When B.C. Auditor General Michael Pickup leaves his post in November and heads back to his beloved Nova Scotia, he will meet for the first time with the man who saved his life when he was a child.
It was a freezing-cold February day in 1968 in Cape Breton when a 17-year-old named Brian Lavery looked across a field from the truck he was in and saw what turned out to be a two-year-old Michael floating face-down in a brook.
The teen galloped through waist-deep water, breaking through patches of ice, to rescue the toddler — who had wandered off after being left unattended by a babysitter — and get him to a nearby home, according to an account in the Cape Breton Post.
Pickup — Canada’s first openly gay and Indigenous auditor general — has dedicated his life to figuring out how things work, which has included climbing up the world’s largest container ship in the Atlantic Ocean, descending four kilometres down a mine in Cape Breton, and staying in prison as part of a correctional facilities audit.
But it was only last year that he set out to find the man who rescued him a half century ago.
“I put the word out to my friends in Cape Breton to see if anybody knew if this guy was still alive, or knew who he was — well, it took about a half hour,” he said. A call was set for the next day.
Lavery, now 75, told Pickup the scene is frozen in his mind as if it were yesterday. “I can tell you the colour of your snowsuit. I can tell you the colour your face was turning, I can remember every detail of it … and I remember when I got you out of the water and said you were OK, you didn’t cry once,” he said, adding he kept a thank-you letter he received from Pickup’s grandparents.
Pickup didn’t anticipate the profound effect the story would have on him.
“It kind of gave me chills because there’s the guy who — had he not gone down [to investigate] and [just] left me — I would have died.”
During that phone call last summer, Pickup made a plan to return to Cape Breton to meet Lavery in person.
Whether Pickup had already decided upon his retirement date then or not, the call to return to Nova Scotia was already strong. Last week, he made it official.
Pickup leaves in November, after th e fall election, just four years into an eight-year term but after 35 years of public service. He says “a big part” of his decision to retire is personal — he and his partner want to return to the Maritimes, where they both have healthy parents and loads of family.
Pickup was appointed as B.C.’s new auditor general in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made for a stressful four years in leadership, with travel restrictions that prevented him from getting home for several family Christmases and visits.
“It’s only been four years on the calendar but it’s been longer than that, right?”
Despite that, Pickup says his office has filed 40 reports in four years with another coming out this month. “That’s a massive change,” he said, adding: “I wasn’t just a caretaker or a just get-through-COVID kind of leader.”
In 2022 alone, his work included two reports on fraud risk management, an audit of additional safe spaces for women and children leaving violence amid the pandemic, and managing cybersecurity in a telework environment.
Every year, he hammered away on the province’s financial reporting. It’s his job to give his opinion on whether the province’s financial statements are in line with the Canadian Public Sector Accounting Standards. He found three accounting misstatements in the 2022/2023 financial statements, marking the 16th consecutive year of such mistakes.
“Most provinces across the country have little or none,” said Pickup. “Honestly the only sort of disappointment that I leave with is that we didn’t see progress in that area.”
In March of this year, Pickup produced a report on B.C.’s toxic drug crisis in which he said there were “significant deficiencies” in the Mental Health and Addictions and Health ministries’ implementation of two harm-reduction programs focused on reducing the death toll — overdose-prevention and supervised-consumption services, as well as the initial phase of prescribed safer supply.
“I think what I’m most proud of is the diversity of the work we did through those 40 reports,” said Pickup, whose office looked at everything from Indigenous offenders in correctional facilities to bus-transportation services in northern B.C.
Pickup says the auditor’s office is now more efficient and productive, inclusive and diverse at all levels — he and his leadership team completed Cornell University’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion certificate program, as well as a mental health first aid certificate program from the Canadian Mental Health Commission.
He said workforce engagement in his office has increased, staff turnover has decreased, there’s been a massive modernization in terms of technology, and his office has a higher profile due to social media, videos and its one-page explainers for investigative reports.
And while it doesn’t show on a spreadsheet, he hopes he brought more humour to the workplace.
“I wouldn’t be leaving now if I thought I wasn’t leaving the place in the best shape it’s ever been,” said Pickup.
Pickup, the youngest of two boys born to still-married teenage parents Molly and Jack Pickup, is a status Indian member of the Miawpukek First Nation who grew up just steps from the Membertou reservation and says he learned early on what racism and intergenerational trauma feel like.
His Indigenous great-grandmother was 13 when it was decided she would marry a 30-year-old white man, he said. She had her first baby at 14 and 10 more by 30, he said. Pickup said one of her children, his grandmother, was advised upon moving to Cape Breton to forget she was Indigenous.
On the flip side, as a white male, he learned a lot about racism from those who didn’t know his background — “because I obviously don’t look typically or historically Indigenous … I often saw the true colours of people.”
Having come out as gay in his early 20s, Pickup also well remembers the early days of Pride parades in Halifax, when participants wore paper bags over their heads for fear of reprisals. He didn’t grow up thinking gay marriage and adopting children would one day be possible.
After studying economics and political science, he was offered the opportunity to earn an accounting degree. Once he started investigating the value and effectiveness of government programs and services, he was hooked.
As Pickup rose up the ranks from paper and pencil accounting at Doane Raymond — later to become part of Grant Thornton — to working in the Auditor General of Canada’s office under Sheila Fraser, he downplayed his Indigenous and LGBTQ background, as he wanted to be recognized on merit.
But once he was appointed to the highest ranks of government office in Nova Scotia in 2014, having proven there was no tokenism in his trajectory, he slowly began to open up.
He wrote a book on his paternal grandmother called Nan-made: How a Grandmother Made A Man, published in 2018, and is working on another in the same 25 short stories format of lessons learned with his maternal grandmother.
By the time he came to B.C., he had fully grown into the idea that part of his legacy would be as advertised — the first LGBTQ and first Indigenous auditor general in Canada.
He wants to be fully seen by Indigenous and LGBTQ youth to demonstrate they, too, could hold positions in public office.
“Representation matters,” said Pickup. “I hope they think of working in public service.
“It’s been a wonderful career.”
