CALGARY — Funny thing about this health-care queue-jumping. Everybody seemed to know it went on, but nobody can quite recall anybody who did it, or who was asked to provide it.

Stephen Duckett, testifying Tuesday by video from Australia, wrote a strong memo in 2009 to condemn so-called preferential access.

After Duckett and AHS parted company in November 2010 over his cookie-chomping, he made tough statements about the practice, both in a farewell address and a speech in Toronto.

Those remarks are the sole reason we have Alberta’s first public inquiry in nearly 30 years.

But on Tuesday, Duckett said he had no evidence of queue-jumping. Nor does he care to find any.

He’d simply been told it went on, he said, and wanted to write a kind of prophylactic memo to ensure that if existed, it would stop.

“The past was the past, in my view,” Duckett said from a dimly-lit room somewhere in Oz.

“It didn’t seem worth my time or anybody else’s time to follow it up because there’s nothing you can do.”

Only later, after he gained more experience of our treasured Alberta Health care, did he understand there was at least one “fixer” who solved problems.

Duckett named that person: Brian Hlus, who was a Capital Health Region official.

But once again, Duckett provided no evidence, direct or indirect, to show this Hlus fellow really did anything.

It was all second-hand. And Duckett does not believe there was any similar “fixer” in the Calgary Health Region.

The inquiry will hear from Hlus, who was outed by the Edmonton Journal last week — as an admirably frugal man with his expense account.

Lynn Redford, the premier’s sister, will also testify about her government-relations role in Calgary.

One thing Duckett did know directly is that many MLAs were unhappy with the new centralized AHS, because they no longer knew how to get things done.

“It was a criticism of me that fixer people weren’t kept in the organization,” Duckett said Tuesday.

He named only one discontented MLA: Raj Sherman, then a PC MLA, now the Liberal leader, whose emergency ward rebellion caused AHS much grief.

Of unhappy PC MLAs, Duckett recalls not a single one.

If you find this singularly unsatisfying, you’re with me.

A true queue-jumping scandal won’t be revealed by memo-ridden, meeting-hardened executives.

Like many of their species, they’re so busy pretending to control their vast organization that they tend to lose the thread.

In this archive of muddle, a true classic is the genesis of the original Duckett memo that warned hospitals against allowing preferential access.

It was actually written for him by Dr. David Megran, a senior executive with AHS.

Megran insisted Tuesday that he had no knowledge of queue-jumping and did not raise the issue with Duckett.

But Duckett said Megran told him there was concern about preferential access “and he wanted to know what my views were on that issue.

“I said I was opposed ... and I asked him to draft a memo to make explicit my views about that.”

Megran wrote a very good memo that Duckett accepted verbatim. He fired it out to hospitals.