"If only," one Liberal insider sighed, "it hadn't been crystal meth."

Not, he hastened to add, that the Campbell administration would have been the least bit happy about one of its ministerial aides being charged with criminal offences involving any illicit substance.

But there is indeed some added irony that the substance involved in the drug-dealing charges against ministerial assistant Marshall Smith is crystal meth - the same substance on which the Liberals are currently focusing their war on drugs.

It was less than two months ago that Susan Brice, the minister of state for mental health and addictions, announced that her government would be developing a special plan to tackle the problems of crystal meth.

"The age at which the young people of this province and across the country are exposed to the potential of taking crystal meth is so alarming that it absolutely has to be dealt with," Brice said in May. Doctors and police officers had all been telling her the need for quick, effective action on crystal meth, described as being appallingly addictive and having the potential to cause long-term neurological problems.

Victoria has been one of the B.C. cities leading the charge against crystal meth. Police forces, the local school board, city council, and Victoria-Hillside MLA Sheila Orr have all been working together to develop effective prevention, treatment and enforcement programs.

High profile street corner

It's hard to believe that anyone whose job includes keeping a finger on the political pulse would not be aware of all these efforts. That makes it all the more surprising that a ministerial aide should be caught, allegedly dealing crystal meth, on a high-profile street corner on the edge of Victoria's downtown, an area frequently put under surveillance by drug officers from both the Victoria city police and the RCMP.

But that, it appears, is exactly how Marshall Smith went down on the afternoon of Canada Day. Both the police and government officials have taken great pains to make clear that whatever Smith was or wasn't doing (like everyone else, he must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and he has adamantly denied any wrongdoing), it had nothing to do with the entirely separate high-profile case involving former ministerial assistants David Basi and Bob Virk. They were the two who were involved in the search warrants that were executed on their offices at the legislative buildings and other places back on Dec. 28. The police investigation into that case proceeds methodically onwards, and it remains unclear when more information about it will be allowed to be made public.

Smith's case appears on the surface to be much simpler. Here there are no search warrants, no wiretaps, no complex links in which one investigation leads police to another, and another.

Here there are simply a couple of officers from the street-crimes unit of Victoria police who, on a sunny Canada Day afternoon, set up a surveillance operation at the corner of Fisgard and Government, just at the entrance to the city's Chinatown, a block away from City Hall, and exactly eight blocks away from Smith's office in the legislative buildings.

Police were unaware of Leg tie

The officers watched until they saw what they thought was a drug deal go down, and then they moved in. One man was somebody who was banned by court order from being in that part of town. The second man was Smith. Based on what they observed and found, the officers charged Smith with possession of crystal meth for the purposes of trafficking. They had no idea who he was until they were back at the police station, questioning him about, among other things, his occupation.

Solicitor General Rich Coleman has since told us that Smith had been on leave from the government for the past several weeks, because he needed to deal with some "personal issues" that apparently did include substance abuse problems. If the police allegations against him are true, one suspects his political masters didn't exactly expect him to "deal with" the issues by setting up his own home-based business.

In some ways, it is unfair to tarnish the Liberal government with Smith's problems. At worst, he was clearly one person acting alone. There was no relationship whatsoever between his latter-day difficulties and his work for the government. In this case, there are no suspicions of links to campaign contributions or to the B.C. Rail deal or to anything Smith did while he worked in the ministry of Community, Aboriginal and Women's Affairs.

Another 'young turk' in trouble

Politics, however, is rarely fair, especially in British Columbia. And his arrest cannot help but lead many British Columbians to wonder about the judgment of those political masters who seem to have hired a distressingly large number of ministerial assistants with a penchant for getting themselves into legal trouble.

Like Basi, Smith was one of the first "young Turks" hired by the Campbell government as a ministerial assistant after the 2001 election. Like Basi, he had worked as a civil servant for much of the time the NDP had been in power, in his case as a correctional officer and bureaucrat in the attorney general's ministry. The cabinet order appointing him went through on June 29, 2001, when the Liberals had officially been in power for only about two weeks. For two and a half years, he served as ministerial assistant to Ted Nebbeling whose main job was to get the Community Charter passed and running for local governments.

With that job done, Nebbeling was left out of cabinet in the shuffle of January, 2004. But Smith didn't follow his political master into political oblivion. Rather, he was transferred over to be ministerial assistant to Gulzar Cheema, who, in the shuffle, had become minister of state for immigration and multi-cultural services.

Cheema, in fact, quit shortly thereafter to make an ill-fated stab at gaining federal office for the Liberals. But the latest government directory still shows Smith as the MA for immigration and multi-culturalism, even though without a specific minister of state to report to.

Smith now has been suspended without pay from his position.

And even with the charges against him pending, Coleman still feels the need to call on the justice system to get much tougher with those who traffic in harmful and illegal substances - like crystal meth.

Barbara McLintock is the Victoria-based contributing editor to The Tyee.