‘It’s my fault’: N.L. commissioner for legislative standards neglected to file annual reports since 2022 appointment

In the lead-up to October’s provincial election, and after nearly three years in office, the province’s Commissioner for Legislative Standards still had not filed an annual report, in violation of legislative requirements.

As of early November, Ann Chafe still had not filed annual reports for 2023 or 2024, despite having been appointed as the province’s acting commissioner in December 2022. That failure left a void on the commissioner’s website where annual reports dating back to 1993 are publicly available.

“They’re not online, mostly ‘cause they’re not done, and that’s all on me,” Chafe said Oct. 9 after The Independent requested the reports.

Chafe is the person responsible for ensuring elected officials file their public disclosure statements in accordance with provincial legislation. Provincial laws require elected members to disclose ownership of assets like property, investments, business ownership, employment income, shares in companies, as well as liabilities.

The commissioner then reviews the statements, follows up with MHAs if she has questions or concerns about the contents of their disclosures, then submits annual reports to the speaker of the House of Assembly. The reports are then posted online as a measure of government transparency and public accountability.

“ It’s my fault,” Chafe said. “That’s, you know, just because there wasn’t a whole lot to report and it was, you know—it’s a skimpy report. There was nothing earth shattering in there. It was more process stuff.”

Chafe said in early October the reports were “in format, shall we say,” but that in order to post them online, “the people who need to do that […] are face and eyes into the election. Like, they work with Elections NL.”

Minutes later, she said she could have the reports published “tonight,” but that they “won’t look pretty, and the [House] speaker’s not in place right now. But like I’m telling you, there’s nothing there. The most I’m gonna say is everybody is compliant.”

In addition to summarizing their previous year’s work on member compliance with disclosures, annual reports from Chafe’s predecessors have included summaries of MHA’s requests for investigations into other members, public office-holder appeals, summaries of the number of MHAs who have been asked to, or who have on their own accord, place investments into blind trusts, and a list of conferences and meetings the commissioner attended.

Chafe said she had “several reviews of other matters,” and that she has “taken endless complaints—you know, x-number of complaints. And you know, I’m here to say to you, if you want to know something, I’m happy to tell you in the absence of those things being online.”

When The Independent suggested that publication of the reports, regardless of their contents, was an important piece of government transparency and public accountability, Chafe agreed, adding, “if you want to wait until after the election, I can get these people to post it, you know, online, but I really don’t have the heart.”

The 2023 annual report appears to have been published on the Commissioner for Legislative Standards’ website in recent days, but at the time of publication the 2024 report is still not available.

House Speaker could not ask for reports

Bobbi Russell, the House of Assembly’s Principal Clerk of Committees, says the Commissioner for Legislative Standards “is required to submit annual reports to the House in accordance with the House of Assembly Act,” and that “statutory officers are responsible for ensuring and answering to the fulfillment of their statutory requirements.”

The House of Assembly Act states that the commissioner “shall report annually upon the affairs of his or her office to the Speaker of the Assembly who shall present the report to the House of Assembly within 15 sitting days of receiving it and, if the assembly is not in session, within 15 sitting days of the beginning of the next session.”

The commissioner for legislative standards is a designated statutory officer, and the legislation does not include any provisions through which the Speaker of the House of Assembly can ask the commissioner for her report.

In October The Independent contacted the Liberal Party and Lewisporte-Twillingate MHA Derek Bennett, who served as House speaker during Chafe’s entire time as commissioner up to the 2025 election campaign, to ask why Bennett did not request the annual reports from Chafe after she failed to submit them to the legislature. Neither responded.

Russell says the commissioner is accountable to the House of Assembly, not the House speaker specifically.

“They are independent of the Speaker and the Executive branch, including Cabinet and ministers, as the mandates of these offices perform an oversight role of government,” she explains. “Given their independence, it is not appropriate for the Speaker to answer questions with respect to how any of the statutory offices, including the Commissioner for Legislative Standards, execute their mandates.”

‘Professional negligence’ and ‘institutional corruption’

Memorial University Political Scientist Sean Gray isn’t surprised by the fact Chafe has not been held to account for what he calls “professional negligence”.

“Usually it’s just normally assumed that, as part of your public role of office, you would just be in accordance and act in accordance with certain legislative parameters of your position,” he says. “It’s a duty of office, so I’m not surprised that there wouldn’t be a follow up for the commissioner to ensure that they’re doing their job other than, you know, political oversight.

“I think this is an interesting instance of professional negligence, but I don’t think it’s uncommon for, for example, an office to have specific duties spelled out in legislation, and for there not to be a series of accountability mechanisms. You usually assume—especially if you are, say, an auditor or a commissioner—that the duties of office themselves specify your role and that you’re going to do your job, basically.”

Gray says there may be a larger issue at play.

“The public should be worried about what we would loosely call ‘institutional corruption,’ instances where elected politicians are playing fast and loose with personal connections and public resources,” he explains. “It’s been a huge problem in this province, and we put in place some loose mechanisms, including this commissioner, to at least try to ameliorate some of that and restore public confidence and trust in government.

“So when something like this happens, it does have serious knock-on effects unless it’s spotlighted and the folks involved are brought to account, even if it’s just in the media through stories like [this].”

Gray says what stands out to him about Chafe’s failure to submit annual reports isn’t the absence of the reports so much as the reasoning Chafe shared with The Independent.

“If you think about most street-level bureaucrats—folks like police officers, like a commissioner—it’s not really uncommon for those officials to have demanding standards of job performance, but they’re all the obligations they’re supposed to fulfill and have insufficient resources to meet them,” he says.

“What troubles me though is that that’s used as an excuse—and a perennial one, especially in this government—for failing to comply with legislative mandates. It’s one thing to say that for various reasons you weren’t able to fulfill those [obligations], but it’s another thing to say that, despite not being able to fulfill them, I don’t consider it a priority or a worry that this office hasn’t been able to be in compliance.

“So when it falls into that kind of category, then you do face an ethical conundrum; it’s about using bureaucratic mechanisms, or bureaucratic inefficiencies, to justify continued negligence, knowing that you’re actually in violation of the duties of office essentially.

“If it’s part of the mandate that this commissioner file those reports, and if they know that they have to do this, they know that they’re in dereliction, and they still nevertheless don’t make that a priority, well then I would consider that to be a personal failing and certainly a failing of the institution itself.”