Two former ministers who would have inside knowledge of the government’s COVID-19 response have been removed from the public accounts committee ahead of chief medical officer of health Jennifer Russell’s Thursday appearance.
Former minister of health Dorothy Shephard had been filling in on the committee during meetings this fall, but was left off after changes to committee membership were made on Tuesday.
Andrea Anderson-Mason was the minister of justice in the early days of the pandemic, until she was shuffled out of cabinet following the 2020 election. She had served as a member of the public accounts committee since then, but lost nearly all of her committee responsibilities in Tuesday’s shake-up.
Liberal leader Susan Holt said the timing was suspect, particularly the absence of Shephard on the committee.
“One of them would have intimate knowledge of how things worked with the (COVID cabinet) committee and with public health and decisions made around COVID, so it seems like he doesn’t want that perspective being brought to bear in questions to (the) chief medical health officer,” she said.
Most of Tuesday’s shakeup in committee membership was to replace the backbenchers who were elevated to cabinet following the round of resignations and firings that enveloped the party in June.
Ministers don’t typically serve on most of the legislature’s committees, which meant that former ministers Trevor Holder, Jeff Carr and Shephard were all tapped to fill in for the members who replaced them in cabinet during meetings of the public accounts committee in September.
All three found themselves right at home with the committee’s recent push to take partisanship out of proceedings and posed robust questions to government departments about government spending and program delivery.
The committee has increasingly shown its teeth, calling Ambulance New Brunswick back for a second visit this fall after it felt it didn’t get all the answers it wanted the first time round. Russell’s appearance is another sign of that push for accountability, having been summoned when committee members felt they didn’t get all the answers they needed when studying the auditor general’s review of the province’s COVID-19 response.
Green Leader David Coon said it’s clear that Premier Blaine Higgs isn’t a fan of the committee’s new direction.
“For the first time in a long time, government members of committee have been participating as full committee members … and it’s been tremendous, the committee has had a real feeling of working together and doing its job,” he said.
“The premier clearly doesn’t like the fact that he’s got members on the committee that are functioning as parliamentarians, doing their jobs as committee members, he wants them as marionettes.”
Higgs was not made available to media following Tuesday’s sitting of the legislature, but did express some discomfort with the tough questions being asked by government members at committee earlier this month.
“We saw in the opening of committee this fall, you know, it started out just kind of the way it ended last June,” Higgs said, referring to some of the tough questions being asked by his MLAs.
When caught by reporters on her way out of the legislature, Anderson-Mason refused to speculate on why she had been stripped of almost all her committee responsibilities.
“We serve at the pleasure of the premier,” she said.
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