23 Apr Bureaucrats humiliate a weak minister

When you bring $145 million a year into the treasury of a province as deeply in hock as Nova Scotia, you swing a big bat.

So when a consultant hired by the banished Tory government delivered a cost-benefit analysis of gambling in Nova Scotia to the newly elected NDP government, it stands to reason that the big bat wielders at the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation*, the agency that administers the provincial government’s addiction to gambling revenue, had first dibs on reviewing it.

Marilyn More

Whatever the report said about the human toll exacted by provincially sponsored gambling, we can surmise that Gaming Corp. honchos didn’t take kindly to its conclusions. If the Labor Department harbors any panty waists who fret over such trifles as suicides, bankruptcies, child neglect, and marriage breakups caused by the corporation’s activities, they were no match for the gaming execs.

On Tuesday, Labor Minister Marilyn More announced that the report had been scrapped, the consultants who wrote it fired, and the citizenry spared exposure to its malign conclusions.

“It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to create anxiety and apprehension around information that just isn’t accurate,” More told reporters, setting a new standard for patronizing voters.

Not to worry, said More, the corporation will get right on a cost-benefit analysis of its own, presumably one showing less cost and more benefit.

“You can be sure that the next study will have clear accountability and criteria, and that the information will be publicly released, and it will answer a lot of your questions.,” she said Tuesday

That ringing declaration apparently set Blackberries jangling, because the very next day saw More execute a humiliating about-face. There will be no such study because (in a revelation sure to surprise economists and social scientists) no one knows how to do a cost-benefit analysis of provincially promoted gambling addiction.

At least now we know who runs The Department of Labor, and it ain’t Minister More.

This is a classic illustration of how canny bureaucrats can manipulate an inexperienced minister in a newly elected government. Too bad so many gambling addicted Nova Scotians will have to pay the price for More’s weakness.

So much for social democracy.

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*Nova Scotia Gaming Corp. is the agency’s official name, but I use it reluctantly, because “gaming” is a euphemism designed to disguise the outfit as some benign Department of Parcheesi and Hopscotch.