NDP’S FAST PACE SPARKS ERRORS
A year in power, and things are getting sloppy for the Horgan administration
It’s possible, in some parallel universe, that last week was a good one for Premier John Horgan.
But back here on earth prime, his government bungled two major news conferences, leaving a trail of confusion and selfinflicted errors that are worth noting as the NDP administration marks its first anniversary in power.
The first announcement was July 16, when Horgan unveiled rules that will require major government projects to be built using union-only labour.
It was a massive shift in policy, potentially affecting billions of dollars in infrastructure spending and marking a hard left turn back to a 1990s model that rewarded the many trades unions that donated to, and volunteered on, NDP election campaigns.
Yet during the 30-minute news conference by Horgan and Transportation Minister Claire Trevena, the mandatory union requirement wasn’t mentioned once. Nor was it in the 1,024word press release and two backgrounder documents.
Instead, the focus was on quotas for apprentices, female and Aboriginal workers, set amid a TV-friendly backdrop of smiling student tradespeople at BCIT in Burnaby.
“This is a new way of doing business in B.C.,” proclaimed Horgan.
It wasn’t until four hours later, after questions from Postmedia News, that government released a statement that shed light on the core of the issue: “Within 30 days of employment on the job site, any non-union worker or a worker from another affiliation will be required to join the union for work specific to the project.”
It’s hard to escape the cynical conclusion that the NDP hid the controversial change in the hopes it could get a few hours of feel-good coverage of its apprenticeship program. But it left the impression that government was so embarrassed to admit the change that it went to great lengths to make sure it wasn’t made public until it was backed into a corner.
The second bungled announcement was a few days later when Trevena updated the public on government’s snail-like pace to allow ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft. “We’ll be making changes in legislation this fall,” said Trevena, in response to questions about when B.C. would finally join the rest of the modern world in allowing app-based ride-hailing services to compete with traditional taxis.
It sounded like the government was on track for its promised 2018 deadline to let Uber and Lyft onto provincial streets.
But even as Trevena was speaking, her staff quietly distributed a news release in which the first line described the government’s position as “easing the way for other rideshare services to offer services to British Columbians by fall 2019.”
The fall of 2019. A full year later than Trevena had just stated out loud.
It took awhile for everyone to clue in to the conflicting dates.
When reporters started asking Trevena about the one-year delay, she dug in her heels and refused to repeat out loud what was in her own news release.
Instead, she spent 15 minutes deflecting questions with vague canned responses. Her refusal to acknowledge the obvious made her look ridiculous.
The event was so confusing that, back in the real world, very few people understood the government’s position.
The advocacy group Ridesharing Now for B.C. at first praised Trevena for sticking to 2018 before realizing hours later her comments had been misleading and issuing a second news release revising its position.
It’s tempting to blame the common denominator in these two cases: Trevena. Her performance certainly exacerbated the problems. A year in, Trevena struggles to stay afloat in her portfolio.
However, there is another reason for the troubled week. It has to do with the frenetic and unrelenting pace the NDP has taken in its first year in office.
Rushed planning, confusion, so many affected people to consult, and simple human error are apparently to blame for the union-only building announcement. In the case of ride-hailing, Trevena apparently simply misspoke for 15 minutes, despite having been briefed about the 2019 timeline (she did talk about 2019 later that day in subsequent interviews).
Let’s give New Democrats the benefit of the doubt in this confusion. Horgan has led a breakneck pace in his first 12 months. He celebrated the first anniversary in power last Wednesday. And what the NDP has accomplished has been remarkable.
Almost two-thirds of the NDP’s more than 120 election promises are either completed or in progress, according to tracking by the CBC’s list-making savant, Justin McElroy.
New Democrat ministers were making major announcements before they’d even stepped foot in their new offices, raising the welfare and income assistance rates two days into their mandate. They’ve gone full tilt since, reviewing and continuing construction on the Site C dam, stalling the Kinder Morgan pipeline with a court reference case, capping automobile insurance settlements, eliminating Metro Vancouver bridge tolls, raising the carbon tax, introducing new housing taxes, just to name a few of their biggest changes.
Those looking for a break after the spring session of the legislature ended last month instead found themselves back on the grindstone — overhauling B.C.’s gambling and money-laundering regulations, preparing a distribution system for legalized marijuana, changing the employer health tax exemptions for charities, setting the rules to launch the campaign on the referendum on proportional representation, overhauling fish farm licensing and dealing with the fallout of Greyhound’s bus service cuts.
The NDP is under intense pressure internally to keep up the pace from MLAs who have 16 years of pent-up reforms they want to enact quickly. There’s pressure externally from a public that wants change (or at least action) on high-profile election promises like housing affordability, affordable child care and eliminating school portables.
Horgan must continue to show voters his government is accomplishing its agenda under a power-sharing deal with the B.C. Greens, to prove minority governments can work and bolster confidence in the idea of proportional representation.
But that is clearly coming at a cost.
A year in and things are getting sloppy in the Horgan administration. The premier surrounded himself with a competent crew of bright political staff and a cabinet stacked with veterans.
His government shouldn’t be suffering so many self-inflicted errors.
If they continue, he may want to consider slowing the pace of change, so that his second year of accomplishments isn’t tarnished by more confusion and mistakes.