Hypocrisy, patronage and the cleansing power of transparency
Michel Samson is right on both counts. The Liberal MLA is right to acknowledge that last week’s collection of NDP appointees to various provincial agencies, boards and commissions is clearly a well qualified lot.
But he is right too to point out the unbecoming hypocrisy of a government that—while in opposition—railed so righteously against patronage picks.
Last week’s 16 rubber-stamped, Grade-A choices include a former federal NDP MP, a former provincial NDP MLA, a former provincial NDP candidate, the father of a current NDP cabinet minister and a party donor. The government, Samson noted, had already appointed another former NDP MLA and the son of a former provincial and national leader to significant positions too.
But interestingly, neither Samson nor Chris D’Entremont—a Tory member of the Human Resources Committee, who also tut-tutted the NDP’s hypocrisy—appear to want the process changed.
Someday, they said without saying, it may be their turn to reward friends and punish enemies, and they don’t want their own plum-proffering proscribed. (Perhaps the real reason the NDP opposed the system in opposition was that, at the time, they couldn’t imagine becoming the government…)
Our appointments process is far better than it used to be—how could it not?—but it can still be improved.
These days, if you apply for any of dozens of now-publicly-advertised positions—from the Agricultural Marshlands Conservation Commission to the Crane Operators Appeal Board—your application is first vetted by a non-partisan committee of civil servants and lay appointees.
The names of those chosen to do the choosing are published on the government’s website.
Transparent.
Once the vetters come up with their list of qualified candidates, it is passed on to the minister responsible who gets to make the final choice.
Accountable.
But we never get to decide for ourselves if the minister has chosen the best qualified candidate because the other names on the short list aren’t made public.
Which is neither transparent nor accountable.
It would be a small change but making those names public would give us the information we need to make up our own minds about whether the best qualified candidate got the position.
Transparent. And accountable.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Do boots on the ground equal votes in the hand?
Time flies when you’re having fun. Ask Darrell Dexter. Next month, he will celebrate his second anniversary as the province’s first ever NDP premier. In two years—probably less—he will try to become Nova Scotia’s NDP premier to win a second majority government… or, perhaps, settle for a minority… or, failing one of the above—and politics being politics—not be Ignatieffed in his own riding.
His fate then may well depend on what happens in Ottawa today.
Today, Dexter leads a high-level, high-profile delegation of business and government leaders to Toryland. Their goal: to browbeat, sweet-talk, cajole Stephen Harper’s newly re-elected, no-reason-to-like-Nova-Scotia majority government into spreading some largesse our way.
The stakes are billions of dollars high.
Halifax’s Irving Shipbuilding, for example, wants a sweet piece of the navy’s upcoming $35-billion shipbuilding program. At a “Ships Start Here” kick-off pep rally Friday, Dexter touted consultants’ reports claiming the project could generate 11,500 spin-off jobs and inject $800 million a year into the provincial economy.
“Winning this bid,” Dexter declared, “would equate to hosting the Olympics each year for 30 years.”
And then, of course, there’s the Lower Churchill, a $6.2-billion Newfoundland-Nova Scotia power generating and transmission project Dexter has grandly called “our Canadian Pacific Railway.” Dexter is fond of metaphor and simile.
If Lower Churchill happens—and Stephen Harper promised to make it happen during the federal campaign—Nova Scotia workers would be in line for a chunk of its 45,000 person-years worth of work. And the Lower Churchill itself would become a stable source of forever energy for Nova Scotians—and for future industrial development.
While Dexter will remind Ottawa of the prime minister’s Lower Churchill pledge, he’ll stickhandle more delicately past Harper’s seeming reluctance to cough up $47 million finance Halifax’s infamous downtown convention centre. Please!
And, among those many other supplications, Dexter will also pitch yet another provincial capital project: a new stadium.
If Dexter can convince Ottawa to fund any or all of the above, it will mean construction boots on the ground in time for the next provincial election.
Which could make Dexter’s hopes for re-election more likely.
