On Tuesday CTV News called attention to a mathematical quirk in the newly re-elected New Democratic government of British Columbia. The previous day, returning premier David Eby had announced his re-formed cabinet and other parliamentary officers. You will remember that the Oct. 19 election was fought on a razor’s edge, with the result that B.C.’s relatively slender 93-member assembly now consists of 47 New Democrats, 44 Conservatives, and two Greens.
Forty-seven members is the smallest caucus that a true B.C. majority government can have — and this group of members is then charged with the actual governing of B.C., an insanely complex and divided polity that would actually consist of anywhere from three to eight provinces if we were starting over from scratch.
Eby has kept the cabinet numbers the same as before, appointing 23 ministers and four ministers of state. What’s attracting notice is his creation of a further 14 parliamentary secretaries to handle lower-level specialized responsibilities; these jobs come with pay bumps of about $18,000 a year over and above an MLA’s $120,000 base salary. Of the six leftover MLAs, five have other titles carrying extra pay, including the speaker and the whip; the only New Democrat member initially earning a regular MLA’s income will be deputy caucus chair Rohini Arora. Who will, as CTV’s Robert Buffam points out, probably be first in line for some committee chair job and the attached $3,000 bonus.
Your first instinct here might be to quarrel with the increasingly confusing and absurd nature of provincial cabinet portfolios. It’s apparently not enough anymore for B.C. to have the traditional pairing of an attorney general and a solicitor general: the province now also needs a minister of state for community safety and integrated services to catch any wrong ‘uns the others might have missed. The “integrated services” part of that job bears no relation whatsoever to the Ministry of Citizens’ Services, which I’d have thought to be every cabinet minister’s job in one way or another. (Who are any of these people serving, if not citizens? Animistic local deities? Bears?)
There is both a labour minister and a jobs, economic development and innovation minister; the latter is now equipped with a helpful flunky, the minister of state for trade. Where the social development and poverty reduction minister fits in amidst this puzzle is anybody’s guess. And I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for having an environment minister and a water, land and resource stewardship minister, even as the energy minister is actually an “energy and climate solutions” minister.
The cabinet’s probably a touch bigger than it needs to be, is all I’m sayin’; everybody’s heard similar complaints before, and with all this overlapping, one might well wonder why the 14 parliamentary secretaries are required. The twin labour and jobs portfolios may seem to be superfluous, but yet aren’t enough for the province to dispense with the need for a further parliamentary secretary for labour and another for international (labour) credentials. But, hey, Eby didn’t choose the size of the B.C. legislature, nor would he have opted for his party to have a shrunken caucus; what he has is the challenge of keeping all his MLAs contented with a legislature majority of exactly one.
What alarms me is not the appearance of cynical job inflation and conflation, but the fact that this governing caucus is essentially equipped with no back bench whatsoever. B.C. New Democrats themselves should consider this a genuine, moderately serious problem. There are no New Democratic MLAs whose income doesn’t depend, in one way or another, on keeping in the good books of the leader.
The governing-party back bench, however despised by those occupying it, has a distinct customary role in our political system, as the formal Opposition does: it is counted on to provide friendly independent criticism of the government from behind, and to allow for within-party dissent and electoral feedback. Parties of the left might be said to need that kind of thing more than ever in 2024, but the B.C. New Democrats have chosen to disavow it, and, after all, $120K doesn’t go very far over there, does it?
— Colby Cosh
