A deep dive into six years of legislature management committee meetings leaves an impression of a legislature clerk markedly different than the one currently circulating.
Craig James is accused of rampant expense-account abuse and mismanagement by Speaker Darryl Plecas. He’s under RCMP investigation and has until Friday to respond to the speaker’s report, after which MLAs could reconsider his current suspended-with-pay status.
But the man who was escorted out of the building by police two months ago appeared as a driving force for accountability, transparency and spending controls over 26 management committee meetings going back six years.
After a former auditor general roasted the legislature for pervasive, long-standing deficiencies in its fiscal management, a reform movement started. The legislative assembly management committee started holding open meetings in 2012. They were mostly devoted to responding to the savage audit and dragging the legislature into modern financial reporting.
James, as the senior staff member, led the way. He guided MLAs through many of the complex moves that had to be made to get to full accountability. It was his idea to create a finance and audit sub-committee of LAMC, to keep an even closer eye on spending.
“As you probably know, virtually 100 per cent of my time over the past year has been devoted to looking at the accounting and accounting processes for the legislative assembly,” he said on Oct. 17, 2012.
Subsequently, on Sept. 24, 2013, he told MLAs: “Over the past two years we’ve had a very methodical and rigorous approach toward assembling or preparing the budget estimates for Vote 1 [the mechanism for approving the legislature’s budget].
“We do have a very rigorous internal process that involves a number of serious meetings.”
He also assured MLAs: “We are moving toward a better inventory control with the Parliament Buildings and the precinct, along with better asset control.”
On March 11, 2014, as the accountability drive continued, he told them: “I welcome … more openness, more transparency, more accountability and more controls.”
He even changed the accounting for his own travel expenses, which were sharply criticized in Plecas’s detailed report last week.
James told the MLAs back then that travel was in a different budget “but my view is that my travel should actually come out of my office … it would be a more accurate representation of disclosing my travel.”
By May 6, 2014, he said an audit working group overseeing all the improvements had held 73 meetings in two years. The financial services division was “drowning in the work that they’re doing,” he said. It had 19 new functions.
“We’re a pretty lean organization,” he said.
“I’ll use my office as an example,” he said, noting staff changes that saved money.
“We want to demonstrate clearly and unequivocally that the legislative assembly of B.C. is being managed properly. That is our overriding concern.”
By Nov. 5, 2014, he was hailing the fact the legislature had just passed an independent audit.
“This is a giant leap forward. … The public and MLAs should be very pleased in the knowledge that their legislature is being managed very well, very economically, very efficiently and very effectively.”
On Dec. 10, 2014, he told MLAs B.C. has one of the best-run parliaments in the entire Commonwealth.
“Since being appointed as clerk … I have initiated a number of fundamental reforms … that have resulted in savings and improved service delivery to members.”
But most of the accountability work was aimed at MLAs, not the senior officers. As noted here Saturday, the 1992 law that created the management committee specifically exempted the permanent officers from the committee’s management and supervision, for reasons never explained.
Then-opposition MLA John Horgan objected to that in 2012. For the most part, MLAs took James at his word.
Just So You Know: The latest legislature accountability report includes glowing passages from Plecas and James about all the progress made and good works undertaken, such as “strengthening financial processes.”
Plecas’s contribution is dated April 2018. But his report last week makes it clear that by then he was profoundly suspicious of James and sergeant-at-arms Gary Lenz and immersed in detective work scrutinizing their work. He called the cops on them five months later.
