NDP Under Fire for Rich Contract for Downtown Eastside Adviser

B.C. Conservative MLAs say they have “massive concerns” that less than a year after Michael Bryant’s abrupt and unexplained departure as the CEO of Legal Aid BC, the government has awarded him a lucrative contract to provide strategic advice about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“This clearly is not adding up,” said Surrey-White Rock MLA Trevor Halford, citing the six-month contract that will pay Bryant $150,000 plus $25,000 for expenses.

“I think we need to understand why he may have left [Legal Aid BC] and we don’t have clear answers on that. I’m sure the province probably knows why he left.”

Legal Aid BC’s board announced last April that Bryant was leaving the provincially funded organization after a little more than two years as its CEO, but would not say whether he’d quit or been fired.

Halford said the opposition was surprised to learn recently through the media that the government appointed Bryant to the new position in February.

“At the end of the day this is a government that is showing that they’re rewarding friends and insiders,” Halford said. “The fact is this is a $150,000 contract for six months’ work and we don’t know if there’s going to be a report issued, we don’t know what the terms of reference are, we don’t even know the ministry that holds the contract.”

The lack of answers from the government during question period was embarrassing, he said.

“What we do know is this is a former politician from Ontario that obviously had some very severe and public challenges in Ontario when he left,” he said. “We also know that he held positions with [Legal Aid BC], and again there’s a lot of questions and not one single minister wanted to get up and discuss Michael Bryant in that room, and that to me is very, very alarming.”

Sheila Malcolmson, the minister of social development and poverty reduction, declined to specify who decided to hire Bryant.

“We asked him to do this work knowing that he brings a lot to the file that we don’t have around the cabinet table and that we don’t have on our cabinet committee on public safety, which is what he’s also providing advice to,” she said.

According to a government information bulletin released last week, Bryant’s job includes providing strategic advice to Malcolmson, Premier David Eby and the Cabinet Committee on Community Safety that Eby chairs.

Eby’s publicly available calendar says he met with Bryant on Feb. 21.

Bryant is uniquely qualified to provide advice on the Downtown Eastside, said Malcolmson. “His legal background, his work with the civil liberties association, his political work as a minister on multiple files, and I would say what a lot of us are thinking about are his own personal struggles with addiction, his own recovery journey, brings a very different perspective from what we have around the cabinet table.”

A former attorney general in Ontario, Bryant’s background includes law degrees from Harvard and Osgoode Hall, clerking at the Supreme Court of Canada, a decade in provincial politics in Ontario, and involvement in the tragic 2009 death of cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard, an incident for which charges were laid against him and later dropped.

Bryant later released a memoir, 28 Seconds: A True Story of Addiction, Tragedy, and Hope, that intertwined the stories of Sheppard’s death and his own struggle with alcoholism.

Before moving to the job with Legal Aid BC at the start of 2022, Bryant worked for four years as executive director and general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad said the government has claimed to have all the answers to address issues in the Downtown Eastside but now says it is hiring Bryant to review whether what it is doing makes sense.

“That just sounds like political patronage, appointing somebody, whether it’s a payback or it’s just helping out a friend, who knows exactly what it is,” said Rustad. “There’s no question in my mind what’s going on in the Downtown Eastside has been a complete failure by this government and it’s been a failure for decades.”

It doesn’t take another review to see that what’s needed is strengthening mental health care, dealing differently with addictions and providing more housing, he said.