You’d think with the number of course changes the B.C. Liberals have made lately, they’d be more adept at it.
But Premier Christy Clark’s abrupt capitulation on the $50,000 stipend the party pays her was something less than graceful.
She volunteered the news at a media scrum Friday afternoon with the minimum amount of information possible and wasn’t very interested in filling in the details Monday.
The party has been topping up the premier’s taxpayer-paid salary ($197,618) with its own money for years. But media revelations last year about the size of it — much bigger than assumed — came at a time of intense scrutiny of fundraising. That intensified the attention, since some of the money raised was going directly to the premier.
The NDP charged conflict of interest, but it was dismissed. So Clark had a green light from the ethics adjudicator to stare down critics and keep cashing the cheques.
But with indications the stipend was going to come up through the election campaign, she decided to surrender the extra salary.
She plans to claim expenses while on party business, but those claims will likely be a lot less than $50,000 a year.
Pressed for an explanation at an event Monday in Vancouver she said: “I don’t really have anything to add … it was a distraction.”
It’s the latest in a series of quick and not-so-quick course changes by the Liberals:
• There’s been an ongoing rethink over the past year on a less political and much more serious issue — the fentanyl crisis.
Decisions on the Health Ministry’s $18-billion annual budget are always an exercise in risk management. Addressing all the urgent needs is impossible, so they try to handle as many as possible, gambling that the lower-priority ones won’t get worse.
Addiction treatment, which is never a wildly popular expenditure in the first place, has had make-do budgets for years. After the ministry announced hikes in the number of treatment beds, Health Minister Terry Lake acknowledged in the legislature last spring that health authorities were expected to handle that within their existing budgets.
But the fentanyl death toll has changed that. The ministry says it has allocated $64 million extra to a variety of agencies to deal with the crisis, a chunk of it for treatment. Any government would have responded that way, but it’s striking to see the problem rocket up the priority list.
• The biggest change of mind came on housing and runaway real-estate prices. If the Liberals had stuck to their original leisurely schedule, they would only just now be starting an analysis of foreign ownership based on the new citizenship disclosure they ordered in the last budget. That timetable went out the window as Liberals realized they’d been caught flat-footed in the real-estate panic. Finance Minister Mike de Jong dropped positions he’d held for months and embraced moves he used to scorn. They slammed in a tax on foreign buyers in metro Vancouver in short order and gave the city power to impose a vacancy tax. They yanked self-regulation away from real-estate agents after assorted fall-downs were exposed.
Then they started on a housing spree that is now budgeted at more than $800 million, orders of magnitude higher than the original plan. When a budget top-up is six times higher than the original budget, you know alarm bells have sounded.
• There were constant complaints about the government’s attitude toward information and privacy law from all quarters, including the independent commissioner.
After the cavalier runarounds and flagrant violations (triple-deleting) reached the crisis point, de Jong issued the first-ever ministerial directive. It ordered political appointees to clean up their acts, divulge information promptly when asked and imposed proactive disclosure on new fields of information. He even found $3 million to beef up the documentation processes. Similarly, there was a quick turnaround in favour of protecting gender identity in human-rights law, and a major park campground expansion promised.
And a rethink of MSP premiums is in the works.
Cheerful Liberals will say it all proves government is listening.
The less-charitable will wonder why they let things on each front get to the point where such reversals and rethinks were needed.
