For more than four years, people have been chewing over the government’s decision to include a reference to the RCMP in its announcement that seven health researchers had been fired.
The reference torqued an already major announcement into something even bigger. It all but confirmed the impression of scandal.
Admitting you just called the cops on your own employees isn’t normally a good news day for government. But in this case it was almost a positive reference. From the senior bureaucrats’ perspective, it worked to their advantage. It proved how serious they were in dealing with an alleged data breach.
The connotation was that they had gone to battle stations and were taking a hard line to protect the sanctity of government data from some kind of mysterious gang working within the Health Ministry that they had uncovered, and fired. (See Friday’s column for a partial account of that farce.)
The downside, of course, is that it smeared the ex-employees even more than the dismissals did. Not only did they lose their jobs, the intimation was they were now under police investigation.
Ombudsperson Jay Chalke’s Misfire report recounts the moves leading up to the moment that news release (since expunged from the news archive) was handed out on Sept. 6, 2012. In the first line was: “The Ministry of Health has asked the RCMP to investigate allegations of inappropriate conduct, contracting and data-management practices involving ministry employees and drug researchers.”
Among those surprised by the news were the RCMP. Although the government investigator who drove the case said she checked with the police prior to the announcement to make sure they were on the same page, the RCMP officer involved told Chalke “he had no record or recollection of such a conversation, and remembered being surprised by the press conference.”
There were officials who counselled against the reference, the deputy attorney general among them. There was a lot of confusion leading up to the announcement. One draft communications plan warned that it would make it more difficult for the ministry and the RCMP to investigate without prejudice and would deny the ex-employees due process.
Chalke said that warning was prescient, given what eventually happened. He found that the reference to the RCMP was based on nothing more than a single meeting with the RCMP, at which an officer made it clear they would do nothing until they got a final report from the ministry. Even then, any investigation would depend on the force’s capacity to take on the matter, which suggests it wasn’t considered a high-priority item.
Chalke said the RCMP discussed the case after being notified and concluded: “They had not been provided with any evidence of a criminal offence.”
The government’s lead investigator promised the police in August 2012 they would get a final report from the ministry soon.
But it never happened, as the report was delayed, then never finalized as the case started eroding.
She did supply them with lots of information, but the RCMP weren’t clear on why they were getting it. She sent them thousands of emails from the employees under suspicion, but an officer had to explain that simply providing emails without context was not helpful.
Chalke concluded the RCMP reference was “not only factually misleading, but showed little understanding of the significant impact the spectre of a criminal investigation would have, not just on the fired employees, but on others caught up in the investigation and public servants in general, who did not know or understand what anyone had done wrong.”
One witness told Chalke about the impact of that specific reference: “Knowing that somebody has called the RCMP about you is actually terrifying … I would wake up in the middle of the night, I would think about, oh my God … what was this horrible thing that I had done?”
Just So You Know: Ironically, the only data breach in the whole mess came when the lead investigator supplied research information on personal health information of thousands of people to the RCMP to help convince them to investigate and charge the fired employees. It was not a permitted use of such restricted data and clearly breaches an agreement with Statistics Canada.
That agency complained, and lawyers told the ministry to stop doing it, but the advice was not followed.
