You might have missed the Christiiane Ouimet flap in the flurry of all the other government miscues recently in the news. And in truth there’s nothing so remarkable about the former public sector integrity minister screwing up and then walking away with a half million dollars in severance and an entitlement to: “all benefits accruing to retiring appointees”. After all she did serve three years in this office since her appointment in 2007 and only left when the Auditors General’s report “outed” her for acting on only a handful of the hundreds of complaints that had been lodged with her office. And, of course for berated and belittled her staff. A voluntarily retirement, it was said at the time.
It was also revealed that during her tenure she communicated with both the Treasury Board Office and the Privy Council Office two things she was warned not to do in her supposedly arms-length role as a defender of whistle blowers and potential critic of the government that appointed her. Conveniently the deal was signed by Wayne Wouters, the Clerk of the Privy Office, one of the centres of government power that she was not supposed to have any communications with. So you ask: “if that’s not the story, what is?” The real story is that when Ms. Ouimet accepted the generous offer from the Privy Council Office she also, (readily, I’m sure) accepted the gag order that went with it. Not coincidentally she is to appear before the Commons public-accounts committee on March 10 to explain why she never thought it necessary to investigate more than 7 of the 228 disclosures of bureaucratic wrongdoing and to shed some light on what those complaints were about. Obviously she’s not going to have a lot to say. A cynic might say that that silence will suit this government very well.
AH
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