Bureaucrat hired to look at act

Premier Kathy Dunderdale appointed a deputy minister to rework the way government buys things Tuesday afternoon. Leigh Puddester was announced as deputy minister responsible for government procurement reform.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale appointed a deputy minister to rework the way government buys things Tuesday afternoon.

Leigh Puddester was announced as deputy minister responsible for government procurement reform.

Nick McGrath, minister responsible for the Government Purchasing Agency, said he wants to see new legislation passed this spring.

But within hours of the announcement, Liberal MHA Andrew Parsons was blasting the government for another appointment to the senior bureaucracy, at a time when the Dunderdale government has been talking about the need for spending restraint.

She is handing out deputy minister positions and six-figure salaries like they’re candy.

Liberal MHA Andrew Parsons

The newly appointed deputy minister is just the latest development in a saga that’s being going on for years.

In both the 2007 and 2011 PC Party election platforms, the Tories promised to reform the public tendering system.

The legislation governs how the province buys everything from ferries to office supplies. It is routinely criticized as being unwieldy and occasionally forces the government to pay more than necessary for the things it needs to buy.

In March of last year, the government introduced Bill No. 1, “An Act Respecting Procurement By Public Bodies” into the House of Assembly.

At the first reading stage, only the title of the piece of legislation is read; the government never publicly released the actual text of the proposed law, and it was never debated in the House.

In July, then-Service NL Minister Paul Davis said the actual text of the legislation was written and ready to go, but government officials were still working on the regulations to accompany the bill.

“The actual procurement process — the nuts and bolts of how that takes place — will be built into regulation,” Davis said. “We’re moving forward in doing those next steps now, and we’re soon going to announce and start working with our stakeholders again to move into that consultation process.”

At the time, Davis said the legislation would be passed in the fall of 2012, and the associated regulations would be made public when the text of the legislation was debated in the House.

But the fall sitting of the House came and went without any movement on the legislation.

Back in June, the government brought in Bill Mackenzie, former clerk of the House of Assembly, as a “senior adviser” — the equivalent of a deputy minister. MacKenzie was tasked with writing the regulations associated with the legislation.

Now, McGrath said that MacKenzie has finished that job.

The province is bringing Puddester in to take over and has morphed the job from a senior adviser to a formal deputy minister position.

McGrath said Puddester will now be tasked with making sure the legislation — which has already been written — lines up with the regulations — which MacKenzie wrote in the past seven months.

“Now we need to marry the two together,” McGrath said. “We want to make sure that the regulations are written to the best of the ability to make sure that the act works best for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador because this is their money that we’re spending here.”

Before Puddester was appointed to the new job, he was the CEO of the Multi-Materials Stewardship Board.

A deputy minister with the government typically gets paid more than $150,000.

Parsons called it “fiscal mismanagement.”

He said it’s hard to swallow the idea that a deputy minister is responsible for a single piece of legislation at the same time that Dunderdale is talking about the need to make budget cuts.

The government is currently running a $726 million deficit.

“We hear Dunderdale talking about right-sizing and cutbacks to front-line workers in health care and education, and here she is handing out deputy minister positions and six-figure salaries like they’re candy,” he said.

“It just seems like it’s a neverending stream of senior appointments by the Dunderdale government.”

The Telegram requested to speak with Dunderdale, but she would not do an interview for this story.