Okay, so it's not like it's the first time Danny Williams applied two different standards to similar situations when he wanted different outcomes in both.
There's no small example of this approach to governing that isn't based on any other principle than 'What I say goes."
take for example, the tedious drama in which Danny Williams tried to stuff Andy Wells onto the offshore regulatory board. The provincial government started out wanting one person to be chairman and chief executive officer. Then they tried to split the job in two with Wells taking the chairman's job.
Then when a panel appointed to pick a single person for both jobs chose someone other than Andy, Danny Williams went back to the two jobs approach.
The sorry tale is well described in Ruelokke v Newfoundland and Labrador.
The best quote of all, though came from none other than the Premier himself, while the case was in court. Speaking to reporters, the premier gave this lovely explanation of his position:
"My ultimate responsibility is to the people of the province to make sure that we have the best representation on that board to safeguard our interests.
"That's good governance, that's good practice ... we even actually went to Mr. Ruelokke and said look you know why don't you agree to split this ... and he didn't want any part of that," Williams said.
He's right. They did go to Ruelokke and make such a proposition and he quite rightly rejected it. After all, the provincial government had set up a selection panel to find one person for both jobs. That's what the panel found.
The Public Utilities Board is no less important a body. After all, under the Electrical Power Control Act it has some pretty wide reaching powers to regulate the province's electricity industry. The revised version of the Act, introduced in 1994, allows the board to recall power from Churchill Falls under certain circumstances and to provide adequate compensation to Churchill Falls Labrador Corporation and its customers in the process.
The utility regulator may well have an interesting time in the next few years if the Lower Churchill project goes ahead and, depending on how things go with that enterprise, electricity rates might well be affected and not in a good way.
Interesting then that Danny Williams appointed Andy Wells to run the utility regulator on Thursday serving as both chairman and chief executive officer. Forget Williams' comment in the early 1990s that Andy needed a good "shit-knocking"; in the years since the two have become best political buddies.
Hence the appointment of one man to two jobs, even though when it came to the offshore board good corporate governance suggested something else to the Premier. Of course, no one should doubt that had Wells gotten the nod at the offshore board, Williams would have happily accepted one guy in two jobs and then rationalised that decision the same way he undoubtedly will rationalise the discrepancy between his two views of good corporate governance in regulatory authorities.
Wells' appointment is interesting, in a Chinese curse sorta way.
Well, that and it raises a question as to why Wells got the nod at the utility board. The answer might rest in an older question: why was Williams so insistent on Wells at the offshore board.
No one has been able to answer that one definitively, since Williams never got his way. But if you think about it for a while and ponder these old posts - here and here - some ideas may come to mind. The Wells appointment might be less about good governance and more about controlling a regulatory body so it can be used for a specific purpose at some point in the future.
There's nothing like stacking the deck.
-srbp-