June 24, 2005

Missing Pieces from Government's Reorg

How things change in four years! It is not just the sale of BC Rail, the doubling of gambling, and cuts to the Ministry of Children and Family development, to name a few of the big things. The Campbell government's rush to implement its agenda has also changed. In 2001 the election was held on May 16th and massive tax cuts were announced on June 5th, the day the first Campbell cabinet was sworn in. In 2005 the election was held on May 17th, the new cabinet wasn't sworn in until June 16th and government is moving so slowly it appears to be on an extended holiday.

The Order in Council (OIC) that established the new cabinet is now posted on the government website. Its 37 pages consist mostly of an appendix that lists every statute that is the responsibility of each minister; for example, on page 28 it says that the Minister of Labour and Citizens' Services is responsible for the Legislative Library Act. Between the "backgrounder" that accompanied the government news release on June 16th and the full OIC one might expect to pick up on all the important details of latest reorganization of BC's government; however, the changes involve much more than what those documents cover.

One of the first acts of the 2001 Campbell government was to establish a "waste buster website". The top government web page, www.gov.bc.ca, no longer lists that site. The list of government ministries and organizations doesn't list that site. The list of ministerial responsibilities doesn't mention the waste buster. Fortunately, when appropriately prompted, the search engine on the government site points to http://www.wastebuster.gov.bc.ca/. The waste buster site states that as of June 8, 2005, 8,065 submissions had been made to it. That would suggest that the site is still an active and important part of government, but its pages offer no example of any suggestion made since 2002. It might have been fun for the Campbell government to identify waste in the early days of its "core review" but after four years Campbell has no one to blame but himself for any government waste or inefficiencies. Perhaps that is why the site has been shifted to a very far back burner. It does provide a link to minister responsible for the site, Mike de Jong; that has to be an updated link since in his former job as Minister of Forests, de Jong was not responsible for the waste buster site. The site must be an undisclosed component of "Citizens Services" in the newly named Ministry of Labour and Citizens' Services.

Those who are responsible for the government's Internet presence have an enormous job reorganizing ministry sites so as to reflect the new organization. It so happens that de Jong is also responsible for BC Internet Services which might explain why links from his responsibilities back to him appear to be updated. Government watchers can learn a lot by keeping an eye on both the online government phone book and on the changing government websites as pieces of the government jigsaw puzzle are reassembled. One particularly interesting site to watch will be http://www.prov.gov.bc.ca/prem/popt/cabinet/, the home of documents relating to the staged cabinet meetings. The carefully rehearsed "meetings" are expensive public relations stunts that are usually followed by real, behind-closed-doors, meetings. The last so called open cabinet meeting was held on January 26, 2005. It will be interesting to see if the new players in Campbell's cabinet are willing to participate in those games.