Last time we checked in on governments – any of them, not just the BC NDP one – they were considerably less gifted at industrial investment and picking winners than were venture capitalists.
Still, that doesn’t stop governments – including one of them, specifically the BC NDP one – in the strategic quest to outsmart the people whose six- and seven-figure livelihoods arise from years of putting funds at some risk to reap regular returns.
Which is not to say it can’t happen, nor that it hasn’t happened before, nor that it isn’t even tried elsewhere with provincial funds, only that there are clear public interest considerations when any government decides to place corporate bets with tax dollars.
Such is the case as we greet the newly legislated InBC Crown corporation, vested with $500 million over three years to pursue the “social, economic and environmental policy objectives of the government.” Policy objectives aren’t always aligned with economic performance excellence.
In any other recent time, the notion of a half-billion-dollar government instrument to invest in industries aligned with an ideological program would be a focal and fairly foul point of public discussion. We would call into question its need, purpose and accountability. We would wonder how government wandered into territory typically for the market to determine. We might even be suspicious or cynical, no matter that the emphasis of InBC is on “patient capital” eventually yielding 5% returns instead of swift and significant wins.
But these are pandemic times. The window is wide open, and the breeze each day seems to more briskly blow through it for an expansion of the public sector. Deficits are devil-may-care. Other agendas are in play under the “building back stronger” umbrella, too, particularly in the broad field of economic opportunity.
Given the billions that appear to be suddenly growing on trees, it can feel that the allocation of $500 million over three years is a rounding error on the provincial books, pandemic edition.
Sorry, though, it’s not chump change. And if the public isn’t going to emerge as chumps in this exercise, InBC has a duty to “show the work,” as John Horgan has often described his elementary teacher’s influential request. Instead, cards are close to the chest.
The impact of InBC will take ages to evaluate. The funds will be slow in supply when they emerge later this year, glacial in effecting results, and the public understanding of its deliberations and decisions will be opaque and delayed.
It is sad to report that this latter quality has become an NDP modus operandi, where the mantra of “putting people first” often translates into “keeping secrets first.” This government is rapidly vying for the country’s most furtive – a hard race to win, but not for lack of effort, as the miserly disclosures of data during the pandemic have attested.
So it is that InBC, as a Crown corporation spending our dollars, will have a meagre method of answering for its operations. It will produce an annual report, surely bland because it will be framed by cabinet regulatory directive, and an every-five-year audit, surely untimely around 2026 or 2027 so as not to inconvenience this government.
Most significantly, its legislation passed earlier this month exempts it from the province’s limp Freedom of Information Act – not that it would be much of a leash, given how it’s routinely abused. Its business plan is considered a cabinet confidence. Its operational “scorecards” to grade investment proposals will be considered a commercial confidence.
Confidence conferred everywhere, it seems, but in the public’s right to know and capacity to judge.
If this is how one instils trust in an entity that has to build credibility, it is a novel take.
Michael McEvoy, the provincial information commissioner, has made clear his displeasure with InBC’s exclusion from the disclosure law and is trying to persuade the government to change course. He disabuses the argument that commercially sensitive material will be divulged. There are ways to stickhandle this, he and we and even the government knows.
As for the government’s other argument – that the BC Immigrant Investment Fund, the organization that morphed into InBC through the legislation, wasn’t covered by the information freedom law – well, we all know non-sequiturs when we hear them. This is a vastly different animal at a different altitude in the economic atmosphere.
Nor should the calls for transparency be inferred as personal or professional criticism of its new and experienced board, or any reflection on the premise of a chief investment officer who will have considerable independence under the legislation from political meddling. These are generally positive features to, in principle, keep InBC from treating the treasury like play money.
But it may grate the well-meaning who wish to reduce inequity and accelerate and capitalize on the climate change commitment that the InBC concept is not by default the ideal vehicle to achieve policy goals. There are many skeptics to be won over. InBC needs to produce the equivalent of a proof of concept, and visibly so and soon.
It cannot join the club of other Crown corporations reticent to trust the public with timely information. If InBC is designed to help modernize our economic priorities, it looks silly sticking with old-school secrecy as a foundational value. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
