PALMER: DE JONG MAKES HIS PRESENCE FELT
Foiled: Finance minister steps in to question spending decision made in secret by a subcommittee
Acommittee of government and Opposition MLAs was on the verge of approving a 13 per cent boost in the budget for constituency offices recently, when Finance Minister Mike de Jong entered the room.
“I apologize for being late,” de Jong began, then proceeded to spoil the mood of collegiality at the legislative assembly management committee. “I wonder if members would want to provide the rationale for the recommendation.”
The proposed budget increase having originated with the Opposition, it fell to New Democratic Party caucus chair Shane Simpson to explain.
“There has been an erosion in the buying power of the constituency offices, while costs continue to go up,” he began, noting the allotment had been frozen for a decade, during which time the assembly imposed new responsibilities on staff in terms of reporting and accountability.
“So this is about making that whole,” Simpson continued. “I don’t see it as an increase. I see it as restoring what was there, and it makes eminent sense, certainly, to me.”
Besides, the New Democrat went on to say, the proposed annual increase of $15,835 was to “relatively modest budgets” of $119,000 per constituency office.
Still, with 85 constituency budgets, one for each MLA, there would have to be 85 such increases, making the boost $1.3 million in total. Suddenly the increase didn’t sound all that modest.
“I don’t in any way dispute or argue with the mounting pressure and the challenges that have arisen and continue to arise,” replied de Jong. “Of course, there are pressures that have arisen for a variety of departments of government and the legislative assembly.”
Yet other departments, including such assembly services as security, Hansard and the library, had all lived within budget.
“No one else,” de Jong continued, “gets to fix the problem and the pressures they are facing, by a vote of (a handful) of legislators.”
He then countered with a proposal to put off the proposed increase until after the May 2017 election, in effect extending the freeze for another year and a half.
“My sensitivity to this derives from the number of times I have said to agencies: ‘You’re going to have to make do,’ ” de Jong explained. “I think it frustrates people that when a problem and a pressure that they are confronted with on a regular basis reveals itself with respect to the politicians themselves, the catch-up will happen all immediately.”
Simpson was not backing down.
“There’s nothing instant about this,” he returned. “It’s been a problem that has been growing for a decade, every year. The question is: when do you address it? The reason for bringing it now is that it’s far enough ahead of the next election to deal with it.”
Indeed, as Simpson confessed to de Jong, he originally pitched for a significantly larger increase in the $25,000 to $30,000 range, “but I fully appreciate that we need to manage here.”
The scaled down increase was “relatively modest” to Simpson’s way of thinking, though he quickly added “I don’t want to diminish $1 million.”
While Simpson and de Jong went at it Nov. 23, I was noting a shift of mood within the legislative committee room.
The proposed increase emerged from an earlier meeting of the finance and audit subcommittee of the main legislative assembly management committee. The subcommittee, which is chaired by Speaker of the Legislature Linda Reid, consists of Simpson and his government counterpart, Jackie Tegart, chair of the caucus of B.C. Liberal MLAs.
The subcommittee meets in secret. The main committee is public. De Jong is not a member of the subcommittee though he does attend meetings of the main committee in his capacity as house leader for the government.
And not for the first time was he showing up at a public meeting of main committee to nix one of those I’ll-scratch-your-back-ifyou-scratch-mine deals the two parties cooked up behind closed doors at the subcommittee.
Sure enough, after de Jong said his piece, Liberal caucus chair Tegart proceeded to put some distance between herself and her NDP counterpart on the question of timing.
“I appreciate the comments made today,” she announced. “I’m comfortable with the fact that we’re actually going to have a second motion and look at it for the future.”
This had the New Democrats quietly seething. They had every reason to think the Liberals were in support of the immediate increase for their own constituency budgets until the finance minister put his foot down.
Not surprisingly, the keeper of the pursue strings prevailed. The $1.3-million, 13 per cent increase, was put off until after the election.
But the day was not a complete loss for Simpson, whose wife works in a constituency office, albeit not his own (quote: “It’s not an issue”).
He was also the originator of a call for the committee to “not put ourselves back in this place again” and instead link constituency office budgets to annual increases in the consumer price index.
De Jong and the Liberals did grasp Simpson’s logic on that one. Both parties joined in a motion to index the office budgets post-2017, ensuring future increases will happen automatically, without further need of any messy debating or voting in public.