I bet Stephen Duckett never in his wildest imagination would have ever thought that he could get fired due to a few flippant words that he threw to a horde of media minions while rushing out of a high profile Alberta Health Services board meeting. By now, every Albertan has heard the infamous five little words that would become the proverbial nail in the coffin of his tenure as the figurehead of the Alberta Health Services.
Yesterday, Premier Stelmach, in between voicing his disappointment over the loss of Edmonton’s chance for EXPO 2017 and oh, I don’t know… maybe something about the oil sands haters, exclaimed with much exasperation that he found Duckett’s words to be quite offensive. Then, less than 24 hours later, I hear the breaking news on CBC radio on the drive home from work – Dr. Stephen Duckett is officially fired.
Really?? Really?? Since when was brushing off media just cause for job termination? As for offensive, Dr. Duckett could have said far worst things. For instance, how about “Leave me the hell alone, you red neck Albertans – perhaps the emergency rooms wouldn’t be nearly as busy if you didn’t hurt yourselves on snowmobile, quads, and hunting accidents!” Perhaps, he was actually thinking something more along those lines, but he decided to bite his tongue, err…I mean, cookie instead. Oops.
Isn’t it rather common to see government officials on the news refusing to comment to reporters, and I can’t recall any of them in the past being let go for it afterwards. Many would agree that Ducket’s comments were quirky and rude, but does it warrant sending him packing back to the land down under.
Personally, I think his comments don’t hold a candle to some of the other truly scandalous shenanigans that have been recently exposed.
For instance, Gary Holden, the CEO of Enmax, a large utility company owned by the City of Calgary did not get the boot when it was reported that he had been using company funds to host lavish parties featuring “rock stars” (albeit B-list Canadian ones) in his private residence. The only fallout from that was that the company is now required have better reporting of their executives’ earnings to the public, annnd… I heard that they recently begrudgingly cancelled the Blue Rodeo Concert / staff Christmas Party, due to budget cuts. (Why can’t Mr. Holden just pay the band the $70,000 that they demand out of his salary of $2.7 million?)
Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP during the April 20th explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig off the gulf shore, which killed 11 workers. The spewing rig was finally plugged three month later, but not before discharging 4.4 million barrels of oil into the ocean. Throughout the ordeal, Hayward, too, couldn’t help but make a few asinine comments.
One month into the spill (mid-May), Hayward thought he would try the “look at the bright side” approach and said "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." Then two weeks later he whines publicly to reporters “I'm sorry. We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back.”
As a result of Hayward’s failure to project an acceptable and humble image of himself and the company during this unprecedented environmental catastrophe, he was relieved of his duties as BP’s CEO. But guess what? He still didn’t get totally fired. The company just demoted him to a cushy director level position with a BP subsidiary.
During a recent BBC interview, Hayward said something that I thought really mirrored Duckett’s plight. Hayward claimed that he understood why he had been "vilified and demonized" by the media. "You know, it's very difficult to hate a company; it's much easier to hate an individual," he said.
In Duckett’s case, the media might have overblown the situation, but Alberta’s Health Minister and Premier still could have chosen to ignore the media and remained loyal to him. But instead, they made him the scapegoat for all of AHS’ current woes. Our health care troubles are chronic and systemic. They stem from years of poor planning, inability to balance short and long term priorities, lack of funding to disease prevention and health promotion programs; and are aggravated by the consistent pattern of making of rash, costly decisions based on immediate political pressures rather than on best practice evidence from research and other jurisdictions. Our problems did not suddenly come about after we hired the cookie-loving, Australian health economist in 2009.
One of the senior engineers at my work loves to say, “an ounce of image is worth a pound of performance”. I’m starting to think that this could be our provincial government’s mantra.