Which, of course, is the idea.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Howard Epstein: the man who wasn’t added to the NDP cabinet
The most intriguing aspect of last week’s provincial cabinet shuffle was not the Cheshire-cat-like, photo-op grins on the faces of the two newly blessed members of Darrell Dexter’s inner circle.
Or the nameplate-shuffling and amoeba-like subdividing of ministerial responsibilities the government predictably insisted will help it do its job even better and eventually save taxpayers money it is about to spend to add new ministers and their staffs to the public payroll.
Or even the equally predictable bleating from the opposition that now is no time to add to the cost of government, even though they will almost certainly do the same if they some how, some way, some day get the chance.
No, the most intriguing aspect of last week’s shuffle was the name that went unmentioned: Howard Epstein.
Intriguing. Disappointing. But hardly surprising.
Epstein, a lawyer, veteran MLA and former Halifax city councilor, remains one of his party’s best, brightest and worst used backbenchers.
He’s a former head of the Ecology Action Centre, an acknowledged expert on matters environmental. Given the Dexter government isn’t winning awards for environmental stewardship—can you say mercury emissions?—appointing Epstein would signal the party is serious about sustainability and help woo Green-leaning voters.
But Epstein—a finance critic during the NDP’s opposition-wandering years and a wise-in-the-ways provincial-municipal affairs expert—would have been a good fit in other portfolios too.
Why is he still on the outside?
There are obvious answers, of course.
Epstein is ideologically to the left of many of his colleagues, not to forget an independent thinker who speaks his mind and a smart guy who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
For much of his time in opposition and during Dexter’s first year in office, Epstein played—in public at least—the ideal team player.
When he finally went off the reservation this summer—publicly opposing plans for a convention centre—it seemed an acknowledgement he would never inside.
Ultimately, that may not be a bad thing.
Given its own tendencies and the rightward lurch of both opposition parties, Dexter’s government could use an articulate critic from the left.
Epstein is certainly that. So his absence is a disappointment. But not completely.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
The sound of one cymbal clanging
It’s difficult to comprehend how a politician seemingly in such perfect harmony with the populist political zeitgeist eight months ago could have become so cymbal-clangingly tone deaf so quickly.
Darrell Dexter got himself elected premier by channeling Coffee-at-the-Tims Everyman. He was like us, only smarter. We could—and did—trust him.
We forgave him for lying to us during the election campaign because… well, we wanted to be lied to. It helped get us over the emotional hump of turfing out a government that deserved to go in order to vote for a bunch of untried, are-they-really-socialist New Democrats.
That the current MLA expenses excesses have become such a sticking scandal shows just how badly Dexter has stumbled.
When the auditor-general’s report broke in January, Dexter could—rightly—have argued he’d already begun reforming the system, that his party’s fall legislative package—which banned corporate and union donations, eliminated over-generous allowances for departing and defeated MLAs and sliced computer expenses for members—was a strong first step. And more change was on the way…
The fact the premier was out of town—on vacation, at the Olympics, at a premier’s meeting in Washington—as the messy stories seeped, spilled and ultimately flooded into the public prints made for awkward optics.
Even that could have been managed. We don’t expect our premier to sit, quill in hand, puzzling over the minutiae of legislation. He’d given the orders; we could judge the results when the legislation was tabled. Besides, his response was the correct one. I wasn’t the premier who started the system, but I will be the one to put an end to it.
But then came news the NDP had failed to return $45,000 in illicit union contributions Dexter himself—during the dying days of last June’s campaign—claimed had been returned.
And then it emerged that Dexter—whose expensive tastes in electronics and a briefcase raised eyebrows—had been billing the public purse for his $3,800 annual bar society fees.
Pre-premier Dexter would have immediately understood how that would play down at Tims, mea culpa-ed and moved on. The New Darrell tried to justify it all. By the time he finally gave up and gave in on Wednesday, he’d used up all the political capital he’d accumulated over a decade in opposition.
Just in time to deliver a very bad-news budget that will require all the political capital he’s squandered—and much more.
We are in for interesting times.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
A promise is not a law until it is
It happened so long ago that Alexa McDonough was still the leader of a rag-tag band of New Democrats in the provincial legislature. And I was a still-young-ish reporter.
