Vaughn Palmer
In Victoria
Premier Gordon Campbell needed almost 100 words Monday to summarize the rationale behind his latest cabinet shuffle. I can do it in four: "When in doubt, reorganize."
Yes, the last resort of a manager who has run out of ideas and finds his back to the wall. Move stuff around. Shuffle the team. Cook up a bunch of new titles. And hope it buys you some time with the bosses, the shareholders or, in this case, the electorate.
So most ministers, most ministries and most deputies were moved, with no obvious rationale -- forestry combined with mining? a minister of state to renew the building code? -- other than change for the sake of change, by an increasingly capricious premier.
Campbell, who just two years ago touted the need for separate ministries of health services and healthy living, decided to recombine the two into a single ministry. At the same time, he discovered a sudden compulsion to spread education over three separate ministries, one dealing with K-12, one with colleges, a third with universities.
Ida Chong found herself in her ninth ministerial assignment in six years. Kevin Krueger had to profess to be happy with his fifth portfolio in three. Ian Black accepted his second stint as minister of labour, while Rich Coleman prepared for his third tour of duty as solicitor-general.
Still, there was the premier swearing up and down that it was all part of the grand plan.
"Today's changes focus on investment and job creation, helping our children realize their full potential and building on our Olympic momentum," the government press release quoted him, conveniently overlooking that he said pretty much the same thing about the last shuffle, undertaken in the wake of the 2009 provincial election.
In the effort to insist that this time, he was finally getting it right, he tried to focus attention on a new ministry of natural resource operations.
"This new structure will streamline government processes for critical natural resource industries. ... It enables us to move forward with our federal partners towards establishing a 'one project, one process' model."
But the new vehicle bears more than passing resemblance to something Campbell tried his first term, namely the ministry for sustainable resource management, which was also supposed to be the one-stop centre for project approval.
It emerged from an earlier round of tinkering.
Before winning the 2001 election, he spent weeks with a team of advisers on a vaunted reorganization. They eventually reduced the entire government to some 120 index cards, each representing a different office or agency, displayed on a big board in his office. Apparently, Campbell liked to while away the hours by shuffling the cards and creating new ministries, like a kid with a Tinkertoy set.
He never completed the exercise to his own satisfaction -- witness the number of different configurations he has produced involving economic development, small business, technology, trade and investment.
Competition, science and enterprise (2001-04). Small business and economic development (2004-05). Economic development (2005-2008). Technology, trade and economic development (2008-2009). Small business, technology and economic development (2009-10).
Monday he shuffled the index cards again, as small business was dumped into finance, science and technology were combined with universities, and economic development dealt into a new ministry of regional economic and skills development. Other bits and pieces would appear to have lodged in a new ministry of tourism, trade and investment. The latter is also the new resting place for the premier's chief of staff, Martyn Brown, whose putative translation from chief political adviser into deputy minister and public servant was the most outrageous news of the shuffle.
"When we were looking at this agenda," said Campbell, venturing a preposterous rationale for the move, "we said there is a huge opportunity in tourism, trade and investment in the province of B.C."
"We" being himself and his deputy minister and head of the public service, Allan Seckel, who, if he took the lead on this appointment, did nothing to enhance the independence of the public service.
"We looked across the deputy ranks and said, 'Who could do that job best?'" continued Campbell to a mounting sense of disbelief in the media scrum. "We really thought Martyn could do that job the best."
Right. The guy who stage-managed every political move out the premier's office for the past nine years was better qualified than anyone who worked his or her way up through the bureaucracy on expertise and dedication to the public service.
This from a premier whose many New Era promises included one to "restore a professional, non-partisan public service, appointed strictly on merit, not on patronage."
But stunts like the Brown appointment are another sign of managerial desperation. Chronic reorganization. Trying to find a safe landing place for your cronies. Next he'll be telling us he's terribly misunderstood.
