Mr. Wilson gets a pass
There are plenty of questions about the past of West Vancouver's newest Liberal MP. How come voters didn't hear about them?
Terry O'Neill - March 13, 2006
The tongue-twistingly named B.C. riding of West Vancouver- Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country is sending a new Liberal MP to Ottawa this spring, a self-described entrepreneur and accountant by the name of Blair Wilson. A handsome and self-assured 42-year-old family man, Wilson seems the very embodiment of the riding's demographics. After all, WV-SC-SSC is home to the richest community in the country, the aforementioned West Vancouver, and contains within its boundaries Canada's most upscale all-season holiday destination, the resort town of Whistler.
But while the riding's successful business folk may have thought they were electing a mirror image of themselves in the person of the charming Wilson, who operates a pair of restaurants in Vancouver, questions have arisen about his record as an entrepreneur.
After narrowly losing to incumbent Conservative John Reynolds in the 2004 election, Wilson campaigned unceasingly for the next 18 months, driving around West Vancouver in a car decked out with a sign promoting his candidacy. The self-promotion paid off on Jan. 23, when he edged Conservative candidate John Weston, a Harvard grad and Osgoode Hall-trained lawyer, by a thousand votes.
Shortly before the election, however, a small-circulation newspaper began reporting that Wilson was not all he seemed. News reports noted that his campaign literature omitted any references to his relationship to a Vancouver-based high-tech venture called Multimedia Accelerator Corp. According to court documents, Wilson resigned as president and chief financial officer of the company in 1998 amid allegations he had taken "unauthorized cash advances" from the company and had filed "duplicate expense charges." The company sued for damages; Wilson denied the allegations and countersued; the two parties settled out of court, and the company eventually folded.
Investor Tony Tanti, a former NHL star who now runs a Vancouver flooring business, says he lost $50,000 in the meltdown of Multimedia, in which he invested only because he had considered Wilson a friend. Now, "I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him," Tanti says. Wilson did not respond to interview requests, but in a statement issued days before the election, he wrote: "This was settled seven years ago and there are no outstanding issues. Every once in a while in business you have differences. Fortunately, we were able to come together and resolve the matter out of court."
Private investigator Leo Knight dug into the case before the election and found a disillusioned company officer, Ron Condly, who questioned Wilson's suitability for office because of the fiasco. Condly's name was subsequently removed from an Internet blog operated by Knight, after Condly's current employer asked that he remain anonymous.
Conservative supporters have also privately pointed out that Wilson's 2004 campaign resum? may have exaggerated his role in developing a pizza chain in Poland in the mid-1990s. Indeed, his older pamphlet says he opened 40 restaurants in that country, but he more recently claimed to have opened 21. The campaign literature also does not mention that Wilson left Pan Smak Pizza Inc. under unhappy circumstances: he and its principals ended up suing each other before settling out of court. Court documents also show that Wilson worked with Pan Smak only two years, 1994-96, not the five years he told reporters and voters.
Defeated Tory candidate Weston says he purposely chose not to raise any of these questions during the campaign because he wanted to "focus on a positive vision for the community." However, he now says that, while he did not feel he should have alerted voters to Wilson's checkered past, Wilson himself "has a positive obligation to make full disclosure and to account to people of our riding and to Canadians about these things."
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