Two question periods is all it took for a lucrative field of endeavour to potentially dry up and blow away.
Once all the retainers are allowed to lapse, the lobbying for post-secondary institutions industry could look like the oilpatch — bereft of profit and in a deep trough of despair.
“Remember when we used to make $5,000 a month just introducing B.C. Liberal appointees to B.C. Liberal government members?” the academia lobbyists will recall, huddled around the bonfire. “Those were good days.”
But the good days look to be going, if they’re not gone already.
After two embarrassing days trying alternately to explain or ignore revelations from the Opposition, Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson reluctantly promised to have a word with the post-secondary institutions about their penchant for hiring expensive government-relations consultants, rather than picking up the phone and calling government themselves.
After an entertaining foray into the topic Monday, when they explored Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s $177,000 outlay to Liberal lobbyist Mark Jiles, the NDP returned to the issue Tuesday.
This time it was Royal Roads University’s contract with the Pace Group a few years ago. The company was retained to help make the Robert Bateman Environmental Education Centre happen.
RRU said it paid $40,500 for advice on that job. The project came up short financially and the Bateman gallery eventually wound up downtown at the Steamship Terminal. But president Allan Cahoon said Tuesday smaller institutions often need help navigating through their many dealings with different branches of government. RRU has since hired a staff person responsible for government relations.
Which is the trouble with the NDP’s whole argument: If consultant-lobbyists are curbed, the institutions hire their own executives to do it, and they cost a lot more than lobbyists are charging.
Also on the charge sheet Tuesday was Vancouver Community College, which retained Fleishman-Hillard three years ago to “raise awareness with key government officials about the benefits and impact of VCC’s educational programs.” The value of the contract came to $75,000.
That’s almost $300,000 in lobbying expenses by just three institutions. The Opposition noted that some of the lobbyists then donate generously to the B.C. Liberals.
NDP MLA Kathy Corrigan said the Liberal-appointed board at VCC paid a key player in Premier Christy Clark’s leadership campaign to explain VCC to the Liberals.
For good measure, the NDP also cited Wilkinson’s own mention on the lobbyists’ registry. He filed five disclosures nine years ago related to legal work he did for SFU. He was a former president of the B.C. Liberal Party and former deputy to the premier at that point. He said Tuesday, as a lawyer, he had to be careful to comply fully with the law so he registered as a consultant lobbyist.
Wilkinson pointed out that NDP MLA David Eby did the same thing while practising law.
Wilkinson’s asking KPU for documentation about the small fortune it spent on lobbying. As for the others: “I’ll be making it clear to them that we do not see the need for them to retain government-relations consultants.”
Running concurrently with that argument was a set-to about how many students are in debt, with Wilkinson saying it’s a much smaller percentage than is commonly assumed.
He said only 25 per cent of full-time students apply for government student loans, although the NDP and student groups insist it’s far higher.
At one point he dismissed the “cackling” chicken coop on the Opposition side, and clucked like a chicken when an NDP MLA rose to speak. He had to withdraw “the last few syllables of my remarks,” which sounded like “bawk-bawk-bawk.”
Oddly enough, the NDP’s efforts this week make the case in a backhanded way for one of the previous B.C. Liberal budget initiatives. The government in 2012 demanded $50 million in cost savings from the institutions over three years, “which were not to be found through reductions in programming.”
With the kind of money they were throwing at lobbyists now brought to light, it looks like there was lots of room for cost-cutting in the administration budgets.
lleyne@timescolonist.com
twitter.com/leyneles