McDonough had just introduced a private member’s bill to reform the ways in which political parties got financed. Its specifics have long since escaped my memory. But I do recall that everyone knew the legislation—like virtually all such proposals that arrived without the imprimatur of the party in power—had no chance of passing. Her critics accused her of grandstanding.
Why should we believe you’re serious, I asked her?
You shouldn’t, she replied matter-of-factly. That’s why we need laws. To make sure whichever party forms the next government, or the one after that, can’t just do what will benefit its own interests. Voters, she said, shouldn’t have to depend on the too often-empty promises of campaigning politicians. Of any stripe.
I couldn’t help but think of that as I watched the MLAs expense scandal unfold. The NDP is now the government. It has the power to reform the system. But its record to date is mixed.
The NDP started off well enough. It eliminated the policy of providing cabinet ministers with cars, for example. That was a next logical step in a reform process that had begun with Ernie Fage’s 2006 fender bender. The fact that the minister was driving an expensive, taxpayer-provided vehicle at the time had already prompted Rodney MacDonald’s Tories to tighten the rules on cabinet ministers’ pricey rides. (Scandal, of course, has long been the best—often the only—driver of reform.)
And the NDP, during its first legislative session last fall, killed a number of the most outrageous perks of office, including the too-generous severance package for retiring or defeated MLAs and payments for chairing ghost committees, and cut back on members’ technology allowances in the name of fiscal restraint.
But the government has continued to resist efforts to open up the process for appointing people to provincial boards and commissions—reforms it had championed in opposition—and it waited until after the firestorm over the auditor general’s report to make changes to an MLA expenses system it knew was corrupt.
The new and more transparent expenses rules announced this week are another positive, if belated step, but not until those changes get enshrined in legislation and regulation.
As Alexa McDonough rightly said, we shouldn’t ever have to depend solely on politicians’ promises.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
NDP’s first six months: very well but….
Nova Scotia’s new New Democratic Party government isn’t so new anymore. A week from tomorrow, it will have been in office six months.
How well has it performed?
At one level, the answer would have to be very well. Darrell Dexter’s government has demonstrated a level of calming, policy-wonkish competence sadly lacking during the chaotic, what-shall-we-pave-today reign of former Tory Premier Rodney MacDonald.
The NDP clearly learned by watching the endless parade of do-as-we-didn’t Tory gaffes. Even when the new government’s ministers momentarily forget themselves—Deputy Premier Frank Corbett’s big-whopper $441.48 restaurant bill comes to mind—they’ve been wise enough to apologize (“I screwed up and it won't happen again”) and move on. Ernie Fage? Compare and contrast. I rest my case.
The government has also made progress in eliminating the most outrageous entitlements—fees for chairing committees that didn’t meet, peddling taxpayer-bought office furniture for personal gain—too many of our elected officials believed they were entitled to.
On the other hand, it must be said that the New Democrats have broken—or will break—every important election promise they made during last spring’s campaign.
Such blatant backsliding would normally lead to howls of voter outrage, but the NDP’s popularity remains high. That’s probably because we, as voters, never expected them to keep those promises. We would have been angrier if they had, especially after this fall’s sobering economic analysis from experts the government hired to get it off the hook it had created for itself.
For me, however, the most troubling blemish on the NDP’s early record is how easily it seems to have slipped into playing Nova Scotia politics-as-usual on appointments and government spending decisions.
The NDP recently used its majority on the all-party human resources committee, for example, to keep MLAs—and the public—from finding out about all candidates being considered for appointments to provincial boards and commissions. While in opposition, the party led the fight to make that process more open and transparent.
And last week the NDP’s Cumberland South riding president and former candidate resigned because he says the government is playing “old-style politics” on the location of a new provincial jail. The Tories had promised two jails—arguably old-style politics too—but the NDP canceled those, and now plans to build just one to save money.
Intriguingly, allnovascotia.com reports Justice Minister Ross Landry’s home riding is the “leading contender” as home to the new institution.
Those are not good omens so early in their tenure.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
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