Coleman exonerated

Posted September 30, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

The conflict of interest commissioner clears Rich Coleman.

The NDP will try to claim that the commissioner was somehow partisan in this decision, but it will not stick and this issue will be politically dead with respect to the May 2009 election.

The residual “known unknowns” for the BC Liberals revolve around the special prosecutor investigation of John Les and the ALR rezoning, and any resolution concerning the legislature raids approximately five years ago (which is going on at a snail’s pace).

Another uncontrollable variable will be the state of the economy and the commodity markets (of which BC is vulnerable to economically) but it will be impossible to predict until closer to the election date.

I highly suspect that if the election dates were not fixed there would have been an election called by now. As a humourous note, it would have been amusing if Premier Gordon Campbell said to the Union of the BC Municipalities (UBCM) that “We have lost the confidence of the BC Legislature. I will be going to the Lieutenant Governor and dissolving the legislature”, which is roughly equivalent to what the Prime Minister said before pulled the plug on parliament.

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Executive pay hikes issues gaining traction

Posted September 3, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

The NDP has been giving a lot of attention on the government’s August 8, 2008 press release concerning the pay increases given to deputy ministers. When this issue initially came out, I did not think it would gain much traction (the press release time was perfect - on a Friday afternoon, the day of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony). I might be mistaken here.

The media had an opportunity today (via press conference) to interview the Premier, and CKNW has been fairly active in publicizing the executive compensation issue, with a quote of the Premier saying that “I didn’t think I communicated the challenges that we faced”, in addition to stating what was stated on the press release (mainly that the compensation levels are targeted to being third in the country, and the increases being needed to ensure having quality people in the public service).

Attributing the backlash to “a lack of communications” is going to be pour fuel on something that was a candlelight fire - a lack of communications was the rationale that was used for restructuring the MLA pay increase. The initial (November 17, 2005) MLA pay hike legislation was repealed (November 21, 2005) and a commission of three people was set up to study the issue.

Ironically, what the commission recommended was significantly higher than the initial legislation.

Back on the issue of public service executive pay increases, I’m surprised to see this issue still in the news.

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Rich Coleman - Tree Farm License land removal

Posted July 17, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

BC Auditor General John Doyle released a rather scathing report (local link) on the removal of approximately 28,000 hectares of private land from tree farm licenses (TFLs) on Vancouver Island. Since this is an area of government that not many people are familiar with, the report does contain a lot of background information on TFLs and the processes surrounding them.

The media has also been stirring the fact that Rich Coleman’s brother apparently was (and still is) an executive at Western Forest Products - the company owning the tree farm licensed land. In fairness to him, the application by WFP was submitted at a time when Coleman’s brother was not part of the company - WFP bought out that firm subsequent to the application submission.

The conclusion by the auditor general was the following, directly quoted from his report:

We concluded that the removal of the private land from TFLs 6, 19 and 25 was approved without sufficient regard for the public interest.

The information provided by the ministry in support of its recommendation to allow the land removal was incomplete. The information reflected a narrow view of the stakeholders possibly affected and of the potential impacts. Also, the recommendation put greater weight on assisting the licensee’s financial restructuring than on other public interests, including the potentially negative impacts on the forest and range and on other stakeholders, but the information included no analysis to support this position. Overall, the recommendation was not clearly supported by ministry analysis to demonstrate how the removal on the terms proposed was in the interests of British Columbia. The Minister was the final check in the process and the statutory decision-maker but, given the importance of the decision, he did not do enough to ensure that due regard was given to the public interest. Meanwhile, the ministry is not adequately monitoring its other land removal decisions to better inform future requests, to assess stakeholder capacity to deal with decision impacts, or to ensure that conditions agreed to by licensees are met.

This leaves a few questions.

1. Was Coleman removed from the Ministry of Forests preemptively to this report?
2. Will Coleman be formally implicated in a conflict of interest ruling?
3. Will any of this resonate with the public at election time?

I don’t know the answer to question 1, but I will guess that 2 will be “no” and would conjecture that the answer for question 3 will be a flat-out “no”. Governments typically accumulate baggage during their reigns, but it is not remotely close to extreme, which is the level it typically takes for the public to vote governments out of office. For the 1996-2001 NDP government, the snapping point where to public said “too much” was the Fast Ferries Fiasco.

This issue brought up by the auditor general is nowhere close in scale to the fast ferries.

I very much doubt that this government will be plagued by the “Coleman Tree Farm License removal” scandal in 10 months, although this data point certainly does not help them.

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2003 Legislature raids yields more charges

Posted July 4, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Scandal

Five years after the BC Legislature raids, more charges have been pressed against some Vancouver Island developers concerning the alleged bribery to David Basi, then ministerial assistant to finance minister Gary Collins.

It is not known whether the charges against Basi himself will be fruitful or not in terms of the potential impact on the election, but this is a huge “known unknown” for both the BC Liberals and NDP in their election planning. Even if there is no connection to elected officials, the perception can be exploited by the NDP if results in trial are unfavourable.

The Legislature Raids blog is a good detailed resource for those following the (painfully slow) court case.

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John Les resigns as Solicitor General

Posted April 1, 2008 by Sacha Peter
Category: Analysis, Scandal

Last Friday (March 28, 2008), John Les suddenly announced his resignation as Solicitor General due to allegations that he was under investigation by a special prosecutor pertaining to illegally benefiting from some land deals performed when Les was mayor of Chilliwack.

There was surprisingly little further disclosure from anybody else involved, which raised quite a few questions. The criminal process is known, so this leaves quite a few more questions.

During question period on Monday (March 31, 2008), it was exclusively about the Les resignation. We now know the following:

At 5:00pm, the Attorney General’s office was made aware that a special prosecutor from the criminal justice branch of BC has been investigating John Les since June of 2007.

From the criminal justice branch, we have the following quotation:

It is a general practice of the criminal justice branch to make an announcement of the appointment of a special prosecutor only if the matter is, in our judgment, already in the public domain and circumstances that necessitate such announcement to maintain the public’s confidence in the administration of justice.

The decisions to announce the appointment of a special prosecutor and the timing of those announcements are made solely by the branch without any involvement or influence of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, or any other public official outside the branch.

This leaves the following question: What was the catalyst to announcing that Les was under investigation? Was this going to be going imminently into the public domain (i.e. charges will be pressed) or is it because of the “public confidence” clause?

Also, the 5:00pm on Friday timing is highly suspicious - normally politicians reserve this time to bury as much bad news as possible (especially if the Monday is a statutory holiday) - was there any political knowledge on when this information would become public domain?

I can’t tell whether there’s anything deeper here or whether the special prosecutor will be packing up shop and not announcing any charges.

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