31 Fridays in August

Reports that could have hurt the Liberals had they been released in a timely fashion before the May 17th election are now seeing the light of day.

The Ministry of Children and Family Development released, in an extraordinary clumsy fashion, the report on the death of Sherry Charlie, but not until the election was safely over.

The Ministry of Health released the Pharmacare Trends 2003 report which showed that over 100,000 fewer people received benefits from Pharmacare in 2002 than in 2001. The report wasn't posted to the Ministry's website until August 15th.

In August the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (welfare, formerly called Human Resources) released a report on its job placement programs which it received in September 2004. The report was accompanied by a July 6, 2005, "update" which essentially said that further analysis over a longer time period showed that the program wasn't quite as much a waste of money as the first report indicated. Whether it breaks even will depend on how long clients remain "independent", since the program was credited with only 0.5 months of incremental independence per accepted person. Monday Magazine and The Tyee published stories by Andrew MacLeod which reported that "One of the main arguments in favour of privately-run welfare-to-work programs like JobWave and Destinations has been that they don't really cost the taxpayer anything, since they are paid for out of what we save by moving people off of welfare. But an 11-month-old report prepared for the provincial government, quietly added to the province's website this week, shows that people in the programs do only marginally better in their job hunts than people who aren't in the programs."

Governments are frequently criticized for "taking out the laundry" on Fridays, getting bad news out when the media are least likely to pay attention and least likely to give the story "legs" in the following week. That is part of what media types within government get paid to do. The month of August is like 31 Fridays. It is no wonder that the Campbell government is trying to flush out as much bad news as possible before folks return from vacation and start paying attention to politics and policy. They may be surprised this time because a revitalized Opposition going into a September sitting of the legislature is unlikely to let the government forget the embarrassing details of its August publications.