Liberals’ rush job led to loopholes in province’s transit policy

Last- minute legislation reflects lack of government organization

reported on March 26. “But what’s more surprising, the tickets aren’t even enforced.” There followed a sheepish admission from TransLink that if evaders chose not to pay their tickets, there were “no consequences.”

The numbers told the story about what lax enforcement was costing the system. Some 53,000 tickets last year, of which only 7,500 ( about 15 per cent) were paid. The shortfall in collections was estimated at $ 7 million. It was “an absolute bombshell,” as Jordan Bateman of the watchdog Canadian Taxpayers Federation characterized Brown’s story. Even the Liberals had to agree.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” then transportation minister Blair Lekstrom admitted the next day, as he vowed to bring in the necessary enforcement mechanism for all those unpaid tickets.

Six weeks later, he tabled a bill to fix the problem. Relatively short order in the realm of legislative drafting. But only 10 sitting days remained on the spring legislative calendar.

The Liberals, as usual, had overloaded the agenda, then used their majority to impose rigid limits on the time allocated for debate, ensuring the house would adjourn on schedule at the end of May.

The legislative provisions for enforcement and collection of transit fines were not called for scrutiny and debate until the final morning of the session, at just the moment when the allocated time ran out for that particular bill.

Whereupon the entire measure — a dozen pages of legislation dealing with fare evasion plus four last minute amendments introduced to fix the fix — was deemed to have passed in a matter of seconds. No questions asked. None answered.

All that remained was for the cabinet to proclaim it into law. Then fare evaders who refused to pay their tickets could be pressured by withholding renewal of their driver’s licences and auto insurance, or by going after them with collection agencies and court actions.

“The free ride is going to end very shortly,” declared an optimistic Lekstrom. Allowing three months for the regulatory procedures to be put into place, the cabinet ordered the new ticketing and collection regime to kick in right after Labour Day.

But before the first week of enforcement was out, CKNW’s intrepid Brown was reporting yet another embarrassment: “It turns out if somebody refuses to provide identification after not producing proof of a transit fare, officers are required to allow that person to walk away without issuing a ticket.”

The fix for the fix needed a fix. It took two cabinet orders for Polak and her colleagues to close the latest loophole.

“It’s unfathomable after all these months of preparing, they didn’t have their legal ducks in a row,” fumed Bateman from the taxpayers federation. “Incompetence, pure and simple.”

But also a predictable consequence of a style of government, well critiqued by Martyn Brown, the former chief of staff to Premier Gordon Campbell, in Towards a New Government in B. C., an ebook he published recently on Amazon.

“Last- minute legislation frequently reflects a lack of government organization” writes Brown, not excusing himself (“it is a practice that I sometimes supported for partisan reasons”) from the approach he now condemns.

“Legislation that is hastily drafted and introduced is usually rife with flaws .... They also come back to haunt the governments that introduce them. As those legislative errors stack up over time, they indirectly argue for a change of government.”

So not just a matter of closing a loophole here or there.

Rather this episode is part of a pattern of rush- job incompetence that calls into question the B. C. Liberal Party’s ability to do what it promised to do, which is manage government better than its predecessor. New Transportation Minister Mary Polak marked her second full day on the job last week by closing an embarrassing loophole in the province’s legislative attempt to crackdown on fare evasion on the transit system.

“Our mistake,” conceded Polak at Friday’s hastily called news conference. “We had neglected to put in place language that required a person to produce their identification.”

The lapse left transit cops impotent in the face of determined fare evaders. If riders who could not produce proof of payment also refused to produce ID, there was no way to write a ticket.

“It shouldn’t have happened and we are fixing it as quickly as we possibly can,” said Polak. Pressed, she agreed that the enabling legislation was a rush job, forced through a busy spring session of the house at the last minute.

“Certainly it was one ( measure) that was recognized and acted on very quickly,” she conceded. “That puts additional pressure on legislative drafters to make sure that they have all of the language in place.”

In fairness to the members of the legislative drafting team, the B. C. Liberals have only themselves to blame for the tight timeline.

The government had been asked repeatedly to do something about the lack of an enforcement mechanism for the tickets that transit cops were writing. TransLink auditors flagged the problem as far back as 2007.

Still the B. C. Liberals did nothing until they were shamed into action by an exposé on radio station CKNW from reporter Janet Brown.

“The majority of tickets written by TransLink police aren’t paid,” she