Former health minister looks back at firing scandal
Margaret MacDiarmid, the former Liberal health minister whose political legacy is linked to the health scandal that engulfed B.C.’s Liberal government, has finally opened up about one of the darker periods of her life.
MacDiarmid said it took years for her to discover that information she got in her first 2012 briefing by her deputy minister, Graham Whitmarsh, contained largely incorrect information about health data privacy breaches, based on whistleblower allegations that were not — and would never be — substantiated.
Whitmarsh used his authority to suspend and fire eight researchers, just as MacDiarmid was taking the political helm of the ministry.
MacDiarmid, 60, said she still doesn’t know, to this day, if there was anything intentional about the misinformation she was given.
“I have no reason to think it was deliberate. But I don’t know.”
In her first comprehensive interview about the scandal, MacDiarmid said in the initial briefing with Whitmarsh after she was named health minister, he told her the ministry had already spent many months investigating allegations of misconduct by ministry researchers and the internal probe had “revealed some very serious problems.
“Some people had already been let go or were about to be. I was told that peoples’ personal health information has been used for purposes it wasn’t supposed to be used for, and it might have been put on (unencrypted) thumb drives and the ministry didn’t know where they were. I felt the public had a right to know, to be informed of that, so I gave a media briefing the next day.”
She said she would only learn the facts, years later, from various sources including the lawyer who defended her on defamation charges and the 2017 B.C. Ombudsperson report into the scandal.
“So what I know now is that a lot of what I was told is inaccurate or actually not true. But at the time, how could I have done this differently or avoided the long and painful lawsuits?” she said.
Lawsuits filed against the government and MacDiarmid were ultimately dismissed by consent after then-health minister Terry Lake, who succeeded MacDiarmid, acknowledged and apologized in 2015 for the “heavy-handed” way government handled personnel issues while investigating allegations.
Asked why Whitmarsh would give her information containing so much unproven, inaccurate information, MacDiarmid said she remains baffled.
“I have no idea, I’ve never spoken to him about it. I’ve never seen him or had anything to do with him since being unelected (she lost her seat in the 2013 election). In previous ministries, I had so much confidence in deputies, so if one of them said someone was being fired I would not have even thought about what is the process, the rules for the civil service. It’s the responsibility of the deputy, not the cabinet minister, so it never occurred to me to ask those sorts of questions.
“I’ve never had a situation where I was told things that weren’t true, things that I then went out to the media and said, that ended up being not true. It was not part of my experience with other deputies and I had had three before that.”
Reached in the Bahamas, where he works as a health consultant and lives part time when not in Vancouver, Whitmarsh said he was “disappointed” to hear about MacDiarmid’s comments. But he said he relates to the emotional toll on MacDiarmid because he, too, has regrets about the scandal.
“I never knowingly misled any cabinet minister that I dealt with. Indeed, I believe that I had a reputation for being direct and straightforward. Clearly, if we had known then what we know today, I expect all those involved would have handled matters differently.”
MacDiarmid said she was told during her first briefing that ministry officials had asked the RCMP to investigate. At a press conference on Sept. 6, the day after being sworn in, she announced that some employees had been dismissed and the RCMP had been asked to investigate.
But that gave a false impression that a criminal case was underway when, in fact, the police had not committed to conducting an investigation. A corresponding press release also mentioned the RCMP.
The police never found any grounds to launch an investigation and did not launch an investigation, something the public only learned much later.
One of the researchers fired in 2012, Roderick McIsaac, committed suicide in 2013.
Some employees eventually got cash settlements and jobs back, and apologies were ultimately made by then-premier Christy Clark. The fiasco was documented in the scathing ombudsperson’s report that found the government lacked evidence to fire workers, botched internal probes, and smeared reputations of the health researchers, in no small part because of MacDiarmid’s reference to the RCMP in her initial news conference.
In his report, ombudsperson Jay Chalke said the firings were driven by a flawed, rushed investigation and that the government misled the public about police involvement.
Asked if she was told to say the RCMP were involved at her first press conference as health minister, MacDiarmid said: “I wouldn’t put it that way.
“When a minister is going to have a conversation with the media, information is provided. The explanation I recall is that health information, thumb drives and that sort of thing, were considered to be property, and it wasn’t known where they were and so that could be considered to be a crime and that the ministry had approached the RCMP. It was part of the briefing notes.”
In hindsight, MacDiarmid concedes she could have taken more time to drill down for more information from a variety of sources besides her deputy minister.
Asked if she agrees history will show she was too trusting, she said: “I had been a cabinet minister (for three years) and I had never had a briefing from a deputy that was inaccurate. There might have been some facts that needed fact checking but not something this glaring.
“But I take your point. Was I naive? That’s very fair. Trusting ? Yes, but there’s a reason I was trusting. I did not become aware of many things that had gone wrong with the investigation until two years later. Lawsuits were all dropped against me but it was very late in the day that I become aware of things that went wrong at various levels of the ministry.”
MacDiarmid said for her, the years since the scandal have been marked by long stretches of anger, resentment, regret, “but mostly sadness.” Asked who is to blame for the scandal, MacDiarmid said her interpretation of the Chalke report is that elected officials are not at fault.
“The firings — cabinet ministers don’t do that, it’s the deputy or someone who makes a decision,” said MacDiarmid, who was a family physician before going into politics in 2009.
“The way the (internal) investigation was run and the improperness in the way some of the interviews were done, I’m not aware of any politician, including (her predecessor) Mike de Jong, who was found at fault.”