VICTORIA – After Premier Gordon Campbell unveiled a bulky 22-member cabinet following the 2005 election, NDP leader Carole James cracked a joke about two of his obsessions, administrative tinkering and healthy eating: “I thought we might get a Minister of Fruits and Vegetables this time around.”

Last week’s pre-election shuffle went beyond replacing retiring ministers Carole Taylor, Claude Richmond, Olga Ilich and Rick Thorpe, swapping duties, tweaking titles and bringing the total to 24 members of the “executive council,” including the premier. That’s twice the number that Campbell said he would need when he was sitting in opposition.

It was quite a crowd around the cabinet table, glimpsed by us media types during a brief photo op in their high-security meeting room. That room has apparently reached its physical limit, as the legislative chamber will do when the number of MLAs grows from 79 to 85 next spring.

Fruits and vegetables remain largely the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, now headed by veteran Comox Valley MLA Stan Hagen. But the junior fitness job of ActNowBC has blossomed into the full-scale Ministry of Healthy Living and Sport, given to cabinet newcomer Mary Polak of Langley.

At first glance this looks like a make-work project to raise the estrogen level on a male-dominated B.C. Liberal front bench. But in addition to such nebulous responsibilities as “women and seniors,” Polak’s ministry takes over serious business from the huge health portfolio, including “public health planning” and the Provincial Health Officer, who has broad new powers to handle communicable disease outbreaks.

The biggest news is the new job for Rich Coleman, who as this column predicted was replaced in Forests and Range by Pat Bell. Coleman showed more enthusiasm for his housing duties than the troubled forest file, and it’s a measure of his clout with the premier that he took that with him in an expanded new Ministry of Housing and Social Development.

This latest version of the “welfare” ministry encompasses income assistance, transition houses, mental health and addiction services, disabled adults and “housing and homeless policy.” Coleman wasted no time, announcing a new addiction and mental health treatment centre for some of society’s hardest cases at the former Willingdon youth jail in Burnaby, the start of new sentencing options to control our growing street disorder.

Also shuffled to Coleman is responsibility for liquor control and “gaming policy,” prompting one government wit to nickname it “the Ministry of Bad Habits”. This separates the money machine of B.C. lotteries and casinos from the gambling enforcement role, which remains with Public Safety Minister John van Dongen.

Another significant change is the Ministry of Community Development, which expands the old municipal affairs job to include rural development, the ominous “community adjustment” and specifically recovery from the mountain pine beetle scourge. This daunting task falls to cabinet rookie Blair Lekstrom, the former Dawson Creek mayor best known for riding a Harley and voting against the government’s two recent aboriginal treaties.

Lekstrom makes no apology for his opposition to special rights based on racial identity, but his entry to cabinet means he will neither speak nor vote that way again. With the retirement of Bulkley Valley-Stikine MLA Dennis MacKay next spring, North Vancouver-Seymour’s Dan Jarvis would be the only B.C. Liberal off side on treaties.

East Kootenay MLA Bill Bennett, an embarrassing cabinet resignation behind him, returns with the plum Tourism portfolio.

For the rest of the B.C. Liberal government, it’s mainly stay-the-course, with unflappable cabinet veteran Colin Hansen taking his Olympic file with him back to Finance, where he heads into rough waters defending the new carbon tax.

Some hefty raises

These days, a backbencher elevated to cabinet gets a $49,000 pay premium on top of the base annual MLA salary of $98,000. That’s a lot of money, but for most cabinet jobs it’s a lot of responsibility too.

Speaker Bill Barisoff and Opposition Leader Carole James make the same $147,000 pay as cabinet ministers, although James and her NDP colleagues continue to donate last year’s hefty pay raises to charity while accepting the pension benefits that came along at the same time.

Campbell makes a salary of just over $186,000, which may sound like a lot but is less than deputy ministers and about the same as a lowly backbench MP in Ottawa.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers (tfletcher@blackpress.ca).