No good explanation for soil test screw-up

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/08/2018 (2218 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The question is not just whether someone screwed up. The bigger questions are how and why.

Last week, Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires admitted that she and her department had erred in holding back the results of soil testing from an area of St. Boniface where residents have long suspected heavy metal contamination. The tests revealed levels of lead that were well above acceptable limits.

Squires also confirmed that she misled journalists by claiming she did not know about the test results until early July; in fact, internal communication, obtained by the Free Press through an access to information request, showed that Squires had known about the results no later than June 21.

Further, officials in her department received the soil test results on June 4. However, rather than responding in an urgent fashion, senior bureaucrats decided to set up a briefing for the minister on June 21, nearly three weeks later.

Complicating matters even more, on June 19 Premier Brian Pallister dropped the writ for a byelection in St. Boniface that was to take place July 17. The intervening writ period carried with it a blackout on all government announcements.

In the end, Squires ordered that letters be delivered on July 13 to those homes most affected by the contaminated soil. The public at large was notified on July 17, the date of the byelection.

A number of problems arise in this narrative, not least of which is the way Squires misled news organizations about the date she learned of the test results.

Squires said that when questioned by journalists, she “ballparked” the date as having been seven to 10 days before it was made public. The minister was off by more than two weeks in her assessment, a gap that cannot be explained by the ballparking excuse.

Cabinet ministers are provided with staff to help them field inquiries from journalists. The St. Boniface soil test story was a big deal and no doubt would have been flagged by senior political staff as a potential hot potato. The first thing those staffers would do is work with the minister to make sure her answer was accurate, or at least defensible.

What Squires ultimately said was neither. And it deserves to be noted that the truth of the matter was not revealed until the Free Press undertook an access to information request, which news organizations do not do as a matter of course. That meant Squires and her staff likely had an expectation that journalists would accept her initial response.

This leaves us with two possible options for answering the “how” and “why” of this equation.

This is either a case in which the normal checks and balances in the communications and issues management infrastructure of government failed, or that same infrastructure advised her to fib on the dates in the hope that no one would take the time to access her emails.

On the latter scenario, this is a government that has repeatedly offered journalists erroneous or misleading information. From deliberate attempts to misrepresent the deficit they inherited to efforts to obscure the premier’s time away from Manitoba at his Costa Rica vacation property, the Tories have often been “strangers to the truth,” as parliamentarians love to say.

However, there is also evidence to support the first scenario, namely that the normal issues-management checks and balances failed. The Pallister government is woefully understaffed on both the communications and issues-management sides.

In just two years of governing, Pallister has already gone through two communications directors. Both Olivia Baldwin-Valanais and Chisholm Pothier turned out to be unsuccessful at managing the government’s messaging.

This is a government that has spent at least as much time trying to fix its own communication mistakes as it has trying to fix government finances. Who knows what Pallister could have accomplished in two years had he not been constantly closing ranks to absorb the blows from self-inflicted communications gaffes?

Below the senior-most levels of Pallister’s political staff, it is well known that ministers are short on resources and expertise to properly manage their files. And each of Pallister’s cabinet ministers has quite a few files to manage.

In a bid to demonstrate his affinity for prudent management, Pallister trimmed cabinet back to just 13 ministers, not including himself. This required the premier to consolidate departments that existed under the former NDP government, resulting in massively enhanced workloads.

In this structure, Squires ended up as a sort of clearing house for ministerial responsibilities. In addition to sustainable development, a major portfolio that includes environmental and resource management programs and stewardship of the province’s carbon tax initiative, she also has responsibility for francophone affairs and the status of women. That last assignment carries with it the responsibility for speaking to any issues related to women’s health.

How does one minister handle all these important and widely varying responsibilities? Squires is a dynamo who probably makes more announcements and public appearances than just about any other minister, save the premier. But there is a limit to what any one minister can handle.

The additional obligation for women’s health is, in particular, a silly strategy which, in addition to serving as an insult to many women, adds unnecessarily to Squires’ workload.

She is now required to stand in or serve as the wing-woman for the health minister whenever questions arise about women’s health — and in particular, reproductive health.

The Pallister government has never been good at explaining this division of responsibilities, although it is widely assumed that the two men who have held the health portfolio — first Kelvin Goertzen and now Cameron Friesen — object to being asked to defend government policies such as the free provision of Mifegymiso, the so-called abortion pill, on philosophical and religious grounds.

It’s a childish way to go about structuring a cabinet. Women’s health is not its own department and Squires has no Crown authority over spending on reproductive health. Why add to her responsibilities and force her to make announcements for a man who is reluctant to discuss any government program that involves what comedian Samantha Bee would refer to as “lady parts?”

However, the biggest concern for the Pallister government coming off this mess is that even if it could adequately explain the ‘‘how” and “why,” the damage is probably already done.

If a government can be fairly judged on how it responds to urgent issues, there is reason to be concerned about the competency of this government. Failing to master a single, pressing issue does not mean you are incompetent; but it does suggest that you may need to up your game.

It also opens your government to allegations of political manipulation.

Some critics will suggest the Tories were trying to boost their chances in the byelection by holding back an announcement on the soil tests. That theory doesn’t hold water. The Tories were patently aware they were never going to win St. Boniface. Thus, there was little or no political advantage to holding back the test results. As we’re seeing now, however, there was a political liability.

All this leads to a single, inescapable political reality for the Pallister government: when Manitobans next go to the polls, they won’t care anymore about “how” and “why” the soil test results were concealed. They will only remember that they were.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca