FREE TRIPS AFFECT TRUST
Trust must be earned. Word came this week that three employees of ehealth, which handles information technology and vital statistics for the Saskatchewan Health Authority, had taken trips paid for by companies receiving government contracts.
There is no question this will shake the public’s confidence in the government and in the managers who oversee these employees. That broken faith will only be restored by quick and meaningful action.
The employees in question travelled across North America, heading to Las Vegas and spectator events such as golf tournaments and the Indianapolis 500. They have since lost their jobs.
Saskatchewan Health Minister Jim Reiter says the public can be confident no such travel is currently taking place. “The obvious answer to that in my mind anyway is, the employees who took the trips were terminated,” he said. “The message, I think, has been delivered loud and clear to senior management. I’m told that they’ve delivered it loud and clear to all employees, and we need to trust our senior management all across this government to ensure that those policies are followed.”
As we said in the opening of this piece, however, we should not put faith in anyone until those individuals have proven themselves worthy. We are far from reaching this point.
In fact, Reiter does not have the information he needs — and he has not demanded the accountability from officials — to make this assurance. He says there were “troubling ” inconsistencies in the health regions that were recently amalgamated into one provincial health authority on such trips. Obviously, there is a lack of understanding of the improper nature of accepting free trips from companies awarded government contracts. Surely more needs to be done to make sure retraining takes place.
The NDP opposition’s suggestion that Reiter’s staff release the list of all vendor-sponsored travel across all government ministries and Crowns is entirely reasonable. It also seems obvious the government needs to release an investigation completed by an external law firm into the ehealth employee travel, which resulted in the firings. It appears the minister and the government are open to this.
“Unless there are some extenuating circumstances I don’t know about, obviously more transparency is better,” Reiter said Wednesday.
With that in mind, we hope to see these documents in the very near future.
Reiter and the rest of the government officials addressing this issue need to understand that the trust will only come when that transparency is fully in place.