Cleaning up appointment process

Russell Wangerksy: Leo Barry was an excellent judge, not afraid to make decisions that were extremely unpopular with the police — like his 2007 ruling in the Victor Rizzuto case, when Barry threw out criminal charges in the Ireland’s Eye drug case against Montreal crime boss Rizzuto, after evidence came to light showing the RCMP were bugging conversations between Rizzuto and his lawyers in a St. John’s restaurant.

Leo Barry was an excellent judge, not afraid to make decisions that were extremely unpopular with the police — like his 2007 ruling in the Victor Rizzuto case, when Barry threw out criminal charges in the Ireland’s Eye drug case against Montreal crime boss Rizzuto, after evidence came to light showing the RCMP were bugging conversations between Rizzuto and his lawyers in a St. John’s restaurant.

I’ve watched him handle a series of cases in Supreme Court, and he has always been quick to take apart weak argument and unwilling to put up with lawyerly foolishness. In fact, I watched him literally un-seam a lawyer (one who later became minister of justice in this province) during a trial. Barry is sharp and thorough and very little gets by him — to suggest his stare alone is withering is an understatement.

He is, to put it bluntly, an excellent choice to handle the public inquiry into the police shooting death of Donny Dunphy.

But Barry was also a leader of the Newfoundland and Labrador Liberal Party.

Bern Coffey was a tough lawyer, good enough to be on the province’s special prosecutions team, handling a range of sensitive and difficult cases, and a pugnacious litigator as well. I remember quite clearly when I, accompanied by a lawyer representing the CBC (my employer at the time) obtained the release of search warrant information through a court action, only to be told by Coffey in terse detail about the precise legal actions the province intended to take if I put even one foot wrong in my reporting.

Even my lawyer was taken aback by Coffey’s directness.

Coffey’s probably best known for his stint as co-counsel at the Cameron Inquiry, where he was equally smart as a tack, with a clear take-no-prisoners attitude.

Except for his lack of senior management experience, you can at least make the argument that he’s not a bad choice to become the province’s senior bureaucrat — the Clerk of the Executive Council — at a time when a major fiscal shakeup has to occur, and long-time career bureaucrats might back away from recommending the cuts that really have to be made. I don’t see Coffey backing away.

But he was also a former candidate for the provincial Liberal party.

What’s it all mean? Well, that Premier Dwight Ball either has a tin ear for the way his recent senior appointments are being perceived, or else he truly thinks the voters of the province are idiots who will forget anything they read or see in mere minutes.

One of the Liberals’ campaign promises was to clean up the appointments process in this province: you were supposed to be picked for a senior job because of what you knew, not who you knew.

Now, it looks like it’s both what and who you know. And perhaps who you’ve donated money to, as well.

And that’s not getting any better. There have already been three failed Liberal candidates who have wound up on the provincial payroll as assistant deputy ministers, even as the provincial government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to trim jobs and lay off people at the same level.

You can’t claim to be washing the stain from the political appointments process, when, on the other hand, civil service and other senior appointments are close to unanimously Liberal red.

Is the message that you have to belong to the set of people who are qualified to do the job, but also belong to the subset “Liberal Party supporter”?

Because that’s not cleaning up the appointments process.

That’s just changing the Tory bathwater and not even bothering to wash out the tub.