HEALTH FIRING DAMAGE CONTROL DRAGS ON
Dix asks why comptroller’s review did not interview affected staff
As the B.C. legislature approached the scheduled adjournment of the spring session this week, Opposition MLA Adrian Dix had another go at challenging the botched handling of those firings in the B.C. Health Ministry.
His particular target was the review of the affair by the office of the comptroller general, launched shortly after the September 2012 firing of eight drug researchers and not concluded until after a number of them had been reinstated and/or exonerated in June of last year.
“It seems to me that that was a long time for the report,” Dix observed during debate on the budget for the Ministry of Finance, which includes the office of the comptroller general.
“Two years and nine months is a long period of time — period,” conceded Finance Minister Mike de Jong, providing a rare moment of agreement in an otherwise contentious debate.
Why had it taken so long? De Jong cited “the extent, the complexity of the work.”
But Dix quoted passage after passage from the resulting report which blamed short-staffing and a lack of resources.
Quote: “All the individuals originally assigned to the engagement, with the exemption of project lead, either retired or left the ministry. The investigative unit team frequently encountered other challenges, which stressed the team’s already limited resources.”
For a moment Dix seemed to be getting somewhere when he asked who had been interviewed in the course of the investigation. “I don’t want to speculate,” replied de Jong. “I’ll have to get the information.” But after consulting his staff, he came back with a partial rebuff: “I am only able to do that with consent of the people whose names appear on that list. I can undertake to do that but, obviously, won’t be in position to do so this afternoon.”
Dix is nothing if not persistent. He can wait. But by that point in the proceedings, he and the minister were bogged down over who did NOT get interviewed by the office of the comptroller general, namely the fired health workers.
De Jong, relying on advice from comptroller general Stuart Newton (who sat beside him in the house during the debate), said the employees were never the target of the investigation. “The focus was an examination of contracting practices as opposed to a review or an investigation of individuals and individual conduct.”
The review led to a number of improvements in contracting, consequently the ministry regarded the exercise as having been worthwhile, said de Jong.
But …. but …. but, Dix protested.
Those individuals were under a cloud while the comptroller general was conducting his review. They remained there even after the government began reversing course on the firings via a series of apologies, reinstatements and out of court settlements.
Indeed, the government repeatedly cited the continuing work by the comptroller as one reason for not answering questions about how it handled the firings and not calling off the RCMP, to which it had referred the case in a well-publicized press release at the outset.
“I’m not blanket criticizing the comptroller general,” said the New Democrat. “But this is not the right way to conduct an investigation. They didn’t provide it with adequate resources. Then they didn’t even bother to investigate the people whose direct interests were involved and whose actions they were questioning. They didn’t bother to ask them even after the government, in a corporate sense, had exonerated them, reinstated them and paid them cash money.”
“Forget due process,” challenged Dix. “Isn’t that” — giving the accused a chance to tell their side of the story — “just the decent thing to do?”
The minister met his critic part way on one point. “Ensuring that departments have the resources they require to conduct their work — ultimately, the responsibility for that lies with the minister. That’s clear.”
But for the rest, de Jong defended not interviewing the main victims of the affair.
“I’m not in a position to really stray from the answer that I provided earlier, that the view of the comptroller general and his staff was that this was not an investigation relating to individualized conduct for which there would be findings against individuals.”
In an effort to minimize fallout for the individuals, the ministry did extensively edit the report before releasing it last year. But earlier this year, an uncensored copy was leaked to Rob Shaw of The Vancouver Sun.
The contents mainly served to provide further evidence of the Liberals’ botched handling of the affair. First firing the health workers, then launching an investigation by the comptroller general, then reinstating them, then producing a report that insinuated there might have been something to the allegations against them after all.
Dix suggested Wednesday that the source of the leak was someone in “the senior ranks of government.” But de Jong denied that the leak “was the product of a government action or a deliberate step by a representative of the government.”
Far from having ordered the leak, the Liberals were trying to find out how it happened. “There is an investigation underway,” said de Jong, “I feel obliged to put that on the record.”
A witch hunt in other words. The Liberals maintain they have to try to chase down the source of the leak, because the unredacted version of the report constituted a serious breach of privacy of those named within it, including the fired health care workers. Never mind that the main author of the damage to all those reputations was the government itself, not whomever saw fit to leak the report to the paper.
Then they didn’t even bother to investigate the people whose direct interests were involved and whose actions they were questioning. ADRIAN DIX , Opposition MLA