MEET MASON LOH, VAN EAST'S EX-ALLIANCE, LIBERAL SWITCH-HITTER

Ladies and gentlemen, stranger than fiction, gather 'round for the
curious case of Mason Loh.

Here's a Liberal candidate in Vancouver East who carried a membership
in the Canadian Alliance less than two weeks before the election was
called.

Loh was signed up to challenge for the Alliance nomination in
Vancouver Quadra, in fact.

This is Twilight Zone stuff. A man who was preparing to shill for
either Stockwell Day or Jean Chretien in the same month.

Quite an ideological leap there. Which baptism took hold -- the
dipping in the Red Book River, or the dunking in the Sea of Change?

The new $420-million National Drug Strategy revealed in last week's
Liberal platform seemed a good litmus test. It is as yet undefined,
and I was curious to know what Loh wanted to see in it.

Injection-drug use in the Downtown Eastside is an enormous problem.
Does the business-friendly Loh favour an Alliance law-and-order
crackdown, or a health-centred, harm-reduction model?

A little of both, it turns out. Much like Alliance drug point-man
Randy White, Loh wants both expanded treatment and a good dose of
war-on-drugs police action on the supply side.

"I think for Vancouver East the most immediate need is for treatment
facilities," he told me. "There's a desperate shortage, that's the
No. 1 priority.

"If we have the facilities, we can then talk about putting in drug
courts to deal with all the crimes related to drugs" along with other
prevention and enforcement measures.

Asked about employing successful European methods such as
heroin-maintenance prescriptions and safe-injection sites, Loh
hedged. The idea is box-office poison to his targeted business
voters, the ones who marched recently to protest virtually any help
for drug addicts.

"I'm not for any measures that will encourage or facilitate drug
use," Loh said, even though many Euro success stories report the
opposite impact.

White echoed much of what Loh said, although he went much further in
detailing his law-and-order demands. More power for police when
making arrests, mandatory prison terms for traffickers, drug courts
and so on.

White has little time for "harm-reduction" initiatives such as a
needle exchange, "which doesn't do anything for the addict" except
slow HIV infections.

That's a "defeatist approach," he says, citing an Alliance dream to
convert more than a dozen of Canada's mothballed military bases into
mandatory treatment facilities for addicts.

"In this country, there are virtually no medium- and long-term drug
addiction rehab centres," notes White.

He's got a point there, but his boot-camp plan leaves Vancouver East
NDP incumbent Libby Davies cold.

She favours tackling the drug crisis "as a health issue" with
"progressive reforms that are going to prevent further
criminalization of an already very marginalized population."

Business marchers who "say we want no more services, no more
treatment" are "just not dealing with the reality."

"I don't want people in Vancouver East to have yet another silent
Liberal member who basically toes the line. This is an issue where
you've got to take on government."

Davies readily admits she's in a very tight race with the
"conflicted" Loh. The question now is whether previous NDP supporters
are prepared to abandon her for a Liberal who was preening for the
Alliance only last month.