Gordon Wilson should have been Premier of British Columbia. Instead, Vancouver power brokers of the 1990s wanted a more tractable person waiting to be Premier. Gordon Campbell replaced Wilson as Leader of the Official Opposition, David McLean and Jack Poole were among the money men who shaped the future of BC politics.

Despite that setback, Wilson has lived an interesting life. He was born in Vancouver but lived in Kenya until the middle of his teenage years. He was an undergrad in New York and gained a graduate degree in resource economics from UBC.

As leader, he took the BC Liberals from obscurity to become the Official Opposition. It was then that Vancouver tycoons made there move to replace Wilson with Gordon Campbell. Wilson meandered on political roads for some time afterward. Now working primarily as a storyteller, Wilson remains an astute political observer.

He authored a Facebook post earlier this month. It tells of eight-year-old Wilson observing an inebriated pilot take the Captain’s seat of a DC-3 in Kenya. Few people were bothered by the situation. The aircraft landed safely: no harm, no foul. Wilson explains the conduct was underwritten and forgiven by the practice of cronyism.

That was the entry point for a discussion of the despot residing in the American White House:

The Trump administration is rotten to its core with cronyism. His family, friends, and business associates are seated at the table to feast on newly unregulated multi-billion-dollar enterprises in a fiscal gluttony of unlimited and unchecked exploitation in oil and gas, mining, and cryptocurrency, while flying above the law and below the people’s radar.

Cronyism is at the foundation of the Epstein saga: a network of wealthy, misogynistic men of privilege and power exploiting for their pleasure very young girls and vulnerable women while extending their illegal acts into shady business enterprises and money laundering schemes, defying laws and established state-imposed prohibitions in countries deemed hostile to the national interest.

After almost thirty years and a promised release of all documents, files have gone “missing,” the truth obscured by redactions, not to protect the victims, but to shield what Trump called some very important and influential people.

Fentanyl is what has been presented as an acceptable pretext for a US war in Venezuela, which, in reality, is to take control of their oil reserves…

Wilson describes how plunderers rely on cronyism to rule parts of the world. Like the drunken pilot observed by a boy in Kenya, influential wealth seekers don’t much care if others are put at risk. Sometimes, few people are negatively affected. Other times, tens of thousands, including children and innocent adults, end up dead.

Wilson closes with sage advice:

It is only if we permit self-interest to make us duplicitous, to give license to the unfit to govern above and beyond the rule of law, and without regard for the common good, that we will have failed. To successfully resist such an undesirable outcome, we must pay less attention to the distraction in the seat and a good deal more to who is actually flying the plane.