NDP members of the legislature's public-accounts committee plan to ask questions about the partial leaking of acting Auditor General Arn van Iersel's report on the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, released on September 14.

The September 14 Vancouver Province quoted Economic Development Minister Colin Hansen as saying: “Let's put it this way: I found the auditor general's comments around the $600 million encouraging.”

Committee chairman Rob Fleming, the NDP MLA for Victoria-Hillside, says he will likely raise the issue at the next meeting of the committee, due in October. “I do have some concerns that the minister was out trying to do damage control and spin before members of the legislature received the report,” Fleming told the Georgia Straight. “The executive cabinet has no privileged access to this information.”

Hansen's mention of “$600 million” refers to what he claims is the cost of the games, even though van Iersel's report puts the total at $2.5 billion. Some of the report's details, which were officially presented to Speaker Bill Barisoff on September 14, were also reported in a front-page story in the September 14 Vancouver Sun.

When auditors general compile reports, they routinely provide draft copies on a confidential basis ahead of time to government officials in order to give them a chance to respond. The latest report, The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games: A Review of Estimates Related to the Province's Commitments, includes nine pages' worth of Hansen's response.

Neither Barisoff nor van Iersel could be reached before deadline.

Fleming said that he agrees with the policy of allowing government officials time to study draft versions of reports by auditors general, but the reports' contents must remain confidential until formally released. “If ministers are going to start leaking contents of reports in advance of their release, it puts a strain on that good working relationship between the ministries and the office of the auditor general,” Fleming said.

Hansen did not return a call by the Straight's deadline.

The leaks of van Iersel's report”” assuming they all came from the government””support a broader concern among New Democrats. After last spring's legislature session ended, the Liberals relied on their majority on Fleming's committee to force the appointment of van Iersel, then a B.C. Liberal bureaucrat.

“They are once again trampling on the protocols and the importance of the independence of that office,” Fleming said this week.

Harry Bains, the NDP's Olympics critic, believes van Iersel's report is too kind to the government.

“He gave them a bit of a soft landing by saying that management is great and they couldn't have predicted all that stuff,” Bains told the Straight.

Besides van Iersel's report, two other reports on the 2010 Olympics were issued September 14.

One, Due Diligence Review of the 2010 Winter Games Venue Program, was an edited version of a May 19 report commissioned by federal Olympics Minister David Emerson and completed by Vancouver consultants Pacific Liaicon and Associates Inc.

Noting that by last April the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) had already used up all but $13 million of its contingency budget, the report to Emerson says: “Our past experience in managing large projects has been that the contingency starts coming into play in the construction and 'check-out' stages of the project, not in the beginning of the conceptual engineering stage.”

The other report issued on September 14 was Report on Capital Planning and Budget for 2010 Olympics Venues, from Partnerships BC, a Crown corporation established by the B.C. Liberal government to promote and develop public-private partnerships.

Among “construction uncertainties”, the report, dated August 2006, warns of a “lack of required labour” to construct each venue on time. In addition, it cites “global risks” of “inflation, labour shortage and equipment and materials shortage”, that could apply to all venues.

But Bains said that VANOC has only itself to blame for the risk of escalating labour costs noted in the Partnerships BC report. All three reports tell the same story, he added.

“It shows clearly mismanagement and incompetence on their part,” Bains said. “In my view, the responsibility falls at the feet of the premier, because he has loaded VANOC with his own friends.”