Bob Mackin
One year ago today, B.C. Premier David Eby’s X and Instagram accounts displayed messages against Islamophobia instead of commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Jan. 27, 2024 incident gained international attention almost four months after Hamas terrorists sparked the war in Gaza by killing 1,200 people in Israel. Oct. 7, 2023 was the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust.
It took two days for Eby to personally address the controversy. He apologized and called it unacceptable, but refused to discuss what he deemed a personnel matter. The identity of the person responsible remains a mystery.
David Eby’s Jan. 27 error on X. (@Dave_Eby)
Coincidentally, Eby apologized while visiting Ottawa on Jan. 29 — the Day of Action Against Islamophobia and anniversary of the 2017 murder of six people at a Quebec City mosque.
Was it an honest mistake or deliberate?
The request asked for a search of accounts and devices of the NDP premier’s chief of staff Matt Smith and communications staff George Smith, Manveer Sihota, Bhinder Sajan and Jimmy Smith. The Office of the Premier said no records were located. (All the above named officials remain employed in the government, except for Matt Smith, who left Eby’s office just before Christmas with a $278,629 severance.)
The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) opened a file in April after theBreaker.news complained. During last fall’s provincial election campaign, an OIPC investigator closed the file without interviewing any of the persons named in the request.
The investigator, Ryan Graves, formerly worked inside the NDP government as a senior analyst for the Ministry of Citizens’ Services, which processes government-wide FOI requests.
“I understand that you believe there should be records responsive to your request: however, the OIPC has no authority to compel a public body to explain why it does not have a copy of records that an applicant believes should exist,” Graves wrote in an email on Oct. 1, eight days before he closed the file.
In fact, section 44 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act does give the OIPC the power to order someone to answer questions under oath or affirmation and to hand over records. It did so when a previous commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, found evidence in 2015 of mass-deleting throughout Christy Clark’s BC Liberal government.
NDP amendments to the law make it an offence to wilfully mislead or obstruct the OIPC or wilfully evade the public records law. The maximum fine upon conviction is $50,000.
The OIPC is officially an independent office of the Legislative Assembly, but it relies on the NDP-majority Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services for its annual funding. In 2023-2024, the OIPC reported $10.8 million in operating expenses. Eby’s office, by comparison, was allotted $17 million for the current fiscal year.
In January 2024, Commissioner Michael McEvoy reported that the NDP government had continuously broken the FOI law. The government was taking an average 85 business days to respond to requests, the worst performance since McEvoy’s office began reporting on timeliness of responses 13 years earlier.
In 5,100 cases between 2020 and 2023, the government exceeded deadlines without legal authority. By the 2022-23 fiscal year, applicants were forced to wait an average 192 additional business days for a response.
McEvoy’s six-year term ended in 2024. His successor is former Newfoundland and Labrador commissioner Michael Harvey.
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