There’s an obvious clue as to how the spending habits of the clerk and sergeant-at-arms got to the point that a police investigation is underway, the two are suspended, people are scandalized and a legislature log-splitter is a national joke.
It’s in the 1992 law that created and governs the legislative assembly management committee, where most of the drama since the suspensions has played out.
The act lays out the powers and duties of MLAs who are members. Among them are the “supervision and management” of legislature staff.
But there’s a catch. The supervision and management applies to all staff, “other than permanent officers of the legislative assembly.”
So who supervises the permanent officers? The answer is pretty clear. No one.
The Speaker is their nominal boss. But cases of Speakers exerting direct oversight over clerks and querying their expense accounts are few and far between. It’s usually much more the case that a Speaker, with far less parliamentary experience than the permanent officers, just goes along with whatever they decide.
Until Darryl Plecas came along. He developed suspicions on Day 1, spent most of a year doing detective work and this week produced dozens of allegations of wildly inappropriate spending. He did so in the face of considerable skepticism, this corner included.
The loophole that exempts the officers from the oversight committee’s reach prompted some concern six years ago.
It was raised by none other than MLA John Horgan, on Aug. 28, 2012, at the first open public meeting of the management committee. He was then Opposition house leader. Members were grappling with the fallout from then-auditor general John Doyle’s evisceration of the financial controls at the legislature. The do-nothing committee was finally taking itself seriously.
The committee’s lack of jurisdiction over the clerk and sergeant-at-arms had been confirmed in a briefing document.
Horgan asked: “If we don’t manage the table officers and the sergeant-at-arms — and it’s nothing personal, Gary [Lenz] — who does?”
Then-Speaker Bill Barisoff said he did. There was lengthy discussion, and Horgan said he’d prefer that the officers be brought under the committee’s supervision.
“We have a document now that says … we’re not responsible for them. They’re not responsible to us.” He objected to being barred from asking critical questions.
“It jumps off the page to me. … We are accountable for your actions, Craig [James], and your staff, but we have no ability to control that by supervision or management, according to this.
“I want to make sure that I have the ability if there is incompetence demonstrated or malfeasance that I have an obligation and a responsibility to follow up on — that I can.”
Fixing that loophole would have required legislation, but there’s no record of any amendment.
The striking aspect of that meeting was James’s response to Horgan. James was then in charge of executing the sweeping reforms to improve accountability.
Responding to Horgan, he said: “If I could just offer one comment, which I hope is not overly provocative. … I do agree with John Horgan in relation to the management of employees, and I hope to hold myself up as an example of an exemplary clerk who is fully and totally accountable, not only to this committee but to all members of the legislative assembly, and in the proper and prudent financial carriage of [the legislature budget] to the public.”
He held to that theme through five more years of open management-committee meetings.
Now he and Lenz, who sat in on all those meetings, are the subject of a police investigation and are mentioned on every page of Plecas’s 76-page indictment of their spending and expense-account practices. And their “permanent” offices don’t look so permanent.
Just So You Know: Readers are invited to toast Sir Winston Churchill on Sunday at 2 p.m. at his Beacon Hill Park tree, at the foot of Quadra Street.
