Reform storm gathers steam

It’s jarring to see the assorted public-sector watchdogs now sniffing around the legislature with the idea that it be included in their jurisdictions.

On Tuesday, three of them seized on the spending scandal that led to the suspension of clerk Craig James and sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz to pitch some reform ideas.

They’re all perfectly common-sense notions. They should have been in place years ago.

The reason they weren’t is that it was simply unthinkable to contemplate any kind of curb on the authority of the senior officers in charge of day-to-day operations.

Various efforts over the years were dismissed out of hand. With the limited exception of the auditor general, watchdogs were expected to know their places.

So the black-robed demigods ran the joint to their liking for decades. Speakers came and went, but the clerk’s office retained most of the power through the ages. They don’t call them permanent officers for nothing.

Now the information and privacy commissioner again wants them subject to the same freedom-of-information law that applies to most other public-sector bodies. The impudence! The ombudsperson wants whistleblower protection extended to legislature employees, so they can feel free to object when truckloads of liquor get mysteriously carted away in personal vehicles. The effrontery! The merit commissioner wants all hirings and firings in the legislature to be subject to the same checks and rules that apply to all civil servants. The audacity! Their letter urging the changes is a measure of how thoroughly Speaker Darryl Plecas’s allegations of misconduct against the pair have exploded the institutional mindset, even before his charges are formally substantiated.

Even more jarring, the government accepted the idea of extending FOI to the legislature instantly.

A succession of information and privacy commissioners knocked on that door for years and were repeatedly rebuffed. On Tuesday, the door swung wide open.

The three commissioners’ ideas land on top of a letter from the opposition B.C. Liberals with a long list of other new ideas that they would never have dreamed of introducing when they were in power.

Two were aimed directly at the senior officers — mandatory retirement at age 75, and removal from office if deemed incapacitated.

More generally, the opposition suggests intense scrutiny of all foreign junkets. One of the rigid requirements of those jobs is the obligation to go overseas, often somewhere warm, to discuss parliamentary matters. Or in the case of James and Lenz, to research “business continuity” in the event of disaster.

Liberals now even want to curtail the liquor cabinets Plecas noted in the speaker’s office the day he took over the job.

Meanwhile, the auditor general is preparing to scrutinize all the ludicrous expenses that Plecas alleges James and Lenz billed to taxpayers.

It all adds up to a major effort to finish an accountability push that started 12 years ago, but went only part way.

It was in 2007 that the auditor general landed on the legislature for lax accounting. It took two more reports until the politicians took it seriously.

A series of reform measures were put in place. They centred mostly on MLAs’ spending and conduct. Their meetings to manage the legislature were opened for the first time, and their expenses and receipts started to get posted publicly.

Budget processes were made more rigorous. At the first open legislative assembly management committee meeting, then-opposition house leader John Horgan recalled how someone the year previously had casually summed up a $60-million budget with “yadda, yadda, yadda.”

So from 2012 on, the spending oversight, or at least the appearance of oversight, was tightened up. But there was one key area that was conspicuously off-limits to reform — the operation of the clerk’s office and the table officers, such as the sergeant-at-arms. They were exempted by law from oversight by MLAs back in 1992, for some unexplained reason. And while James portrayed himself as playing a leading role in imposing the new accountability standards on MLAs, he and Lenz appear to have escaped being included.

It looks now as if everyone is intent on making up for that in a big way.