Failure of gov’t’s checks & balances plagues politicos
Speaker’s report recounts incidents that were red flags in alleged overspending
It was one of the more memorable episodes from B.C. Speaker Darryl Plecas’s 76-page report released this week detailing alleged “flagrant overspending” by two senior staffers at the legislature: While travelling back to B.C. from China last summer Plecas commented to clerk Craig James that, because of free meals provided by the Chinese government on the trip, the B.C. officials wouldn’t need to claim the full amount of their per diems or daily meal allowances.
In response, Plecas wrote, James “put one hand over his eye, looked at the deputy speaker and said in a joking tone, ‘We didn’t get any free meals here, it was full per diems.’ ”
Plecas and deputy speaker NDP MLA Raj Chouhan were “surprised by the flippant nature of (James’s) comment,” Plecas wrote in the report.
James and sergeant-atarms Gary Lenz, both of whom have been suspended since November, called the report’s allegations “completely false and untrue” in a joint statement Monday.
But Chouhan, when asked Monday about that incident en route home from the China trip, corroborated the account in Plecas’s report. In an email, Chouhan wrote: “I do recall the clerk making the comment outlined in (the report).
“I raised concerns about what the clerk said with the speaker, as the report says, and I told the speaker I would not be claiming full per diems,” Chouhan wrote.
A review of James’s expense claims showed he did claim full per diems for the whole
trip, Plecas wrote in his report.
While Plecas, Chouhan and James were in China in June 2018, Lenz met with a former legislative assistant-turned-“whistleblower” to discuss concerns around travel expenses, according to the report, and Lenz remarked he thought a forensic audit might be needed.
The following week, days after James returned from China, he made a day trip from Victoria to Vancouver to meet with Geoff Plant, a Vancouver lawyer and former
B.C. Liberal MLA, according to Plecas’s report. Plecas quoted deputy clerk Kate Ryan-Lloyd, who said James was meeting with Plant to discuss “how to rein in Gary (Lenz) and ensure he wouldn’t be conducting investigations in the future.”
James’s travel-expense form showed he met in Vancouver with Plant and another man, paying $80.40 for a lunch at the Vancouver Marriott Downtown, the report said, which he expensed to the legislative assembly without
an itemized receipt.
Asked Tuesday about his June 2018 meeting with James, Plant replied with an emailed statement saying he has provided legal advice and representation to James in his capacity as clerk “on a regular basis for a number of years.”
“Craig and I have had many meetings in that capacity,” Plant wrote Tuesday in an email, while on holiday in India. “Our discussions, of course, are privileged.”