VICTORIA — The B.C. Liberal government faced a scathing rebuke from the provincial Supreme Court this week for unfairly scapegoating and firing a senior public servant in the final days of Christy Clark’s tenure as premier.
Justice Lindsay LeBlanc awarded Wendy-Lou Taylor, a 30-year veteran of the public service, $250,000 in punitive and aggravated damages, with additional court costs to be determined later. The judge concluded that the Clark administration had wrongly pinned the blame on Taylor for the 2012 dismissals of six health ministry employees and researchers, one of whom later died by suicide.
Taylor, who served as director of privacy investigations, had looked into allegations against the group. However, the court determined that she did not advocate for their termination. “Her recommendation was for employee suspensions pending completion of the formal investigation, as the investigative work was still underway when the termination decision was made,” Justice LeBlanc wrote.
The ruling identified then-deputy minister of health Graham Whitmarsh as the individual who made the decision to terminate the employees. Subsequent inquiries and reviews concluded that the firings were unjust, leading to the reinstatement and compensation of the affected workers, as well as an apology to the family of the researcher who took his own life.
Despite these findings, the Liberals allowed the impression to persist that Taylor was primarily responsible, portraying her as the alleged leader of the team that carried out the firings. The health firings scandal haunted Clark throughout the 2017 election campaign and likely contributed to her loss of a legislative majority.
Taylor was terminated on June 29, 2017—the same day Clark lost a confidence vote in the legislature and Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon asked John Horgan to form a new government. Kim Henderson, then head of the public service under the Liberals, testified in court that the timing was driven by the confidence vote. “She was concerned that she would not have a job if there was a change of government following the non-confidence vote. As such, it had to be done on the day of the non-confidence vote,” the judge recounted.
Henderson claimed she was acting in response to a report from Ombudsperson Jay Chalke titled “Misfire,” which found the firings unjustified and revealed a pattern of error and duplicity in the case. She stated that she wanted to handle Taylor’s termination personally because she had taken responsibility for responding to the report. However, Justice LeBlanc rejected this explanation, noting that the Misfire report did not recommend terminating Taylor and, in fact, advised against further firings.
