Metro: What made you look into B.C.'s political funding?
Dan Levin: Obviously political financing is a hot topic in the U.S., certainly with conflicts of interest with Donald Trump, it's a bipartisan concern.
I was shocked that this was happening in Canada, I think Americans would be shocked, and frankly I think Canadians would be shocked too. No elected official in the U.S. is allowed to get a stipend; that would be bribery.
I lived in China for seven-and-a-half years; in China or Russia this would just be called 'corruption' or 'nepotism.' But here, it's just ‘legal.’ The idea that a Conflict of Interest Commissioner who's never found anybody in violation of conflict of interest (rules) in all his many years, whose son works in the government he's meant to rule on — it seems like a Kafkaesque dystopian nightmare of shady politics and conflict of interest.