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In the phone call, Carson asks Melland if he would be interested in a job with the Liberal caucus doing research for unelected Liberal candidates before the 2013 election.

“Nominated candidates are looking for communications material that we don’t normally provide out of caucus,” Carson says in the recording. “So we need somebody, like one person that when these requests come in, it just goes to one person and they deal with it. They produce the materials, or get it, you know just co-ordinate it, and provide it back to the party or back to the candidate.”

Carson said the material would be for Liberal candidates seeking information on government activity in their ridings.

“Let’s say you have a nominated candidate in, I don’t know, Vancouver East and he needs information on, you know, a transportation project in their area.”

“So I’d be working out of caucus, though, or?” Melland asks.

“Yeah, you’d be working for caucus,” Carson responds. “For me.”

Melland said he never followed-up on the conversation.

“I wasn’t going to take a job where I was being paid by B.C. taxpayers to do work for the B.C. Liberal party,” he said.

But Carson denied any wrongdoing.

“Any of the work done by caucus was publicly posted on the caucus website at the time,” Carson said Wednesday. “All of the work done was appropriate.”

She said it was “false and untrue” that the job entailed working for Liberal candidates while being paid by taxpayers because the research assembled by staff was made available to anyone on the caucus’s public website, adding Melland’s claims are “misleading.”