More than two years after the B.C. government said it was forwarding the findings of its 2012 Health Ministry privacy breach investigation to the RCMP, the police said they had yet to receive it.
An RCMP officer in the federal serious and organized crime unit asked the B.C. government in November when it would forward information from its 2012 internal investigation, according to documents obtained by the NDP through a freedom of information request. The NDP presented its findings in the legislature on Wednesday.
“I have seen mention of your investigation in the media these past few weeks,” Const. Dean Miller wrote in a Nov. 6, 2014, email to Wendy Taylor, director of privacy investigations for the Ministry of Citizens’ Services. “Are you any closer to being in a position to forward us your findings?”
About two years earlier, on Sept. 6, 2012, Margaret MacDiarmid, then the minister of health, said the government had asked the RCMP to investigate allegations of inappropriate conduct, contracting and data-management practices involving ministry employees and drug researchers.
MacDiarmid said that in August 2012 the ministry provided the RCMP with interim results of its investigation, which eventually led to seven drug researchers being fired and one contractor losing his job.
The NDP has long argued that the RCMP reference was nothing more than a political manoeuvre by the government to ruin the reputations of the drug researchers, one of whom committed suicide about four months after being fired.
“The Liberal government, at the direction of the premier’s communications team, smeared the researchers by reference to an RCMP investigation,” NDP MLA Adrian Dix said Wednesday during question period.
The public reference to an RCMP investigation was made “contrary to all advice and for decisions made at a political level — and two years and three months later, [the government] hadn’t managed or bothered to send anything to the RCMP,” Dix said in an interview. “For the government, the smear was sufficient.”
In an independent review released in December, Victoria lawyer Marcia McNeil said “the investigation was flawed from the outset, as it was embarked upon with a preconceived theory of employee misconduct.”
McNeil said no one in government took responsibility for making the decision to dismiss the employees and rather “all pointed to someone else.”
She also said that the public statements about the suspensions and dismissals — as well as the disclosure within the ministry of at least one person’s name — “did not meet best practices.”
The government has since settled three wrongful-dismissal cases and three union grievances, and has apologized for some of the firings.
Two wrongful-dismissal suits remain before the courts.
The RCMP email is more proof of why a public inquiry must be called into the “botched” investigation, Dix said.
“The premier is responsible for all of this,” Dix said in the legislature. “The people who decided on the smear report to her. … She had the power to ensure that those very officials were compelled to testify before the McNeil report. She refused.”
Health Minister Terry Lake responded that the government has “acknowledged that mistakes were made, and apologies have been given.” The government is implementing the recommendations made by McNeil, he said.
A spokesperson for the Public Service Agency said the government “has an obligation to report to the RCMP when government property goes missing, and our investigation found that a large amount of health data had been downloaded onto unencrypted flash drives and shared with unauthorized people.”
The RCMP were notified and given “appropriate details,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The ministry does not have any more information to provide to the RCMP. It is up to the RCMP to determine if they will conduct an investigation based on the information that they have.”
On Wednesday, Cpl. Laurie White, a spokesperson for the RCMP serious and organized crime branch, said: “There is no update at this time.”
