When Christy Clark took over as premier of British Columbia two years ago, she had a window of opportunity to change taxpayers' perceptions of her government.
To improve her chances in the 2013 election, Clark needed to throw out unpopular and unworkable ideas brought in by her predecessor Gordon Campbell. In a symbolic way, she needed to string a huge banner over the B.C. Legislature that said, "Under New Management."
In the first 90 days of her term, she should have done three things to clearly differentiate her leadership from Campbell's: kill the Pacific Carbon Trust, completely open up MLA expenses and push for public-private pay equity.
The Pacific Carbon Trust has been nothing more than a corporate welfare scheme for years. More than 99.7 per cent of its annual budget comes from taxpayers, who turned over $14 million to some of B.C.'s biggest companies last year, all so we could display three words on government websites: "Carbon Neutral Government."
A huge chunk of that money came from schools, hospitals and universities: the Surrey School District paid more than $525,000 last year. The Vancouver Coastal Health Authority paid $1.32 million. Simon Fraser University paid $466,500.
Clark should have killed the Trust two years ago, but instead it was allowed to continue on, overcharging taxpayers for carbon credits and sending that money to big business. A recently announced review by Environment Minister Terry Lake doesn't go near far enough, but don't worry: B.C. Auditor General John Doyle has a report on the Trust ready to be released any day now. You can bet it won't be pretty.
During her leadership campaign, Clark touted her commitment to open government. Yet, MLAs on both sides of the aisle have refused to fully release details of their personal, travel and office expenses to the taxpayers paying the bill.
Worse yet, after a scathing audit by Doyle on legislature spending, MLAs — both Liberal and NDP — flip-flopped on Speaker Bill Barisoff's explicit promise to release expense receipts. While Albertans get to look at every receipt charged to taxpayers by MLAs and senior bureaucrats, British Columbians get lump sum expense reports, scattered across different websites and lacking any kind of context.
The B.C. government's success with the zero wage mandate, where they managed to hold the line for two years with their unions, should have been a first step in controlling labour costs. Taxpayers currently shell out $24 billion a year on provincial government staffers.
A recent Fraser Institute study shows that the average B.C. government worker is paid 13.6 per cent more than their private sector counterpart. This reinforces the experience of cities like Penticton, which discovered it was paying its lifeguards $23 per hour, while the private pools paid $14.50.
A Compensation Equity Act, applicable to provincial, Crown, regional and municipal employees, would use a market-based model to reform pay packages for government workers and move new hires from ultra-expensive defined-benefit pension plans to more sustainable defined-contribution pension plans.
Instead, the Clark government gave away the zero mandate gains by negotiating increases higher than the rate of inflation with unionized workers, and offering platitudes but no specifics on how those raises would be funded - suggesting a reduction in sick days, for example, but offering no plan on how that would happen.
Killing the Pacific Carbon Trust, fully revealing MLA expenses and legislating a Compensation Equity Act would have saved B.C. taxpayers money and illustrated that the BC Liberals could learn from their mistakes. Instead, we got the same old, same old.
Should the polls hold, these lost opportunities will provide plenty of woulda-coulda-shoulda moments for the BC Liberal Party to chew on for the next four years.
Follow Jordan Bateman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jordanbateman
Although program spending was otherwise somewhat controlled, the Olympic and Vancouver area related debt (Sea to Sky Highway, BC Place, Gateway, Canada Line, Olympic Venues) will be with us for a long time and is now used by the NDP to show the Liberals as the big spenders and financially reckless.
At least we have assets. With the NDP, they love operating deficits on program spending which just goes "poof" without a single brick left behind. That, is bad debt.
Point is that this article comes off as an "excusology", trying to make it sound plausible that Christy will rescue the wreckage with enough positive thinking and more lie-making and silly posturing; indeed she may; the Tory majority fraud is not the first time in BC history when the playing field of politics was upended my major infusions of cash and p.r. rhetoric. 1983, 1995 (when Campbell hijacked the renascent Liberal Party from the moderates and civic-minded people who had started it as an alternative to BC's usual and frustrating political bipolarity), and since. Throw money and lies on it, you will win; a little cheating has always been around in BC, in one way or another.
Making idiocy sound plausible is part of the game; indeed it is the essence of spin.
In the little ramble above, the murky realities of BC politics are obscured by soft-sound analysis. If Christy Clark ever had a chance to show some political spine, she would have called the election within three-six months of coming to power; her constantly putting it off was and is one of the big marks against her. For one thing, it puts off the investigation of BC Rail and BC Hydro and BC Ferries fiascos by the new Dix government (as surely it will be, like a prodigal waiting in the wings to the horrors of those who have ripped off and lied to BC and broken the law to protect themselves, indeed corrupted the law and the courts, who will be exposed as surely they would have been if the Basi-Virk trial hadn't been derailed by an illegal plea bargain. "Grilled" is too shallow a term for what will happen with the right kind of investigation; barbequed into little cubestakes is more like it. And no, no house arrest.....