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It's a new wrinkle on public-private partnerships, B.C.-style. Today, Premier Gordon Campbell and Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid issued a news release urging British Columbians to buy a newspaper.

They will also be out in the streets hawking copies of Postmedia newspapers (which include the Vancouver Sun and Province) as part of the company's Raise-a-Reader fundraiser for literacy.

The B.C. government is matching donations up to $500,000.

The premier's call to buy a newspaper came on the same day that the Vancouver Sun dragged up an editorial from 1991 trashing the leader of the anti-HST campaign, Bill Vander Zalm.

The headline from the vault read: "Trail of deceit and no apology".

Today's lead story in the Vancouver Sun features a story about a recall-campaign organizer, linked to Vander Zalm, who made disparaging remarks on his blog about the chief electoral officer.

If that wasn't enough, Vancouver Sun political columnist Vaughn Palmer chimed in with a highly critical piece, which dragged up Vander Zalm's handling of the abortion issue and AIDS treatments as B.C.'s premier in the late 1980s.

Of course, there's absolutely no connection between the full-throttle attack on Vander Zalm and the B.C. Liberal government's news release.

Anyone who suggests otherwise doesn't understand that the business and the editorial side of a daily newspaper are kept separate for an important reason: to preserve the publication's integrity in the eyes of its readers.