B.C.’s bureaucracy continues to grow to record levels, as two new pieces of NDP legislation are set to create entirely new government offices, full of staff and consultants paid using your tax dollars.
The latest is the “Superintendent of International Credential Recognition,” a new branch within the post-secondary ministry. Its creation was buried within legislation tabled Monday that the NDP promises will speed up the recognition of foreign credentials in 29 professions, including lawyers, early childhood educators, architects and accountants.
“It’s not going to be a big giant department of government,” said Minister of State for Workforce Development Andrew Mercier, when I asked him Monday.
“But it will be streamlined in a team that is effective and able to do the job.”
It’s not clear how much of an actual impact B.C.’s new foreign credential moves will make, when much of the real power lies with Ottawa on the issue. And you might think the government would be stingy about adding new layers of permanent costs, given B.C.’s current three-year fiscal plan calls for massive deficits and a skyrocketing provincial debt.
Not so, it appears.
Instead, the NDP legislation allows the new superintendent to hire multiple deputy superintendents, who in turn can “retain consultants, experts and other persons the superintendent considers necessary.”
The office also has free rein on pay, with the superintendent (who will no doubt earn an executive-level government salary) allowed by law to establish their own pay scale and employment terms for the people they retain.
Collectively, this new branch will conduct research, promote policies and “give information and advice to regulatory authorities.” It should be operational by next summer.
The government admitted Monday it is still contemplating the staff size and budget associated with the superintendent. Perhaps it’s too much to expect the NDP to think about the new costs associated with its decisions, during a year in which the province is forecast to run an almost $7 billion deficit. After all, it’s much easier to govern when you can write blank cheques on the fly as issues arise.
The creation of another level of bureaucracy in Victoria comes amid a 31 per cent jump in size for the core civil service during the NDP’s six years in power — almost 11,000 new full-time equivalent government staffers inside ministries and agencies (not counting health care, education and post-secondary sectors).
“Surely there are already people that work for government, in a combination of different ministries that could step up and put their shoulders into bringing to life their regulatory framework for that and whatever oversight is required,” said Opposition BC United critic Todd Stone.
“But the NDP have a penchant for creating departments, and registrars, and superintendents, and enforcement units, from scratch as they craft policy. And this is why we’ve seen such a massive increase in the size of the public sector.”
Premier David Eby has been unapologetic, saying he believes the ballot box question for voters in next year’s election will be whether they want a government intervening directly to try and solve the big issues, or getting out of the way, as BC United has called for, to let the private sector lead.
Even with that framing, the question remains: Why do we need a superintendent of foreign credentialing when the government has an entire Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills full of people whose job, presumably, already includes monitoring accreditations?
“The system of international credential recognition is a Byzantine and Kafkaesque maze, a bureaucracy that no one in their right mind who was looking at it right now would design,” Mercier told me.
“But it’s what we have, and it's what we have to tackle.
“So it may be counter-intuitive, but what we actually need are the tools in order to bring rationality to that process. And that's what this is about… it is shocking, the degree of process barriers that are in the way at every single step, and where there is no one with any clear authority or ability to set standards and have compliance. So it's an absolutely necessary piece of where we get anything done about it.”
It sounds a bit like creating new red tape in order to reduce existing red tape. That’s a tough sell for a government, but Mercier did an admirable job attempting to explain it Monday.
The NDP is also creating two new civil service offices as part of its crackdown on short-term property rentals.
The first is a new registrar to oversee the registration of all the short-term rentals, as well as sites like AirBnb and VRBO. The registrar will also gather up all the declarations from owners as to whether the properties are their principal residences (a requirement in legislation for many urban centres).
The NDP’s enabling legislation throws open the ability for the new registrar to “retain other persons, whom the registrar considers necessary to exercise the registrar’s powers and perform the registrar’s duties under this Act.”
The other new office is a “short-term rental compliance and enforcement unit” which will track whether people are following the laws, and penalize those who do not.
In the NDP’s defence here, municipalities did call for provincial enforcement as part of short-term rental changes. So at least this one new office already has some buy-in from some community leaders.
The rest, though, appear questionable when you consider there’s already a Ministry of Housing with hundreds of employees.
“They seem to evaluate their progress measures by how many people they hire and how much money they spend, and the results from the public facing perspective seem to be a laggard consideration for them,” Stone said of the NDP.
Ultimately, it’s the taxpayers who foot the bill for every new office the NDP is creating. It will also be up to them to decide whether all this new bureaucracy is a step in the right direction, or just more useless (and costly) red tape.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 15 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio. [email protected]
