Opinion: Ousted directors say they were already making fixes recommended by an auditor's report when the axe fell as Eby prepared to seek the NDP leadership
VICTORIA — On Friday, July 8, B.C. Housing director Perry Staniscia received a call from the office of then housing minister David Eby.
A surprised Staniscia learned “that my appointment to the B.C. Housing board was terminated effective immediately.”
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He was twice an NDP appointee to the board of the lead agency in charge of the government’s $7 billion plan to develop 114,000 units of social housing over 10 years.
Housing Minister Selina Robinson named him to the board in February 2018 as she launched the ambitious housing plan.
Eby, who took over from Robinson in 2020, reappointed Staniscia in January, a mere six months before he turned around and fired him.
To say that the ousted board member was taken aback would be putting it mildly.
He’s a property developer and a consultant to local government on housing projects.
Also, a former senior manager at CMHC, the federal government housing agency, where he had four years’ experience overseeing non-profit housing agencies, their financial statements and use of tax dollars.
On the B.C. Housing board, he chaired the committee in charge of capital review. The other directors included a lawyer, an accountant, a professor, a planner, a retired CEO, a retired deputy minister, and a housing developer.
“I can assure the citizens of British Columbia with 100 per cent confidence that each and every project that came forward, was thoroughly and comprehensively reviewed with the fullest integrity and without bias,” Staniscia declared in an email to me this week.
“As a member of other board committees and the board itself, I can say with 100 per cent confidence, that the same level of integrity was applied.
“We actually delivered more housing units than expected of us by the province. An example of good governance!”
The former director sent the email to me — “please feel free to publish)” — after I wrote about Eby’s disclosure to the legislature that before he stepped down to run for the NDP leadership, he’d ordered a forensic audit into B.C. Housing’s relationship with an unnamed non-profit society.
Staniscia finds especially galling Eby’s statement that he had to “push out” the old board and appoint a new one to deal with the critical findings of a review by Ernst & Young
Far from ignoring the Ernst & Young review, the board accepted had the report and directed then CEO Shayne Ramsey to develop a plan to address its 44 recommendations.
“Go through the report, start prioritizing which recommendations you’re going to be implementing, and then report back to the board on each of those recommendations and when they will be implemented. That’s what we directed the CEO to do,” he told Katie DeRosa of The Vancouver Sun this week.
“So, for him to go public, David Eby, to say that he dismissed us because of that report, and maybe us not dealing with it, is totally false.”
Staniscia doesn’t dispute that the Ernst & Young review turned up serious concerns — handwritten notes, lack of records, expedited approvals and the like.
But it was a time of scrambling. B.C. Housing was in the midst of an ambitious government-directed expansion plan. Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly the provincial and local governments wanted safe shelter for hundreds of people living on the streets and in tent encampments.
“We were all under tremendous pressure,” said Staniscia. ”Shayne and the staff, they all stepped up, and they did the best job they absolutely could, given the circumstances.”
He’s concerned that the replacement board — mostly government managers and a former deputy auditor general — will hold up project approvals while they get up to speed on overseeing the organization.
“The pendulum is going to swing slightly the other way to become risk averse, and everything will stop at a halt. That’s my concern,” he told DeRosa.
“I have no way of knowing whether that’s happened or not because I’m not on the board anymore.”
Plus, there’s the forensic audit which is expected to continue to early next year, according to Eby’s disclosure to the legislature last week.
Staniscia is not the only former member of the board to be speaking out this week about Eby’s rough treatment of B.C. Housing.
Cassie Doyle, who was ousted as board chair at Eby’s behest, accused the now-premier of treating the organization like a “political football.”
Both interviews raised the question of why Eby took such extreme measures while he was still the housing minister.
“Why would he put his own housing organization — that he’s responsible for — publicly in shambles?” asked Staniscia.
One possible answer is suggested by the timing of Eby’s cleanout of the board. He did it on July 8, 10 days after Premier John Horgan announced he was stepping down and 10 days before Eby himself stepped down as housing minister and attorney general to seek the NDP leadership.
Perhaps Eby’s cleanout of the B.C. Housing board was less a carefully considered makeover than a rush to rid himself of a potential embarrassment before he launched his bid for the premier’s office.
vpalmer@postmedia.com
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