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“Some people had already been let go or were about to be. I was told that peoples’ personal health information has been used for purposes it wasn’t supposed to be used for, and it might have been put on (unencrypted) thumb drives and the ministry didn’t know where they were. I felt the public had a right to know, to be informed of that, so I gave a media briefing the next day.

She said she would only learn the facts, years later, from various sources including the lawyer who defended her on defamation charges and the 2017 B.C. Ombudsperson report into the scandal.

“So what I know now is that a lot of what I was told is inaccurate or actually not true. But at the time, how could I have done this differently or avoided the long and painful lawsuits?” she said.

Lawsuits filed against the government and MacDiarmid were ultimately dismissed by consent after then health minister Terry Lake, who succeeded MacDiarmid acknowledged and apologized in 2015 for the “heavy-handed” way government handled personnel issues while investigating allegations.

Asked why Whitmarsh would give her information containing so much unproven, inaccurate information, MacDiarmid said she remains baffled.

“I have no idea, I’ve never spoken to him about it. I’ve never seen him or had anything to do with him since being unelected (she lost her seat in the 2013 election). In previous ministries, I had so much confidence in deputies, so if one of them said someone was being fired I would not have even thought about what is the process, the rules for the civil service. It’s the responsibility of the deputy, not the cabinet minister, so it never occurred to me to ask those sorts of questions.