Like almost everything involving Gordon Wilson and politics, his firing by the NDP has gotten complicated.
It could have been straightforward enough. A leading cheerleader for former premier Christy Clark was directly appointed in 2013 to a $150,000-a-year job promoting opportunities in the liquefied natural gas sector.
Then the NDP, which has a chequered relationship with Wilson, took over and, a few days later, the front-running LNG proposal collapsed, confirming suspicions that LNG opportunities are still a long way off.
The NDP could have dismissed Wilson routinely. He’s a true-blue B.C. Liberal supporter, and the task he was charged with has more or less evaporated. Nobody would have batted an eye.
But they cited a curious reason — he didn’t write any reports — and hinged the dismissal on that. Then that reason blew up in their face, with the revelation from Province columnist Mike Smyth that there are plenty of routine reports on the record.
So the first formal apology from the new regime came quickly. Premier John Horgan followed Jobs Minister Bruce Ralston on Tuesday and expressed regret and issued an apology to Wilson.
The reason it was so quick in coming was because the NDP managed to turn what could have been the routine dismissal of a member of the old Liberal guard into an slam-dunk defamation suit, should Wilson choose to pursue the matter. (Which he appears to be doing.) In later media interviews, Ralston in particular piled on the idea that the lack of reports was a reflection on Wilson’s work ethic.
But in his role of LNG-Buy B.C. advocate, he churned out yards of paperwork. One of the reasons this is known is because the NDP itself, when in Opposition, filed requests to see what he was doing, and got lots of documentation back. Among the documents was an “executive summary of research and findings for LNG-Buy B.C.” and dozens of weekly project updates, all authored by Wilson.
Somewhere in the transfer of power and naming of a new cabinet, someone apparently forgot to check the NDP’s own files when it came to the LNG-Buy B.C. advocate’s work. When the NDP got around to firing Wilson, Ralston went out of his way to alert reporters in very pointed terms about the move. He focused on the lack of reports.
“Gordon Wilson was hired in October 2013. Since then he’s been paid by the government of B.C. $550,000. His contract has been reviewed. We were unable to locate any written reports, reports written by him, setting out what he’d done to earn that money. So the decision has been to end the contract.”
“There’s not a single written report?” a reporter asked.
“No,” said the new minister. “Nothing written by him at all.”
Wilson said Tuesday he has been in a state of bafflement since then. Not about being terminated. He fully expected that and was counting on being in the first wave of dismissals. It’s the stated reason for the decision that confused him.
His initial reaction was that the job was about advocating and linking LNG opportunities to B.C. firms, not writing reports. A termination based on that reason is “like firing a plumber because he didn’t install enough light fixtures,” he told the Times Colonist’s Amy Smart. He later said he filed routine reports.
He’s consulting a lawyer about the NDP’s claims to the contrary.
It’s not the first time he has felt slighted in politics. As the only person to have run for the leadership of three parties in B.C, he has had plenty of clashes. He led the B.C. Liberals back from oblivion in the early 1990s, then was forced out and formed and led his own party. Then he quit that to join the NDP cabinet. He ran for the NDP leadership in 2000 before losing his seat in 2001 and leaving politics — and the NDP.
He bounced back in 2013 to start enthusiastically backing Christy Clark for the Liberal leadership and got the LNG job later that year.
If Ralston had cited that reason instead of his lack of reports, he would be on safer legal ground than he is now.
