The B.C. Court of Appeal has upheld a decision by the registrar of mortgage brokers to refuse to allow a convicted cocaine trafficker to apply for a licence until 2014. The registrar, former police officer Alan Clark, rejected Eugenio Pugliese’s application last year for a submortgage broker’s licence, concluding that Pugliese was “unsuitable and his proposed registration is objectionable”.

Back in 1998, the Surrey RCMP drug squad busted Pugliese and two associates with 69 kilograms of cocaine, 15.2 kilograms of marijuana, 0.7 kilograms of hashish, 5.9 kilograms of psilocybin, and 4.3 kilograms of methamphetamine. In 2001, Pugliese was sentenced to five years in jail for conspiracy to traffic in cocaine and for possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking.

According to a March 27 B.C. Court of Appeal ruling, Pugliese was jailed in 2004 after his appeals failed; he was released on day parole eight months later after serving one-sixth of his sentence. Pugliese is now on full parole, which expires next year.

Pugliese filed a judicial-review application in B.C. Supreme Court challenging Clark’s decision to refuse to consider his application to become a submortgage broker. Justice Richard Bruce Tremayne Goepel upheld Clark’s refusal to consider an application from Pugliese until 2014. A three-judge B.C. Court of Appeal panel endorsed Goepel’s decision.

According to the recent B.C. Court of Appeal ruling, Pugliese disclosed his conviction when he applied to become a submortgage broker in 2005. Clark, in his capacity as the registrar of mortgage brokers, ruled that Pugliese could not apply for registration under the Mortgage Brokers Act until five years after he completes his sentence. This means that Pugliese would have to wait until 2014.

In a written decision, B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Jo-Ann Prowse emphasized the registrar’s role in protecting the public interest. “Thus, while Mr. Pugliese’s arguments, emphasizing the need to recognize an applicant’s capacity for rehabilitation and the importance of employment, cannot be gainsaid, these considerations cannot prevail over the overriding duty of the Registrar to protect the public interest and the integrity of the industry,” Prowse wrote. “In my view, Mr. Pugliese’s arguments in this regard do not cut to the heart of the question of whether it is practically necessary in the public interest that the Registrar have the implicit power to impose time limits on his consideration of further applications for registration by an applicant who has been found ‘unsuitable’ and/or ‘objectionable’ in circumstances such as these.”

Clark, now the superintendent and CEO of the Financial Institutions Commission, has developed a reputation as an aggressive regulator of submortgage brokers since the Eron Mortgage Corporation fiasco of the late 1990s, in which investors were swindled out of $182 million. The investors sued the former registrar for not warning them of looming problems, and the investors’ case was dismissed in 2001.

On April 1, Vancouver city council received a report dealing with amending the official development plan for False Creek North. Earlier this year, council approved a staff recommendation to allocate $290,000 to do the necessary work. Half the money will come in a contribution from PavCo, a provincial Crown corporation that operates B.C. Place Stadium. The other half will be included in the city’s 2008 operating budget.

According to the staff report, PavCo wants to sell or lease surrounding development sites to pay for rehabilitating the stadium. “Earlier planning studies showed it to have the potential to accommodate about 730,000 sq. ft., and more may be possible,” the staff report stated.

On his blog (stephenrees.wordpress.com/ ), Stephen Rees describes himself a “recusant transportation economist and regional planner”. He worked at TransLink until 2004 on a variety of policy issues. “None of these have been solved since I left,” he notes on the blog, “and the region now seems to be likely to abandon its long established growth strategy altogether, as the province is determined to expand its major freeway. I have long advocated more sensible policies to better integrate transport and land use.”

Rees’s blog has surpassed 100,000 page views. That’s one measure of the degree of public
interest in planning issues in this region.