The firing of BC Hydro's fairness commissioner, Michael Asner, raises serious questions about the way the public power utility conducts itself.

The job of an auditor, an ombudsman, a complaints officer or a fairness commissioner is to ensure that an organization is in compliance with its code of ethics, that its stakeholders are dealt with fairly, and that its processes and procedures are open and transparent. Often, what they have to say is not what management wants to hear. That is why they are important, especially in a public agency.

Asner, an expert in the request-for- proposal process, was hired to observe Hydro's handling of a contract to overhaul the Crown corporation's system of soliciting contract work, a project called Procure to Pay.

The methods Hydro uses to award contracts is in the public interest because it is owned by the province and regulated by the British Columbia Utilities Commission. It pays no income tax but remits a dividend to the government. Its tax-exempt status represents a subsidy financed by taxpayers.

Hydro will have to invest massive sums over the next decade to supply the growing demand for power. Indeed, the cost of building the Site C dam on the Peace River is now expected to reach as much as $6.6 billion. And Hydro will spend millions more to buy power from independent power producers. BC Transmission Corp., a sister Crown company, will have to invest $5.1 billion in the next 10 years to upgrade the electrical grid to accommodate increasing power consumption.

So, between now and 2018, Hydro will be doling out billions of dollars worth of work to contractors. Because Hydro is a Crown corporation, it is obliged to invite competing bids through the request for proposals process. Preparing a bid is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking for contractors and they must be assured they have a fair chance in an open competition of winning the contract.

Asner argued that Hydro failed to meet those conditions and breached its own rules when it allowed Deloitte Touche to bid on the final phase of Procure to Pay. Deloitte had already won contracts for the first two phases in a competitive procurement, and was then able to deal itself in as a bidder for the final phase under a request for proposal for which it had written the specifications.

Asner said Deloitte would be favoured in such a process and that a "Chinese wall" between Deloitte employees who worked on the first two phases and those preparing the bid for the third phase should have been considered to mitigate the conflict. In fact, he noted that the case of a vendor submitting a proposal when it contributed to a request for proposal was used as an example in Hydro's own code of conduct guidelines.

In its defence, Hydro maintained that Deloitte's work on earlier phases was fully disclosed in the request for proposal, adding that it disagreed with the view that Deloitte's involvement leads to the conclusion that it has been favoured in the process. It is noteworthy that Asner had to seek a ruling from Hydro's Freedom of Information officer to put his exchange with the utility in the public domain.

BC Hydro has every right to disagree with its fairness commissioner, just as government can ignore an auditor-general's report or public bodies can dismiss a report by a complaints board. But the public has a right to know the details of that disagreement.

Asner's fairness assessment was not an attack on BC Hydro. He raised valid concerns about the way things were done. Reporting on the fairness of the process was his job until he was fired Oct. 30. From the correspondence we've seen, it appears he was fired because he did it too well.