Christy Clark’s government connection to corporate pharmaceuticals has been lost again, in the noisier question of reparations for damages to be assessed by the newly appointed judge, Thomas Cromwell. The apologies of most causative parties have been voluble; and pave the way for taxpayers to supply the money to put the government’s shameful actions behind them. Responsibility accepted by all - excepting the Premier’s Office.
What has been obfuscated was the intended, or accidental, result of those actions; the insidious destruction of two valuable drug overview research projects at UBC and the University of Victoria. That result was enabled by wrongful dismissal of staff and elimination of funding for the project within the Ministry of Health.
The MOH project reviewing corporations selling therapeutic drugs in B.C. was annoying and costly. Insidiously the destruction of these independent research initiatives was accomplished in the aftermath of the “fake RCMP” news allegations in the media. Those bogus reports of a non-existent RCMP investigation, gave the government, specious PR reasons for the wrongful dismissal of staff, the removal of funding and cancelation of support for independent public pharmaceutical review and research in B.C.
I am reminded of the verse “ The law locks up the man or woman who steals the goose from off the common – but leaves the greater villain loose - who steals the common from off the goose.”
Harry Atkinson
Sidney