Opinion: BC’s Housing Minister has become adept at press releases outside of business hours
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VICTORIA — When Housing Minister David Eby cleaned house at BC Housing last week, he tried to downplay what he was doing to the beleaguered social housing management agency.
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Eby’s ministry released the news in a press release at 6:30 pm on Friday.
That’s late even by the standards of “take out the garbage day,” media shorthand for the way governments withhold their most embarrassing announcements until the end of the weekly news cycle.
Eby wielded the ax on the government-owned housing agency’s board of directors, ousting seven board members, replacing them with five newcomers, “effective immediately.”
The new board “will ensure the implementation of best practices in light of the recently published external review by Ernst & Young,” was the explanation for the rotation in the new statement.
Eby also followed the “take out the trash” script with the Ernst & Young report.
It received the review commissioned by the government on May 10. He posted it online with almost no fanfare on June 30, the eve of the Canada Day long weekend.
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The Ernst & Young report ran to over 50 pages plus appendices and there were shocking and disturbing flaws described on almost every page.
Lack of supervision. Lack of controls. Conflict of definitions of risk between the government and BC Housing.
Grants disbursed without any documented justification. Properties purchased without records indicating how decisions were made.
Duplication. Misalignment. The jurisdiction is confused. Outdated policies, outdated systems.
Ernst & Young found that there were no evaluation criteria for projects under the Supportive Housing Fund and the Women’s Transitional Housing Fund, both budgeted to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars.
The lack of transparency around some grants and projects raised suspicions of favoritism and conflicts of interest.
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As New Democrats threw money out the door, employees scrambled to keep paperwork in order.
“To produce a list of BC housing development projects for new homes, it took two people to manually reconcile more than 600 reports, and took three weeks to prepare.”
In all, the review concluded that “the roles, responsibilities and liabilities of both the government and BC Housing are unclear.”
Many of these failings (lack of controls and documentation, shoveling) were attributed to BC Housing’s dramatic growth under the NDP.
The budget was $782 million when they took office, has grown to nearly $2 billion today, and is scheduled for a further $7 billion increase over the next decade.
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In total, Ernst & Young’s fault finding came to 26 separate findings, supported by 44 recommendations for improvement.
Executive summary of Eby: “BC Housing was very informal in its processes. That is the core finding of the report, and those structures need to be in place now that they are so big and bear so much responsibility for taxpayer dollars,” she told reporter Julia Foy of Global TV.
The report did not name names or place blame on individuals.
But Eby explained why he made the changes at the top: “The board that we had is very focused on housing expertise and knowledge about the housing industry. The new appointees have a lot of experience in organizational structure and responsibility.”
His way of saying that the old board was mostly made up of social housing activists and advocates and that the new board members are mostly managers with a mandate to get things under control.
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The new chairman is Allan Seckel, who led the public service and also served as deputy attorney general under BC’s previous Liberal government.
Other directors include accountant Russ Jones, who twice served as acting auditor general, and Mark Sieben, a deputy minister in Prime Minister John Horgan’s office. Two other former deputy ministers complete the new appointments.
If Eby’s comments on the report and citations seem cautious, there’s a reason, and it also explains his effort to minimize the amount of attention to changes.
The ousted directors were NDP appointees, appointed by Selina Robinson, who was Eby’s predecessor as Housing Minister from 2017 to 2020.
The myriad of failures that occurred under her watch also happened in part during Robinson’s watch, which is more than a little embarrassing because she’s now the finance minister.
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Because there are NDP fingerprints all over this mess, Eby couldn’t resort to his usual blame-nobody style, like he did with the ICBC money laundering and dumpster fire, where BC Liberals had all the money. fault. .
Instead, he got sneaky and dropped the news on the eve of a holiday weekend and after dinnertime on a Friday.
He also seemed to be in a bit of a hurry.
The appointments of the new directors were not scheduled to take effect until next Monday. Instead, he redid the cabinet order for them to be launched, effective immediately, on Friday.
“We are putting together a team that will be able to implement that (the recommendations) as quickly as possible,” Eby said.
I presume he is trying to clear his desk before announcing an early run for NDP leadership. He will then have to resign from the cabinet as per the rule laid down by Prime Minister Horgan.
Something to think about as the New Democrats groom Eby as John Horgan’s successor.
If this is how an Eby prime minister handles news of his government’s mistakes and failings, the NDP is in no danger of losing its recent designation as Canada’s Most Secret.
