If you are going to shoot poison darts at the enemy, make sure they don't fit your intended victim's blowgun.
With the provincial election not much more than a heartbeat-and-a-half away, most of the smart money is saying that B.C.'s New Democrats have the ruling BC Liberals on the ropes.
There's the old, festering wound of the HST which will finally be bandaged (but far from healed) on April 1. That's only a couple of weeks before the election writ is dropped.
The current ethnic apology scandal has its tentacles throughout the premier's office, twitching uncomfortably close to Christy Clark's own desk. With a couple of resignations already in hand, in-house investigators will allegedly get to the bottom of it all, but realistically, most folks who don't consider themselves "ethnic" won't be significantly swayed by something they feel doesn't affect them directly.
The same scandal includes elements that will resonate at election time, however: the elements that affect our pocketbooks.
Diversion of tax dollars into partisan political endeavours is not taken lightly by voters, especially the more conservative types who are most likely to support the political right, like Clark and her BC Liberals.
The NDP has been not-so-subtly harping on that issue, pointing not only to the ethnic debacle, but the government's controversial $15-million advertising campaign that veritably stinks of partisan politics.
But now the apparent leak of a draft report from the Auditor General's office, reported by the Victoria Times-Colonist, suggests the NDP have been diverting constituency funding - our tax dollars - into a campaign slush fund.
At about $200 per month per constituency office, totalling a bit more than $460,000, the diversions don't amount to a very large gift to themselves.
But when voters go to the polls, it might just be the thought that counts.
