Public inquiry needed now into fiasco at Health Ministry

Enough of the obfuscating, weaseling, dissimulation, doubletalk, verbal subterfuge, stonewalling and other distasteful conduct that hangs like a miasma over the shameful events surrounding the precipitous firing of eight Ministry of Health researchers in 2012. The B.C. government, only after being driven to it by the tireless demands of the family of Roderick MacIsaac, a graduate student who took his life after being sacked days before his co-op term concluded, grudgingly issued an apology, which some regarded as expedient political damage control, but which the family accepted with grace.

Yet, except for government insiders, we all remain baffled. We don’t know the reasoning that led to people being unjustly fired. We don’t know who made the decision to fire them. We don’t know what evidence the government thought justified the firings. We don’t know who is accountable. We don’t know much about any of this and neither does the lawyer commissioned by the ministry to review the firings.

That’s due to the cynically narrow terms of reference that hobbled the investigator’s mandate and led her to acknowledge she never even interviewed the sacked researchers, that her investigation was flawed by the government’s preconceived theories of misconduct and that she was thus unable to answer the critical questions: who made the decisions and what were the justifications? We do know we had an unjust outcome from an obviously flawed process followed by foot-dragging, evasiveness, duplicity and shifty rhetoric. We know the police investigation that permitted government to justify its stonewalling was essentially a ruse created by government. We know internal investigations were hamstrung by secrecy, resulting in botched outcomes. We know that years after wrongdoing which the government acknowledged — both tacitly by its apology and explicitly in Health Minister Terry Lake’s recent statement that government “made a mistake” — we still don’t have adequate answers to simple questions. We know the taxpayers are on the hook for out-of-court settlements but we don’t know for how much.

It’s time to sort this out. Careers were derailed, reputations left in tatters, a man may have died as a consequence, it’s an unnecessary burden on the public purse and someone made these decisions.

There is simply no excuse for British Columbians not knowing how and why this happened, what it cost, who or what defective process should be held accountable and what can and should be done to ensure there is never a repeat performance.

Government was effusive four years ago with assurances that open government was one of its three top priorities.

The premier and cabinet ministers bloviated about it. Government even created a ministry of open government. Instead, we have this festering mess of secrecy, obstruction and denialism. As the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham has observed, “Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”

The public deserves a public inquiry.

It must be conducted by an independent third party with the power to compel testimony and subpoena evidence.

Our government acts on our behalf. It isn’t free to do as it likes to citizens and then walk away with a shrug and an insincere “So sorry.”