Carrie Tait is the Bob Woodward of Alberta

And some thoughts about governance

The team here at What Now?!? has other things to do today, so this is just a quick post to tell all of you to go and find Carrie Tait’s piece in the Globe and Mail. She connects the dots between the playoff tickets, the Turkish Tylenol, the Premier’s former Chief of Staff and the most recent firing of the AHS Board of Directors and CEO.

This is the kind of scoop that has the potential to end political careers.

Let this sink in: the Deputy Minister of Health sat on the AHS board. The board allegedly recommended that the AHS CEO take her concerns to the RCMP. The Deputy Minister of Health fired the AHS CEO and the Board that he sat on. And then the government appointed that same Deputy Minister of Health to be the AHS administrator, with no board in place.

The big story here is about who knew what, and when, and whether there is corruption at work. I’ll leave the journalists and the opposition to pursue those questions.

But I want to return to the seemingly boring questions around governance and public administration. A few months ago, I wrote this:

On file after file, we have seen the Smith government assert its authority. One mechanism they have settled on is to appoint Deputy Ministers to boards, ostensibly to ‘ensure communication’ with government but perhaps also to exert control. We have two deputy ministers serving on the seven-member AHS board, and as of yesterday one deputy minister serving on the AIMco Board.

Corporate governance is grounded in the principle of fiduciary responsibility: members of a board have a duty to act in the best interests of the organization and its beneficiaries. Deputy Ministers are employees of the government and must act on the its direction. What are they to do if these two roles conflict with one another? In other words, can we think of a board with a deputy minister serving on it as being at arm’s length from government?

These questions are all the more relevant today, in light of Tait’s reporting.

A closing observation: one of the boring but necessary things that Boards do is to establish an audit committee. According to the Corporate Governance Institute, an audit committee “is a committee of a company‘s board of directors that is responsible for overseeing the financial reporting process, internal controls, and audit activities. The audit committee is responsible for ensuring that the company‘s financial statements are accurate and reliable. The audit committee also reviews the company‘s internal control systems and monitors the external auditors.”

Among the many things the Opposition should be demanding today is the immediate appointment of a non-partisan, experienced Board for AHS (or whatever it’s called now) to exercise the fiduciary responsibility that is required so that public money is spent effectively and internal controls are in place to ensure that procurement is in the public interest.