When Premier David Eby swears in his new cabinet on Monday, the new ministers won’t be issued the usual mandate letters.
Instead, they’ll have to learn their portfolios and priorities over Christmas in a more general way, as the NDP and Greens try to hammer out a power-sharing deal.
The premier intends to save his mandate letters until January. On Monday, the ministers will instead get “appointment letters” that repeat, for everyone, the same priority issues of cost-of-living, housing affordability, health care and economic growth (these are, roughly, the same priorities in the last mandate letters, too).
In most cabinet shuffles, the ministers leapfrog out of their appointments with specific marching orders from the premier in the form of the letters.
For example, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon’s last mandate letter instructed him to establish the BC Builds program for middle-income housing, create a rental housing acquisition fund, legalize secondary suites province-wide, create a flipping tax, speed up development permitting and create transit density zones, amongst other things. And, to Kahlon’s credit, he got almost all of it done in the short time he had.
So, appointing a new cabinet without giving them mandate letters is unusual. But we live in unusual times.
The NDP’s razor-thin majority, won by 22 votes in Surrey-Guildford, means the premier is still hoping to cut a deal with the BC Greens to help provide some additional stability and cushion for his government.
Negotiations have been ongoing for more than two weeks. The premier apparently wants to hold off writing the mandate letters so that, in January, he can include Green priorities in the orders for ministers.
“We've been having some good conversations with the Greens, and I'm hopeful we'll be able to find a path forward,” Eby said Wednesday.
“The goal that we have is to ensure that the work that British Columbians sent us to do can be done in a stable parliament that's going to run for the four years that people sent us here to do. I don't think people are going to move for another election. I think they want us to get to work for that.”
A deal with the Greens would also free the NDP up to re-appoint Raj Chouhan to Speaker, without having to worry about Chouhan breaking tie votes in the house.
Still, there’s no deal with the Greens quite yet.
It’s a risk for Eby to forgo cabinet mandate letters in some priority ministries for two months at a time when he’s acknowledged the voting public sent him a clear message to get working, as fast as possible, on making visible progress in key areas.
Yet that risk is mitigated somewhat by the on-the-ground realities of whoever takes the portfolios. If the premier appoints you health minister, and you don’t leap to getting ER closures under control and more doctors and nurses recruited, without being specifically asked in a letter, then you probably don’t deserve to be health minister anyway. Same for the finance minister and cost-of-living assistance.
The Greens, meanwhile, have watched their bargaining position dwindle since Oct. 19, when preliminary results looked like an NDP minority government that would definitively need the two Green MLAs to pass any legislation.
Once the NDP flipped Surrey-Guildford on recount, and hit the 47-seat majority threshold, the Greens became a wanted, but optional, dance partner.
It’s hard to imagine the Greens agreeing to a four-year parliament, like Eby suggested Wednesday. Why would the Greens trust the NDP again, after it tore up the 2017 confidence and supply agreement a year early and plunged the province into a snap election?
Leader Sonia Furstenau isn’t talking — she’s turned down multiple interview requests the past couple of weeks — and shed no light on the issue in a recent statement.
“We are in ongoing discussions with the NDP, focused on delivering BC Green priorities and shared goals that address the needs of the people of B.C.,” the Greens said. “We are actively working towards an agreement – the terms of which are not yet finalized.”
In the end, the mandate letter change isn’t a huge deal. It would be far more concerning if the B.C. government tried fiddling with the letters by keeping them secret like in Ontario.
But the change is a sign that Eby is doing things differently this time around, after having his “wings clipped,” as he said, by a reduced majority in the election.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 16 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
