Monday, August 20, 2018

It's Now Obvious Why We Needed a Change of Government in 2017


If you voted for the NDP in the last election because you wanted to stop the Site C project or halt the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, then you must be very disappointed. But if you did so because of the cesspools of patronage and mismanagement  at ICBC and BC Hydro, and the strong smell of dirty money in gambling and real estate suspiciously coupled with the BC Liberals’ avowed determination  to hang on to outdated campaign finance laws, then your choice has been powerfully vindicated. It was definitely time to have a change of government.

In 2001, the newly elected Liberal government vowed to take politics out of the management of BC Hydro and ICBC, as part of Gordon Campbell’s extensive “New Era” basket of promises.  Accordingly, the BC Utilities Commission had its authority to set BC Hydro’s rates restored, along with the authority to set the rates for ICBC’s compulsory Basic insurance. Following the 2009-10 recession, however, the Liberal government decided  to get more involved in the financial affairs of both major public corporations. Their profits gave the government some badly-needed revenues, and their cash transfers reduced the government’s direct borrowing requirements. The fiscal shell game had begun.  Starting in 2010, the government began to appropriate ICBC’s Optional insurance surplus capital.  In 2011, the Liberals exempted BC Hydro  from rate-regulated accounting rules; then, the following year, the government took direct control of BC Hydro’s annual rate setting authority.

  Richard McCandless  is a retired public servant  whose analysis of  the 40-year financial history of ICBC was published in the academic journal BC Studies in 2013.  His paper exposing the BC government’s manipulation of the finances of BC Hydro from 2008 to 2014 was published in that same journal  in November 2016.  As he described  it, “[t]he government’s politicization of the finances of BC Hydro and ICBC has come at the expense of future customers in a classic ‘pretend and extend’ gambit.”

McCandless shows how in  2013, cabinet imposed limits on the annual change in basic insurance rates, and suppressed  BC Hydro’s rate increases and enhanced  its apparent profits through deferring cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.  Cabinet orders in March 2014 required the Utilities Commission to approve a highly dubious “rate smoothing” deferral account  for BC Hydro, allowing it to count future unbilled revenue.  According to McCandless, “[this device allowed the government to continue to suppress electricity rates while reporting higher yearly profits as government revenue (and to extract dividends which added to BC Hydro’s debt).” 

As a result of these Liberal manoeuvres, BC Hydro customers now face a much higher debt liability, which, when coupled with  recent massive capital expenditures such as the Site C project, threaten to cause the province’s credit rating to be downgraded.  Meanwhile, over at ICBC, the failure to curb the growth in Basic claims costs, and the government’s suppression of the growth in Basic rates, has reduced the corporation’s once healthy capital reserves, making  a future  car insurance rate hike likely unavoidable.  As McCandless wrote on the eve of the election in May 2017, “The [Liberal] government’s  manipulation of the finances of the two public corporations has been incremental, and therefore has generally occurred out of the glare of the media spotlight.”   Now, the Liberals are no doubt hoping that it is the NDP who will be blamed for any rate hikes, tax increases  or credit rating downgrades necessitated by their own poor  governance.

You are probably thinking that it is only a matter of time before the NDP starts playing the same sort of games, or the Liberals get back in and start doing the same things all over again. But maybe this cycle of corruption can be broken by having a more democratic electoral system. If governments are composed of broad coalitions representing a true majority of voters, then we can hope that the parties who are  coalition partners (i.e. friendly competitors for each other’s share of the votes) can keep each other honest, making the kind of financial legerdemain  that we have seen from the BC Liberals more difficult to get away with in the future.

                                          Mark Crawford  is a professor of Political Science at Athabasca University.

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