This Day In Snookland...In Which Ron Gets Even More Obvious Than Usual.

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ChichesterCathedralVille


On Saturday Gary Mason looked at the Dippers' opposition to Jessica McDonald's appointment to run BC Hydro and didn't like what he saw.

Because, well, you know, Ms. McDonald once ran things for the pre-Snooklandian regime leader, and thus is as qualified as anyone:

...(Ms. McDonald) held the top position in the B.C. bureaucracy under former premier Gordon Campbell when she was still in her 30s. Her rapid ascent surprised many. And any time you leap-frog over older, more experienced people there are bound to be some bad feelings generated along the way. Consequently, it’s not a huge surprise that inside the B.C. government there are also people who don’t believe she’s cut out for this job. And that’s okay. Jessica Ms. McDonald has proved people wrong before.

Except, in a classically obvious 'Now Let's Jump The English Channel' bit of flippity-floppity, Mr. Mason then tells us, in the very next graph, that we needn't worry, really, because Ms. McDonald didn't actually run things back in the day anyway.

Seriously:

...Ms. McDonald is associated with many of Mr. Campbell’s most contentious public policy experiments, including his ambitious Green agenda, which foisted Independent Power Producers upon Hydro. Resentment continues to linger inside the utility over that decision, but understand that was Mr. Campbell, not Ms. McDonald...

But here's the thing....

As he skated, flipped, flopped and slid over the surface of pretty much everything Mr. Mason, as per usual, refused to go any deeper and look at what, specifically, Ms. McDonald was involved with regarding the affairs of BC Hydro back when she was running with the devi.....errrrr...Gordon.

So, given that it would appear that Mr. Mason doesn't like to use the Google when he's on deadline we thought we would make you aware of an excerpt from a 2006 profile of Ms. McDonald by Paul Willcocks in BC Business Magazine:

...Aside from her brief stint as a relatively junior manager, McDonald had spent barely 18 months in the premier’s office before she got the top job. Managers learn by making mistakes on the way up, where they matter less, says one public service veteran. “You make a mistake at this level and you’re wearing it,” he notes. There have been stumbles. A couple of the elements of the post-election re-org had to be reversed, most notably the shuffling of responsibility for child mental health out of the children and families ministry – a move that left others in the public service grumbling about the lack of consultation in the top-down effort. And the government’s embarrassing last-minute rejection in December of BC Hydro’s long-term energy plan sparked suggestions the premier’s office had fumbled. Hydro executives trusted that the rest of the government was being canvassed. It wasn’t, and when the caucus saw the plan – which includes the controversial multi-billion-dollar Site C dam on the Peace River – everything went off the rails...


'Nuff said?


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In fairness to Mr. Mason regarding his Google usage, or lack thereof, it was Mr. Willcocks himself who drew our attention to his BCBiz piece in the comment thread attached to a previous post...And in fairness to Ms. McDonald she clearly has shown some consultative and management skillz in the past, particularly when backed by Mr. Campbell's iron fist wrapped in the think tag rags, as Mr. Willcocks also makes clear...The point, however, is that given Mr. Horgan's stated position on Site C and the precarious situation Hydro finds itself in with over-leveraging and all those 'future obligations' instituted back in said 'create a market out of nothing' day...Well, if Mr. Mason dug into that kind of stuff maybe he wouldn't be so quick to diss the Dippers' position as 'same old same old' especially when he himself, in an ultimate act of columnistic lameoisity, ends his piece with the following: "... she has to know there are people out there just waiting, and possibly hoping, she screws up."
Oh, and we thank an Anon-O-Mouse on the same thread (SH perhaps?) for pointing out the passage from Mr. Willcocks quoted above.


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