IMAGINE this scene if you can: federal health minister Tony Clement, confronted by evidence that he had contacted medicare officials to get personal details on 25 heart transplant patients involved in an experimental program, including addresses, telephone numbers and medical charts, offers the following defense in the House of Commons:
“Mr. Speaker, as the minister responsible for the federal health-care system, I have a responsibility to make sure that these programs are delivered effectively.
“When I found out that only 25 patients were involved in this pilot, I thought it was a good opportunity to phone them all personally to find out how it worked, what did not work and build a better health mousetrap for the future.”
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It is easy to imagine an ensuing parliamentary uproar with calls for the minister’s political head since he had breached the privacy of medical records.
Something like that happened once.
During Bob Rae’s NDP government in Ontario in the 1990s, his northern development minister Shelley Martel caused an uproar and a legislative investigation after she alleged at a cocktail party that she knew details of a doctor’s private billing practices. In one of many low points for the Rae government, she got off the hook by taking a lie detector test to prove she had been lying.
The health-care example came to mind when agriculture minister Gerry Ritz was confronted in Parliament last week with evidence that he had demanded from the Canadian Wheat Board the names, addresses and commercial information for 25 organic wheat farmers who had sold grain to an experimental CWB pool in 2006-07.
Ritz said it was his right as the minister to find out how the program worked.
Former acting CWB president Greg Arason, hired by the Conservatives to do the heavy lifting after they fired previous president Adrian Measner in a dispute over the Conservative campaign against the single desk, begged to differ. Three times, he told Ritz he could not provide details on individual dealings with the board because it would violate the Privacy Act.
Yet when these letters became public through a National Farmers Union access-to-information request, there was almost no reaction in Parliament.
Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter asked one question April 16, which led to the Ritz answer noted above. Liberal third line left winger (this is NHL playoff time after all) Raymond Simard asked a lame question April 18. And that was it.
NFU president Stewart Wells, presumed by Easter to be one of the targets of Ritz’s requests for individual files although Ritz denies it, marvels at the lack of fallout compared to what would happen if the health minister was implicated or the revenue minister asked for individual taxpayer filings.
Welcome to the world of agriculture as a below-the-radar issue in Parliament.
Meanwhile, there is one small irony in this episode. CWB defenders objected mightily when the Conservative government in 2006 moved to include the CWB for the first time under the access-to-information law. It would be a weapon for enemies of the board to seek information to undermine the CWB, they bellowed.
But the first creative use of the new power was to hoist Ritz on a petard of his own construction.
Such things make politics interesting.
