VICTORIA — As the Opposition berated the government this week over its “catch-and-release” handling of repeat offenders, the New Democrats were dissatisfied with how Attorney General Murray Rankin fielded the questions.
Rankin, who assumed the post after David Eby stepped down to run for the NDP leadership, was insufficiently combative for NDP tastes when responding to the B.C. Liberals.
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He’d even had the temerity to concede a point or two to the Liberals in the initial go around on Tuesday. He started on the same unsatisfactory footing, as New Democrats saw it, in Wednesday’s question period.
“I wholeheartedly agree with the Leader of the Opposition,” began Rankin in response to Liberal leader Kevin Falcon. “People deserve to feel safe.”
When the Liberals fired a second question at Rankin, Solicitor General Mike Farnworth, who is also the government house leader, took over.
“The nice thing is that the government house leader can get up and answer any question they choose to,” Farnworth reminded the house.
But answering the question was the furthest thing from Farnworth’s mind. Rather, he’d determined it was time for partisan push back.
“Let’s start with their record,” he said, and proceeded to detail B.C. Liberal sins on the law enforcement side, from turning a blind eye to money laundering to scrapping a pilot program to manage prolific offenders.
The New Democrats have made much of the latter lapse, as if the winding up of a $120,000-a-year pilot project a decade ago could begin to account for the current wave of property crime and random violence in B.C. communities.
Farnworth — nicknamed “the janitor” for the number of messes he’s had to clean up for the government — also reminded the Liberals of the recent words of their newest MLA, Elenore Sturko.
“We cannot arrest our way out of these problems,” was the way Sturko, a former RCMP officer, put it at an all-candidates meeting in her successful campaign for the Surrey South seat.
But Sturko pushed back Wednesday with greater confidence than is usually on display from a newcomer to the take-no-prisoners forum of question period.
“There’s a difference between what I say and mean, and the NDP,” she declared. “Nobody is more frustrated than police in this province because they’re catching criminals and the NDP are releasing them.”
Once on her feet, Sturko drew on her experience as a communications officer for the RCMP, to push back at Rankin, too.
The attorney general says he will meet with his federal counterpart, Justice Minister David Lametti, to complain about how Ottawa’s recent bail reforms make it harder to lock up repeat offenders here in B.C.
Sturko, drawing on some apt research by Liberal staffers, pointed out that Rankin supported those reforms when he was an NDP member of Parliament in Ottawa.
She quoted MP Rankin praising the federal government’s don’t-lock-em up approach to repeat offenders as “exemplary” and “a good thing.”
Rankin’s reversal on treatment of repeat offenders won’t surprise anyone familiar with his hypocrisy on the NDP government’s fee for access to information.
As a federal MP, Rankin, a longtime advocate of freedom of information, denounced the Harper government’s $5 application fee as “a tollgate on the public’s right to know.”
But as a B.C. cabinet minister last year, the ever-flexible Rankin went along with the Horgan government’s imposition of a $10 fee.
Though Rankin collected accolades over the years as one of the fathers of freedom of information legislation in B.C., he never had the courage to stand up in the legislature and explain his reversal on the issue of the fee.
Tracked him to his office by reporter Shannon Waters from B.C. Today, he offered a grudging and mostly self-serving rationalization.
“When I spoke at the federal level about that concern, I did not know the abuses that have happened in B.C.,” he told the reporter, without citing a single instance of the alleged abuse.
Rankin’s willingness to sacrifice his credibility on freedom of information did earn him a show of support from his NDP colleagues for his feeble handling of the catch-and-release accusation.
One legislature wag, with a long memory for cultural references, joked this week that Rankin’s performance reminded him of Hamilton Burger, the lawyer who always lost cases to TV’s Perry Mason.
Also coming to Rankin’s assistance this week was Premier John Horgan.
“I do take issue with the catch-and-release thing,” he told reporters. “That’s a bumper sticker. The B.C. Liberals are in the business of slogans.”
Horgan took issue with the media coverage of the catch-and-release issue as well.
“You all know that’s nonsense,” he told the assembled members of the press gallery.
“Yet that’s become part and parcel of the way we discuss this very important issue rather than burrowing down to the mental health issues, burrowing down to the challenges of past practice.
“Instead of just accepting a slogan we should dig a little deeper.
“I don’t want to piss any of you guys off because you still buy ink by the tonne,” he continued. “So, I’ll just leave it at that.”
It was an ungrateful complaint, coming from a populist politician who surfed his way into majority government on a wave of favourable media coverage, much of it earned.
But one couldn’t have asked for stronger evidence that the Liberals hit the New Democrats where it hurts with their catch-and-release simplification of the problem of repeat offenders.
vpalmer@postmedia.com
