As this newspaper was about to go to press, John Yap was the B.C. minister for multiculturalism and advanced education.

And then he wasn't. Yap is out of the B.C. Liberal cabinet, the second head to roll following the heave-ho for Kim Haakstad, deputy chief of staff to Premier Christy Clark.

Haakstad and Yap may be the last, or they may be the first, to take the fall for the leaked plan by which the BC Liberals would mix government and public resources to help engineer an election win.

It's hard to say which part of this plan was more offensive.

Is it the blatant pandering to various ethnic groups, in which the Liberals planned to apologize for past wrongs to score quick political points? With a group of largely Indo-Canadian Liberals calling for Clark's resignation, it seems fair to say that this has gone down about as well as a swig of hydrochloric acid.

Is it the use of government resources to advance entirely partisan aims? With the numerous BC Jobs Plan ads shilling for the Liberals in recent weeks, that part was not in the least surprising.

Perhaps it was the way all the leaked correspondence about this project was taking place off-the-books, through private email accounts of senior staffers and MLAs? Those working on this project deliberately set out to avoid it becoming public through Freedom of Information requests.

There have been demands for Christy Clark to resign, but frankly we're not sure what good it would do. Clark, if you recall, was not so long ago to be the breath of fresh air that would dispel the troubles created by the departure of B.C.'s last elected premier, Gordon Campbell. Campbell was a popular leader of B.C. for many years, but managed to depart for London, metaphorically booted off the continent with an approval rating of just nine per cent.

Clark has some distance to fall before she matches her predecessor's record.

- M.C.