems to break the few remaining stories that are not originally unearthed by Mr. Holman).

.