I have spent quite a lot of time over the years – on and off - trying to uncover what really happened on 1 November 2022 when the developer Michael Rice offered land in the protected Greenbelt at Bathurst to Southlake for the site of a new acute hospital. I was repeatedly told there were no records of that consequential meeting at King's Municipal HQ. 

At every turn, I hit a road-block. For key meetings - which one would ordinarily expect to be documented - no records existed, even though hospitals (and municipalities) are legally obliged to keep records.

Meticulously tracked

When patients go through the doors at Southlake their progress is meticulously tracked. But when Southlake’s hospital administrators were offered free land for a new hospital, worth many millions of dollars, everything was committed to memory and nothing was jotted down by the then Chief Executive, Arden Krystal.

John Marshman, Southlake's Vice President of Capital and Facilities, who was also present on 1 November 2022, chaired the first meeting of Southlake’s Land Acquisition Sub Committee one month later, on 5 December 2022. Like Krystal, Marshman insists he remembered everything that was said on 1 November 2022. No notes were taken.

No record of Dunlap offer

For other key meetings there were no agendas, no minutes, no notes. We have no idea what happened to the long term care facility that was proposed to be incorporated within the new hospital complex. Southlake says it has no record of the former Southlake Board member, John Dunlap, offering his own land at Bathurst as the site of the proposed hospital. Yet we have documentary evidence that on more than one occasion Dunlap told King Mayor, Steve Pellegrini, he was minded to gift land. And so it goes on. Yawning gaps in the record.

Broke obligations

A year ago the Information and Privacy Comnmissioner said she planned to issue a special report on "access to information and record keeping issues relating to changes in the Greenbelt".

We now have her conclusions in the IPC's latest Annual Report which found:

“officials broke legal record keeping obligations in planning Greenbelt Removals”.

Accountability

She makes a series of recommendations for strengthening transparency and public trust. And although she takes aim at the Premier's Office her recommendations hold good for other institutions such as Southlake and the Municipality of King. She says:

"The absence of records raises serious accountability concerns and undermines public trust. Whether digital, handwritten, or verbal, decisions of public importance must be documented. Without a full and accurate record of decision-making, when, by whom and on what basis, the public is left in the dark about government actions that affect their communities and the environment. When records are lost, destroyed, obfuscated, or never created in the first place, it raises more questions than answers."  

The absence or destruction of records may be one reason why the RCMP investigation into the Greenbelt scandal is taking forever. I don't know. Even without records, people do have recollections but these, inevitably, fade over time. That's another reason why this long drawn out police investigation cannot be allowed to drag on indefinitely.

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