MLAs failed to keep tabs on isolated legislature Speaker
VICTORIA After a long day at work at the legislature, Speaker Darryl Plecas and his special adviser, Alan Mullen, like to relax at the bar near the capital building.
Belleville’s Watering Hole & Diner is a favourite haunt for MLAs, political staff and journalists. But among the crowd, you’re more likely to spot Plecas and Mullen sitting alone. They are two men without political friends — ostracized by the B.C. Liberals, largely ignored by the NDP and Greens, and now on the run from the press.
Their secret seven-month investigation into legislature clerk Craig James and sergeantat-arms Gary Lenz, Plecas’s clumsy attempt to install Mullen into Lenz’s job, and Mullen’s even clumsier decision to call police officers to perp-walk the two men out of the building in the most humiliating manner possible, have left the Speaker and his aide even more isolated.
As the crisis plays out, many are wondering whether it all could have been prevented, or at least handled earlier by more qualified individuals. But that would have required MLAs to see the crisis coming, before it blew up in their faces.
To understand why that didn’t happen, it helps to know the vacuum in which Plecas has operated since becoming Speaker 14 months ago.
All Speakers are isolated to a certain degree. By taking the non-partisan job as referee of the house, a Speaker can no longer sit in caucus meetings with colleagues or attend partisan events.
But it has been much harder for Plecas.
The Liberals have boycotted any event the speaker has organized for the past 14 months.
They’ve refused to be seen with him to make it clear how furious they are that Plecas pushed Christy Clark out as leader by threatening to quit the Liberal caucus in June 2017, and then effectively quit anyway shortly afterwards by cutting a deal with the NDP to become Speaker and ducking colleagues until it was announced.
It has made for a tense and dysfunctional work environment at the legislature. Imagine half the employees in your workplace hating your guts, refusing to speak to you and walking out of whatever room you enter.
One of the reasons Plecas hired Mullen as his new special adviser in January was so Mullen could be his eyes and ears inside rooms in which Plecas was not welcome.
Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson has accused Speaker Plecas of being “out of control.”
“We all need to be concerned he’s building his own little empire staffed with expensive lawyers, with investigators with no credentials and he’s being allowed to get away with it,” said Wilkinson.
But the Liberals did nothing to curtail this behaviour because, as a result of their boycott, they haven’t had a clue about what Plecas had been doing since he took the job.
The NDP has done little better. Normally, the party that volunteers the Speaker keeps that person up-to-date with private briefings on caucus priorities, legislation and political strategy, as well as offers advice and help whenever the Speaker needs it.
New Democrats never extended Plecas such courtesies. He wasn’t briefed on the NDP’s governing agenda, wasn’t encouraged to socialize with the party’s MLAs and wasn’t provided advice. Consequently, New Democrats failed to fulfil the other responsibility a governing party typically has: Keep the Speaker out of trouble.
Recent history has shown that left to their own devices, Speakers can quickly land themselves in the glue.
When Liberal speaker Linda Reid went on a spending spree in 2014 — purchasing a $700 muffin rack, a $40,000 computer terminal and taking her husband on a first-class African safari — the Liberals privately threatened to invoke a motion of non-confidence if she didn’t reform.
Reid had also clashed with clerk James, whom she felt unfairly curtailed her spending authority. The two waged a simmering behind-the-scenes civil war for years. But Reid, to her credit, never tried to investigate James. As the building ’s CEO, the clerk is supposed to be protected from political interference. The Speaker is not the clerk’s employer. The clerk is appointed directly by a vote of MLAs.
The other safety valve on the Speaker is MLAs themselves. The Speaker reports to MLAs in the house and through the all-party legislative assembly management committee.
That committee has only met three times since the May 2017 election, for a total of a few hours. None of the concerns Plecas apparently developed were discussed nor did MLAs ask Plecas questions about Mullen or his activities.
This absence of oversight, the NDP’s hands-off approach to Plecas and the Liberals’ boycott meant no MLAs have kept tabs on Plecas for more than a year. We now know Plecas spent more than half that time with Mullen conducting their investigation into the legislature’s highest-ranking staff, without telling anyone.
NDP house leader Mike Farnworth realized his mistake after the scandal erupted. He scrambled to install former Liberal attorney general Wally Oppal in the Speaker’s office so he could tell reporters with a straight face he still had confidence in Plecas.
What qualified Mullen to be Plecas’ political adviser and private investigator? It’s another question MLAs have been asking. The two men met at Kent Institution where Plecas, a criminologist, was a prison judge and Mullen was a corrections manager.
Mullen is not a lawyer, a law enforcement officer or a licensed private investigator. He’s a newcomer to the legislature.
He brought no parliamentary expertise. And his political acumen appears to be nil.
Court documents show Mullen was fired 12 years ago from his job in security for Great Canadian Casino after trying to claim more than $11,000 in overtime without supporting documentation and being suspended for four days for alleged public intoxication at work.
Nonetheless, Mullen does have one important qualification: He’s Plecas’s friend. Plecas trusts him. In an environment where the Speaker has almost no one to turn to for advice, is ostracized by half the building, and taken for granted by the other half, Mullen is essentially a full-time buddy with a public salary of $75,000 a year.
The RCMP and special prosecutors are now investigating the allegations into James and Lenz, based on the material provided by Plecas and Mullen. They’ve all refused to say what those allegations are. James and Lenz said last week they haven’t been told either. To date, no one has been charged with any crime.
But this crisis had been brewing for a long time, right under the noses of MLAs. It proves that the Speaker’s job — once an easy patronage appoint for backbench MLAs — is an important part of our functioning democracy. To prevent another scandal, MLAs will need to pay more attention to who they pick for the position, as well as keep an eye on what the Speaker is doing.