Vaughn Palmer
In Victoria
It has been called Gordon Campbell's last bad decision - the massive reorganization of the Crown resource and land use ministries, launched just 10 days before he announced that he would be stepping down as premier.
The "re-org," as it is known in bureaucratic parlance, should be sharing the last/worst legacy status with the reckless cut to income taxes that Campbell announced just one week before throwing in the towel.
Except he and the B.C. Liberals pulled back on that last desperate attempt to curry favour with taxpayers, conceding that it would be unwise to restrict the fiscal options of the next premier to the tune of $2 billion over the next three years.
They declined to extend that logic to the reorganization, never mind that it will fetter the next premier no less than the tax cut.
"Well, that's something we've been working on for some time," said Campbell, when my Sun colleague Jonathan Fowlie asked recently why the re-org wasn't being put on hold. "We had a long discussion about how we were going to implement that and I think it's going to be very effective, both in terms of the economy and better service for the public."
In spite of what the premier says, the "we" in that sentence is very much in dispute.
Other members of government were well aware of the big-picture goal of streamlining approvals for major land and resource-use developments along the lines of the "one project/one process" slogan in the last throne speech.
But Campbell himself presided over the details in concert with a select group of public servants. He personally signed off on the 44-page cabinet order that shook up five established line ministries -- forests, energy, environment, agriculture and aboriginal relations -- and redistributed some of their parts to a new, overseer ministry of natural resource operations.
There was much less involvement by other players in the government, including the line ministers charged with implementation. Bill Bennett, since ousted as energy minister, provided that side of the story in media interviews.
The process was in the works for eight months, according to Bennett, but the substantive details were confined to the two deputy ministers in charge of making it happen, with stakeholders and others being deliberately kept in the dark.
"The two deputies that were involved in that process were instructed by the premier's office not to tell anybody - but particularly not to tell ministers," recounted Bennett during an interview with me on Voice of B.C. on Shaw TV.
But despite being in the know for months, those two deputies, Doug Konkin and Steve Carr, have appeared to be struggling to carry out the premier's vision, judging from a recent flood of clarifying memos and sorting-things-out meetings in the affected ministries.
Weeks after the shakeup was announced, the deputies were still scrambling to "fill the voids" and "populate the organizational charts," as they described it.
"Someone asked whether we could tell staff that this was the last change we would see for awhile," wrote Konkin and Carr in a recent open letter to ministry staff.
"Our view is that over time organizational structures would always change; that our legacy wouldn't be a structure, it would be about people and resource management. That we needed to make this the kind of organization where people wanted to work but were prepared to move on from if change demanded that."
Brace yourselves for more to come, in other words.
Then there was the leaked e-mail exchange in which one senior official lamented that the whole thing was unbelievably screwed up and his counterpart fired back that the poor fellow should not put too much stock in the reorganization since it was all likely to change again once a new premier comes along.
So far, none of the prospective candidates for the party leadership has seen fit to challenge Campbell's last pet project. Even George Abbott, who has taken the most distance from the departing premier's style, maintains that one project/one process is a worthwhile objective and the re-org should proceed.
Bennett: "They should roll back all the changes in the natural-resource ministries - put everything back where they were. Keep the Ministry of Natural Resource Operations. Keep (cabinet minister) Steve Thomson in charge of that -- I have a lot of respect for Steve. Let him take a year to talk to all the [stakeholders] and figure out if we want to do this integration. A year later, come back to cabinet and to caucus and say, 'This is how we think we can do this.' Wouldn't that make a lot more sense?"
The government insiders aren't inclined to listen to Bennett, perhaps because he is an acknowledged troublemaker, perhaps because they are too wedded to the premier-authored vision, however clumsy the execution.
But now there's an outsider in the contest - Christy Clark, gone from the Campbell cabinet table for six distancing years. Maybe she'll be the one to say it is time to slam the brakes on this poorly conceived, badly executed makeover.
