HUMILIATING OUSTING OF OFFICIALS UNNECESSARY

While leaders of the three provincial political parties maintain a cone of silence about this week’s ouster of two senior officials at the legislature, one key player has stepped out of the shadows to provide some telling details.

He’s Alan Mullen, who is both senior political adviser to Speaker Darryl Plecas and, by his own account, an experienced investigator.

He maintains that he and Plecas have been on the case since the beginning of the year.

“The Speaker had concerns in January,” Mullen told reporters at the legislature Tuesday.

Those concerns were one of several reasons why Plecas hired him — without a public posting or competition — as a $75,000-peryear senior adviser at the outset of the year.

Moreover, Mullen, acting on behalf of Plecas, took those concerns directly to the RCMP in August.

That referral in turn led to a full-blown criminal investigation of the clerk of the legislature Craig James and sergeant-atarms Gary Lenz, the appointment of two special prosecutors and finally this week to James and Lenz being placed on administrative leave.

Mullen has declined to discuss the nature of the allegations against the two, other than to say they involve their administrative duties. But in the course of media briefings this week, he’s hinted at a greater depth of knowledge.

Mullen and Plecas go way back. They are friends and they worked together when Mullen was an administrator and Plecas an adjudicator at the Kent Institution maximum security prison.

Plecas, after he broke with the B.C. Liberals in 2017 to serve as Speaker of the legislature, recruited Mullen to provide independent political advice.

Mullen said he’d earlier volunteered on several political campaigns, while remaining “nonpartisan” like the Speaker himself should be.

Last month he told reporter Tyler Olsen of the Abbotsford News that his volunteer stints began with the NDP and he also helped Plecas in his initial run for the legislature in 2013.

Now Mullen is serving as the goto guy for the Speaker in this case.

“The Speaker will not be speaking publicly,” he advised one of my colleagues. “The attorney general’s office is also directing all media requests to myself for continuity and it falls directly under the Speaker’s office. Hence my role: I speak on behalf and on full authority of Speaker Plecas.”

Against that backdrop, consider what Mullen proceeded to disclose about the unfolding of this case.

Plecas has been nurturing the allegations against Lenz and James since the beginning of the year, all the while leaving them to serve as the top two officials at the legislature.

Once Mullen came on board, he turned his attention to the allegations. He being, by his own account, an experienced investigator.

“I’m not going to get into previous investigations I’ve conducted,” said the self-styled gumshoe. “All I can say is I have been involved in internal investigation for the Correctional Service of Canada amongst others.”

Did he investigate this case himself ?

“For lack of a better term, sure,” Mullen replied. “It is more just going through the process and gathering information.”

Finally, in August he was satisfied he had enough to warrant handing it all over to the RCMP.

“There was more information, obviously,” he confirmed when asked if the material was more serious in August than it had been in January. “We gathered more information. That just got passed off. We’re at the point now where we’re just giving it over to the RCMP and not making any further comment on that.”

He’s surely said enough already about the way this was handled by himself and the Speaker to pique the interest of any defence counsel acting for the two ousted officers of the house.

As to how this months-long investigation emerged into the public eye, Mullen said the Speaker was advised this week about the involvement of the special prosecutors.

He then took those concerns to the house leaders of the three parties in the legislature. They, in consultation with the Speaker, decided to put the two on administrative leave.

Asked whether it needed to be handled in such a hardball fashion, Mullen insisted there was no choice because the two were both officers of the legislature, appointed by majority vote of the house.

“You can’t just give them a heads-up because it has to be a vote on the floor. That motion had to happen. The members had to voteonit.”

But with no warning to the two, while they were watching the proceedings of the house in the office of the Speaker at the Speaker’s request?

And subjecting them to a police escort from the buildings?

I wonder if in the course of briefing the house leaders of the three parties, Plecas disclosed his own role and that of Mullen in assembling the case against Lenz and James.

NDP house leader Mike Farnworth, Liberal house leader Mary Polak and Sonia Furstenau of the Greens have refused to comment, the matter now being in the hands of the police.

But, at the least, the public is entitled to know what they knew about the months-long involvement in the case by the Speaker and his friend-cum-political adviser-cum-private investigator.

There also needs to be a better explanation for the rough handling of the clerk and sergeant-atarms. Surely it was enough to put them on administrative leave. No need to publicly humiliate them as well.

You can’t just give them a heads-up because it has to be a vote on the floor.