NDP shift could cost millions in severances
Horgan has until his July 18 swearing-in as premier to sort out top staff positions
Key staff members in the provincial government will find out soon if they will still have jobs once the New Democrats take power.
“You want to have as many people as you can determined before cabinet is sworn in,” Carole James, spokeswoman for the NDP transition and MLA for Victoria-Beacon Hill, said Thursday.
With the swearing-in ceremony set for July 18, premier-designate John Horgan and his team has just 11 days to sort out the top staff roles.
That work was given a boost this week with Horgan’s appointment of Geoff Meggs, a Vancouver councillor, as his chief of staff, and Don Wright, former CEO of Central 1 Credit Union, as his Horgan’s deputy. Both are involved in shaping the staff.
James said Wright is giving existing deputy ministers a chance to explain how they think they could contribute to the new government, while Meggs is in charge of gathering the premier’s office staff.
The government will likely spend millions in severance as the New Democrats replace Liberal appointees. When the provincial government changed hands in 2001, B.C. taxpayers paid $9 million in severance to NDP appointees fired by the Liberals after they took office.
Within three months of the election, the Liberals had terminated about 170 non-unionized staff members. These employees, hired by the NDP government, ranged from political advisers to clerks and secretaries. All 40 people in the defeated premier’s office lost their jobs.
Some political appointments come with fixed-year contracts, which means the new government may have to pay them out.
Public-sector employees are entitled to up to 18 months of severance. They may have to repay some of it if they get a new job within the severance period.
The amount of severance they are entitled to varies by age, service time and salary.
David Zussman, author of Off and Running: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Government Transitions in Canada, said that while most jobs in government are non-partisan and won through competition, politically appointed and partisan jobs are most vulnerable when the government changes.
These jobs include deputy ministers, premier’s office employees, and heads of Crown corporations, agencies and commissions.
Staff who work in ministers’ offices may also be considered partisan, Zussman said.
“They’ll be looking for people who will be sympathetic to their agenda and who want to implement the platform,” Zussman said. “And conversely, they will want to take people out of the system who they feel are not going to support their objectives.”
Zussman, who led transitions for the Chrétien federal governments in the 1990s, said the concern is not necessarily loyalty.
“It’s a question of whether they believe these people have commitments to acting in the interest of the new government.
“That’s a judgment call that will be made by the premier, there’s no other way to objectively assess it.”
New hires are typically people with political experience in other provinces and short-term staff who proved themselves during the campaign.
Christine Willow, owner-partner of Chemistry Consulting and GT Hiring Solutions, said she has not seen a mad rush of job searchers from the provincial government.
“It’s interesting, we haven’t felt anything like that at this point. And I think in large part, there was such a long period of indecision as to who will actually make up the new government that I think people were waiting and seeing,” she said.
Willow said she expects to see more movement once the ministers and deputy ministers are established, as staffing tends to trickle down from there.
Frontline bureaucrats tend to be in a safer, unionized work environment than senior staff, she said.
There may be fewer bureaucratic staffing changes with a shift to NDP government than a shift to Liberal, she said.
“We have a government that’s friendly to bureaucracy, so I think fear isn’t exactly the same as when it goes from an NDP to a Liberal government,” Willow said.