Did he really say that?

We believe that a strengthened public service will ensure that individuals are being hired on their merits as opposed to who they know in government.

According to the Telly editorial on Monday, those were the words Premier Danny Williams spoke in 2004. He said them, on province-wide television in the infamous January 5, 2004 speech about government's financial plans.

It is a laudable sentiment and the provincial government's 2005 action in creating a public service secretariat within the government itself is a commendable step to making merit-based hiring a reality throughout government.

That's why a competition for commissioners and a chief executive officer for the public utilities board was a great leap forward in handling appointments traditionally made by cabinet from a rather closed process that didn't always appear to be based on merit as most of us would understand the term.

The 2007 public competition showed signs of a real change, despite the efforts made to work around the process for selecting the chair and chief executive at the offshore regulatory board.

In light of all that, it remains very odd that the provincial government made no effort to point out that the selection of Andy Wells as head of the public utilities board came out of a merit-based hiring process, the one the provincial government itself started.

Not only that, but as Bond Papers pointed out on Friday, there isn't any public indication of what happened to the competition. Resumes were assessed but after that, there's been no sign of the whole affair. There are still two commissioner positions vacant at the board.

There's no question that Danny Williams made it a policy of government to move to merit-based hiring throughout government.

He did it on province-wide television in 2004.

So what happened to the PUB competition?

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PUB job competition: what happened to it?

Last summer, the Public Service Commission (PSC) held a competition for the position of chief executive officer of the public utilities board.

They also held a competition apparently for the vacant commissioner positions at the same time.

Bond Papers e-mailed the PSC on Friday and asked for confirmation the competitions had been held, and whether they had been completed or cancelled.

The reply confirmed that a competition was held for "CEO, Public Utilities Board" and that "the resumes of the candidates who applied for the opportunity were assessed" by one of the PSC commissioners and a representative of the Clerk of the Executive Council.

That's it.

A second e-mail asked - for the third time, all told - if the competition was actually completed.

You see, saying that someone assessed the resumes doesn't say anything at all. That would be one step in a full selection process that included interviews, some kind of written test and then a final set of recommendations. Then again, if the resumes were deemed lacking qualification after they were assessed, the whole process might have come to a screeching halt.

The second e-mail has gone unanswered. The one from last Friday likewise has gone unanswered.

This aspect of the current public utilities board controversy is really quite interesting.

Recall that in the offshore board matter, the provincial government twice agreed to a process to select a person for the chair/chief executive job based on merit criteria. Andy Wells wasn't even in the first competition. That was halted when the Premier injected Wells into the whole thing.

In the second go-round, based on a statutory process, Wells didn't get the job then either.

Now this whole Public Service Commission angle pops up and the whole thing takes on another aspect.

First, the vagueness - let alone incompleteness - of the PSC reply is suggestive there is more to the story.

Second, there have been no appointments made since the competition to fill two vacant commissioner jobs at the board.

Third, the news release announcing Andy Wells would collect a second big salary for a second big job contained not a single reference to Wells having been selected by a competitive hiring process based on merit. you see, while senior appointments don't normally refer to the selection process, in this case the successful conclusion of a process would be a really good thing. These sorts of appointments haven't been handled that way and establishing competition based on merit goes a long way to giving cabinet appointments more credibility than they have.

Of course, the news release omitted a description of the public utilities boards full set of statutory responsibilities - like municipal water and sewer rates - so maybe there's nothing to it. That's like saying there was a competition for CEO of the PUB when the position was merged with that of board chair in 2006.

Then again, given that the whole appointment looks suspiciously familiar, maybe there was a failed or interrupted public service competition in this case as well.