Controversial future appointments made before former Prime Minister Stephen Harper left power were orchestrated in the prime minister’s office with the help of Privy Council officials, says a former Conservative cabinet minister.

In an interview with iPolitics, former Transport Minister Lisa Raitt said she routinely “filled the pipeline” with candidates for posts that would be opening in coming weeks and months – in part because she wanted to increase the number of women appointed.

In the lead-up to the general election, however, officials in the prime minister’s office cherry picked a number of people in the pipeline and renewed their mandates early, well before they were due to expire.

“The pipeline was there,” Raitt explained, adding the PCO officials walked the nominations around to four ministers to sign the nominations. “All the names were there. Who chose those particular ones to be walked around was within the PMO.”

Raitt said there were other candidates she had identified and put in the pipeline in advance that weren’t appointed or renewed. She said she does not know who in PMO picked which future appointments would go ahead and which ones wouldn’t.

“I had 18 people that I wanted appointed before the writ dropped. They were ready to go. We didn’t get it done because the last cabinet meeting didn’t happen….We had the Via Rail chair ready to go. We had the Marine Atlantic Chair ready to go. I will tell you that the person I identified for Marine Atlantic was a woman and I thought it would have been great to have her as the chair.”

The chairs of both Via Rail and Marine Atlantic are now vacant.

In the end, five of the Harper government’s 49 “future appointments” were candidates in Raitt’s pipeline, including Deepak Chopra, whose mandate as president and CEO of Canada Post was renewed for five years even though it wasn’t due to expire until February.

“On Deepak Chopra, the board requested that we reappoint him and we did the walk-around on that.”

Raitt’s revelation of how the future appointments came about after iPolitics reported that Harper’s cabinet quietly stacked government agencies and crown corporations with dozens of “future appointments,” and early appointment renewals in the final weeks of its regime. While some had been due to come up for renewal in November and December, others were renewed up to a year in advance of when they had been scheduled to expire and made effective the date the appointees’ current term was due to end.

In the case of the National Energy Board, which regulates the construction of pipelines and the import of oil and natural gas, the move means Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government won’t be able to appoint anyone to the board for years.

The appointment that was renewed the furthest in advance was John Badowski, whose term with the Canadian Transportation Appeal Tribunal was renewed until 2020 – even though it wasn’t set to expire until December 2018. Friday, Badowski announced through his lawyer that he was renouncing the extension to his term and would retire after his current term expires in 2018.

The law firm representing Badowski said Monday his decision was not the result of any action by the Trudeau government.

The government is, however, taking action in 33 other cases.

A government source says letters from Liberal House Leader Dominic Leblanc’s office are going out to 33 of those given future appointments by the Harper government, asking them to voluntarily give up those appointments so that the government to allow for a new, more open, merit-based process in which they are “welcome to participate.”

In some of the 33 cases, like Veterans’ Ombudsman Guy Parent, the appointment renewals went into effect weeks ago. In others, like Museum of History Director Mark O’Neill, the appointment renewal was only set to go into effect next year.

A review by iPolitics of past appointments made in the lead-up to elections reveals that outgoing governments have sometimes made appointments that took effect in the days following an election. However, none of those reviewed came anywhere close to the scale of what Harper’s office did in the final days of his government with 49 future appointments averaging 81 days between the time of the election and the time the appointment was scheduled to go into effect.

In 2000, former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s government made 11 appointments that took effect after the election with an average of 36.6 days between the election and the appointment going into effect.

In 2004, former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government made nine appointments that kicked in an average 46 days after the election – six of them proposed by former Human Resources Minister Joe Volpe. Two years later, in 2006, Martin’s government made only eight appointments that took effect after the election he lost to Harper’s Conservatives and the average number of days after the election was only 19.

That number doubled to 17 when Harper headed into his first election as an incumbent in 2008 and the average length of time between the election and the effective date for the appointments was 24 days. It then climbed to 18 appointments and an average of 35 days going into the 2011 election that gave Harper a majority government.

In 2008, the initiative to reach ahead to make future appointments came from officials in Harper’s PMO, says Alison Stodin, who was an aide at the time to Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg.

“We were told, and it must have been the PMO that told me, that I had to go back and go through every appointment and anyone that was going to be up for a renewal within about a year, we had about a year that we could do it,” Stodin said in an interview with iPolitics. “We could get them through cabinet, get the OIC put through, even though their terms didn’t expire until so many months, and I think it was a year I had.”

Stodin called the future appointments “stocking the fridge.”

“We used to call it ‘we put it in the fridge’. They had gone through cabinet but they don’t take effect until their terms end. So they have already been approved so they automatically get renewed when their original term expired.”

The goal was simple, she said – try to ensure that the Conservatives held onto their institutional influence within the government as long as possible if they lost the election.

“If we won the election or we didn’t win the election, we would still have our own people in these positions. So it would make it harder for whoever the next government was.”

That’s the problem the Trudeau government now faces.

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