She didn’t quite stonewall when the official independent investigator called her up for a chat. But “full co-operation” isn’t the word that comes to mind when describing former B.C. legislature Speaker Linda Reid’s stance. She was Speaker from 2013 to 2017 and was — nominally — the person to whom former senior officials Craig James and Gary Lenz reported.
Reid, Liberal MLA for Richmond South Centre, became Speaker two months after a truckload of booze was carted off the premises and disappeared in 2013. She was Speaker for the four subsequent years that staff privately started voicing suspicions about it.
Reid had an opportunity to contribute to the sum of knowledge about that and various other capers that have come to light. She stopped just short of clamming up completely. That undercuts the Opposition efforts to portray the NDP government as fumbling the handling of the scandal when it started to emerge.
They can’t stay outraged about the premier’s office shredding an early copy of current Speaker Darryl Plecas’s allegations when one of their own co-operated only minimally with one of the investigations.
The probe released this week into ex-sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz recounts in passing Reid’s contribution to the fact-finding effort.
It wasn’t much.
Reid did preside over a draft policy about legislature property that was written up partly in response to concern about how James had loaded his pickup with boxes of liquor and driven away.
That incident was the focus of Doug LePard’s report into allegations against Lenz. But Reid didn’t seem to want to talk about it.
Recounting the progress of his investigation, LePard wrote: “Ms. Reid declined, through her legal counsel, to be interviewed.”
Pursuing the matter, he issued some written questions to her lawyer. She advised via her lawyer that Lenz had not informed her in 2013 of the liquor incident.
“She declined to respond to questions about whether she had knowledge of the incident from other sources.”
Specifically, her lawyer declined to say whether Reid had any knowledge of the liquor incident. He declined on her behalf to say whether she had spoken to staff about it.
The lawyer said the questions weren’t relevant.
He told LePard that he disagreed with the idea she needed to answer some of the questions so “there will be no response to those questions.”
She did volunteer two answers. On the question of whether Lenz spoke to her about the liquor, she said: “No.”
And she said she had no documents, knowledge or information that were relevant to the investigation.
That response is entirely believable, as she was part of a long line of figurehead Speakers who had only token control of the legislature and let the clerks run the joint.
If she’d sat down with LePard and admitted as much, it would have been embarrassing, but understandable.
She decided to avoid all that. And she did so without checking with her leader, Andrew Wilkinson.
He was reluctant to comment on her stance, but eventually conceded: “Everybody who is asked to co-operate in this investigation should do so.”
Meanwhile, the legislative assembly management committee of MLAs met this week. The main fallout from Plecas’s explosive allegations last January are the subsequent confirmations that he was onto something.
But there’s also an enormous bureaucratic process underway to respond to the scandal with dozens of new policies.
They’ve written up new rules on employee travel, gifts, internal audits, and yes, “liquor control and inventory policy.”
There’s also a policy for work-related clothing (presumably, no more expensive suits bought in exotic foreign lands.)
There’s even a new “creating and updating policies policy.”
Auditor General Carol Bellringer briefed MLAs on her recent report criticizing the spending policies that James and Lenz operated under. Her office is continuing various other audits.
It all adds up to a major shakeup in senior staff and a huge retooling of policies that govern every facet of conduct. The unofficial theme governing the whole enterprise is “never again.”
It’s all very encouraging, except this is the second attempt. A previous auditor general condemned the decrepit accountability standards at the legislature years ago. A major effort was launched to tighten up spending policies.
The only problem was that it was headed by the two men now identified as the prime culprits in the scandals revealed to date.
