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“It’s one of those issues that can easily erode the confidence in the B.C. Liberals,” Ruff said. “Once there’s a whiff of sleaze, it’s hard to escape it.”

Besides the refunded Liberal donations, the party said last week that another 30 people had come forward to say they had been incorrectly listed as contributors, when in fact the donations came from their employers. The NDP have identified a much smaller total and returned donations totalling about $10,000.

The investigation was sparked by an article in The Globe and Mail about lobbyists who were using their names to make donations to the Liberals, then being reimbursed by clients.

Christy Clark had every opportunity to clean up the wild west of political cash. Instead … she chose yet again to protect her rich donors’ — B.C. NDP leader John Horgan

Butcher, a Vancouver lawyer, was last in the public eye when he oversaw an RCMP investigation stemming from another Liberal scandal — the so-called “quick wins” affair that saw the party attempting to court votes in ethnic communities before the 2013 election. Although that investigation wasn’t launched until after the vote, an NDP post mortem on their losing campaign found that then-leader Adrian Dix didn’t push hard enough to keep the scandal in the public eye.

But Ruff doesn’t believe the NDP have to worry about repeating that mistake.

“I think they can sit back and watch things unfold,” he said. “The notion of B.C. as being the ‘wild west,’ I think that tag has stuck and that gives it some legs.”

Necessarily or not, NDP leader John Horgan appears to be pushing that narrative, releasing a statement Thursday that condemned the premier’s fundraising practices.