NDP FAILS THREE TESTS IN A WEEK ON OPENNESS

The past week has featured three tests of Premier John Horgan's promise of openness and transparency — and his NDP government failed all three.

The most telling example was the leak of two internal reports from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, which showed the government has been assembling far more information about the COVID-19 outbreak than it made public.

“The internal reports — each over 45 pages — are four times longer than the weekly reports published by the centre,” as Nathan Griffiths reported in The Vancouver Sun on Friday. “They delve into the details of COVID-19 case counts and vaccinations at the neighbourhood level, breakdowns about variants of concern, and more … a level of detail the centre has so far refused to make public despite repeated calls from academics and researchers.”

The contents told a tale about pandemic hot spots that have simultaneously recorded high case counts and low levels of vaccination.

“Surrey continues to have the highest rate of COVID cases in the province with 29 per cent of all B.C. cases for the week of April 23-29,” as The Sun's Katie Derosa reported, quoting the reports. “Parts of northwest Surrey including Whalley and Newton had an average of 40 COVID-19 cases a day for every 100,0000 people, more than double the rate of most other areas of Metro Vancouver. In Whalley and Newton, more than 20 per cent of COVID-19 tests were positive, compared with 11 per cent for the whole province. Those neighbourhoods, plus Guildford, had a lower first-dose vaccination rate. Just 21-40 per cent of adults in those neighbourhoods have had their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, compared to between 41-60 per cent of adults in South Surrey, Delta and Langley.”

Reading those and other details in the two leaked reports, one gained a deeper understanding of the government drive to raise vaccination rates and discourage travel between the Lower Mainland and lower-risk regions. It went a long way to explain Premier John Horgan's personal intervention with community and faith leaders to encourage registration for immunization in Surrey and other hot-spot communities.

The level of detail in the reports would be helpful in alerting communities to the risk and building support for the immunization drive. Reporters and researchers have been asking in vain for such information for weeks and sometimes for months.

Was the withholding just another example of a public agency taking a proprietary interest in information gathered on behalf of the public? Or was the information withheld to protect the Horgan government from the political fallout of having let the third wave get out of control in Surrey and elsewhere?

Either way, by having the information come out through leaks — instead of posting the two reports openly on a public health websites — the secrecy mongers risked playing into the hands of the COVID-19 deniers and their suspicions about government cover-ups.

“By controlling the message so strongly, I think it backfires a bit,” said Dr. Sarah Otto, Canada research chair in theoretical and experimental evolution at UBC.

The Horgan government's deliberate withholding of information was also on display in the fight against the Site C project by the West Moberly First Nations and Chief Roland Willson. They secured a B.C. Supreme Court order giving them access to the full report of Peter Milburn, the former deputy minister of finance who oversaw last year's review of the troubled project.

The public was given only a summary of Milburn's work when Horgan announced in February that the project would be completed. But Milburn provided the government with a great deal more information, including confidential material on safety, dam stability and cost controls on a project where the New Democrats recently boosted the budget to

$16 billion from $10.7 billion without any breakdown of how the $5.3-billion top-up was reached. In fighting West Moberly's application for the full report, B.C. Hydro argued that the case before the court did not involve “whether the dam is being built in a manner that is safe or cost effective.” Not, mind you, that there was no documentation relating to safety and cost effectiveness, only that if such documents existed, they were irrelevant to the proceedings. The provincial government argued against the public release of most of the material on grounds that it would not be in the public interest to, er, well, you know, share the information with the public.

One notes, in passing, that in deciding the question of relevancy in favour of West Moberly, B.C. Supreme Court Judge Warren Milman cited the Peruvian guano case, a reference to a precedent from 1882. No disrespect to his honour, but with Site C, the guano is coming from a place a lot closer to home than Peru.

A third test of the Horgan government's commitment to openness emerged through the decision to set up a Crown corporation to oversee $500 million worth of investments in venture capital and other B.c.-based businesses.

The INBC corporation will be governed by principles of “transparency and accountability,” Jobs Minister Ravi Kahlon assured the legislature recently.

But when I asked Kahlon's ministry for the business plan on which this high-risk venture was based, I was told it was a “confidential” document for cabinet eyes only.

The half-billion dollars is public money. So is the risk. But the business plan is the exclusive property of Kahlon and his NDP cabinet colleagues.

Government argued against the public release of most of the material on grounds that it would not be in the public interest to, er, well, you know, share the information with the public.