Jenny Kwan travel expenses scam develops

Vaughn Palmer: Jenny Kwan quickly takes responsibility for family travel expenses

 

Whether the move will placate the NDP MLA’s critics remains to be seen

 

BY VAUGHN PALMER, VANCOUVER SUN COLUMNIST

MARCH 22, 2014

 

 

 

NDP MLA Jenny Kwan announces Friday, March 21, 2014, that she is taking a leave of absence from her duties as MLA, and reimbursing the Portland Hotel Society $34,922.57 after an audit found questionable use of PHA money to fund private trips. Kwan was married to PHA senior executive Dan Small when the money was spent.

Photograph by: Jason Payne , PNG

VICTORIA — New Democratic Party MLA Jenny Kwan, the Portland Hotel Society and the Downtown Eastside go back a long way together.

Kwan entered politics as a protege of Downtown Eastside Residents Association frontman Jim Green, himself a sometime politician and founder of the Portland Hotel Society.

Elected to Vancouver city council in 1993 when still in her 20s — she was the lone representative for the left-of-centre Coalition of Progressive Electors against a solid wall of NPA council members — Kwan moved on to the provincial political arena with the NDP three years later.

Her chosen riding, won handily, was Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, which then as now includes the entire Downtown Eastside. She has held it through 17 years and four more elections, including the B.C. Liberals’ near sweep in 2001.

Over the years there has been plenty of overlap between her political interests and those of the Portland Hotel Society (lately PHS Community Services), it being one of the lead agencies on the DTES, providing housing, drug treatment and health and social services.

Here one finds a major player in the PHS serving as Kwan’s riding president. There another turns up helping to run her election campaign. When she was in cabinet in the NDP government of the 1990s, a former PHS director served as her deputy minister.

Plus Dan Small, her husband and the father of her two children, was a senior manager with the society.

So when the government was preparing this week to release two explosive audits of the society, word spread that there might be something in the contents to embarrass Kwan.

Some of those rumours came from the Liberals, keen to see the holier-than-thou Kwan neutralized on issues of poverty and hardship. But tongues were also wagging inside the NDP, where Kwan is a polarizing figure because of her role in fronting for the revolt that led to the resignation of Carole James as party leader in late 2010.

“Under Carole James’ leadership, there has been a steady erosion of our democratic principles,” declared Kwan in a 900-word open letter on Dec. 1 of that year. “Debate has been stifled, decision-making centralized, and individual MLAs marginalized. Carole James is dividing the party by staying on as leader.”

Less than a week after that unsparing denunciation, James was gone. Some New Democrats, not forgetting those words, may have derived some satisfaction from the admission that Kwan had to make late Thursday, a few hours after the PHS audits were made public.

Turned out that in 2012 she and her children had joined her then PHS-director husband on two trips where the society ended up paying at least part of the freight. She said he assured her that he was covering the family portion of the expenses out of his own pocket.

But now that the audits had made clear that the tab was being picked up by the provincially funded non-profit society, she was urging her now ex-partner (the couple are in the midst of a divorce) to repay the PHS for the family portion of the travel.

“And if he doesn’t, then I will.”

Thursday’s brief statement raised as many questions as it answered and Kwan did not make herself available to provide answers. But shortly before noon Friday, she did meet with reporters, for a press conference that was as emotional as it was gripping.

Long pauses while Kwan had to compose herself again and again.

Her explanation that she took her husband’s word that he was covering the expenditures because, like other working couples, they maintained separate bank accounts. “I trusted him … in a relationship there is an element of trust.”

Her account of the frustrations, since the news broke Thursday, of trying to get the full details of the expenditures from her ex and/or the society.

Then the news of the day: “Even though I don’t have all the information about the expenses I’m going to take responsibility for them and pay for them.”

That morning she’d written a personal cheque to the society for almost $35,000, that being her estimate, taken from the audits, of the all-in cost to the PHS of one family trip to Europe and another to Disneyland.

Her family, her responsibility, no ducking. Then having publicly aired a heavy load of dirty laundry, she announced she’d be taking a leave of absence from her duties in the legislature: “My first priority is to be with my children.”

Had she considered resigning altogether? After a dramatic pause, she said “no,” she hadn’t.

Whether paying the money back, then going on leave, will placate the critics, in and out of the party, in the blood sport arena of B.C. politics, remains to be seen. She’ll surely be neutralized on policy matters for some time to come.

But in comparative terms, I found myself thinking about Alison Redford, resigning this week as premier of Alberta after a caucus revolt triggered in part by the revelation that she’d socked taxpayers for $45,000 to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa.

She did pay back the money out of her own pocket but only after refusing to do so through a month of public outrage. Perhaps if she’d done as Kwan did, and paid within 24 hours after the news broke, she could have postponed the reckoning and remained premier for a time.