According to a provincial government news release, the Premier announced something new today: the “Research & Development Corporation (RDC), a new Crown entity for improving the province’s research and development capacity.”
Problem One: it isn’t new.
At some point in the distant past, the legislature passed the Research Council Act which created an agency to fund research and development. The thing is old enough to be included in not only the 1990 consolidation of provincial statutes but in the 1970 one as well.
The purposes of the council, as established long ago, are to research into just about anything anyone can think of with respect to the local economy and society and to take whatever steps are necessary to support both the research and potentially the fruits of research.
Last December, the legislature passed a new bill to create a research and development council. The new legislation isn’t in force by the way, so the announcement today was completely bogus on that front as well.
But aside from those extra two words in the title, the new bill doesn’t do much that the old one didn’t.
Problem Two: the research and development council act, passed in December, copies almost word for word the sections of the energy corporation bill and thereby that makes pretty well everything connected to the council exempt from the province’s open records laws based solely on the decision of the cabinet-appointed Rhodes scholar who runs the thing.
That isn’t sarcasm, incidentally. The guy is yet another Rhodent appointed by the province’s chief Rhodes beneficiary.
Public money – to the tune of $25 million is going in – but what happens to will remain a state secret. Not only are the fruits of research to be hidden from the people who paid for it but the new corporation can hide just about everything related to its own operations.
The information and privacy commissioner and anyone else who would normally examine a secrecy decision by a government body are directed by this bill to uphold the corporation’s decision on keeping secrets.
The old corporation had a mandate to publish research results, incidentally, which is pretty much consistent with the idea of making ideas available so the private sector can develop them and make something out of them. Academics publish the results of their research so their peers can either profit from it for their work or tear into it and find the flaws.
Not so in the brave new world of the research and development council.
Everything will be secret except for whatever trivial bits of information the people controlling this enterprise – cabinet appointees all – deign to tell the nasty little proles who are footing the bill.
The cabinet gets to appoint the chief executive officer and the staff hiring must all be approved by the minister.
But even though this new version of the research council legislation was just created last December – and the bill isn’t in force yet - the government is already making amendments. The government bill exempts the new entity entirely from the Corporations Act and gives cabinet the power to pick a name for the council (it went from being the Research and Development Council to a name to be chosen later).
The tenure of board members has changed as well for some inexplicable reason. Here’s the December version of section 7(1):
7. (1) Members of the board shall be appointed for a term of 3 years but may be removed by the Lieutenant-Governor in Council for cause.
Here’s the May version:
7. (1) Members of the board, whether appointed before or after this Act comes into force, shall be appointed for a term of up to 3 years but may be removed by the Lieutenant-Governor in Council for cause.
Anyone want to venture what difference the change makes?
To help you out, here’s the provision of the bill under which the current members of the council were appointed (remember that the new bill isn’t in force yet):
4. (1) Members hold office for a period of 3 years from the date of their appointment.
What we have here is yet another example of policy recycling by an administration that has been surprisingly bereft of any original ideas since 2003.
On top of that we have a government which can’t seem to sort out its own legislation. We had three versions of the energy corporation bill in each of three years and here again we have a piece of legislation that hasn’t even been proclaimed and yet is being altered already. Both of those things suggest serious problems in the policy-making processes of government.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, we have yet another example of a government that talks a great deal about openness, transparency and accountability but seems to do exactly the opposite.
Where is the novelty, where is the innovation in any of that?
What a way to start out what is supposedly a bold, new venture to come with some original ideas.
-srbp-