A Reader's Reading Of The Milburn Report On The Vancouver School Board.

WhyGoodCommentThreadsStill
MatterVille


When longtime reader 'Lew' decides to leave a detailed comment on a topic of import I pay attention.

The following, which is a comment on that 'report/audit' that our fine Minister of Education indicated helped him to fire the entire Vancouver School Board, is something I found to be of exeptional interest:

There doesn’t appear to be anything in Milburn’s report that should have surprised the Minister of Education or his staff had they been fulfilling their oversight role on a regular basis. The report appears to be an attempt to make it appear as though Bernier was shocked to discover what was going on and he had no option but to fire the Board.

The terms of reference on page one make no mention of Milburn being tasked with determining whether the minister should or should not decide to dismiss a school board, and his ruminations on page three are therefore gratuitous. He states, “However, the terms of reference for this review go beyond the question of non-compliance as a basis for the Lieutenant Governor in Council to consider intervention under section 172(1)(c) of the School Act.” Why would he make that statement? The terms of reference “go beyond the question” because they don’t contemplate it. And neither do any of his recommendations. But it’s clear that it was a key goal of his review because he actually states it has equal importance to providing an action plan for the Minister through which he may enable the VSB to rectify and strengthen their approach to governance and oversight of the district.

He was asked to do a forensic audit of the of the trustee’s expenses. Which means looking for criminal acts. He apparently found none. Anything else was known by the Minister beforehand, including the purported reason for terminating the Board, which he admits in his report was going to be imminently rectified by the Board without any action by the Minister in any case. This is a hatchet job. Pure and simple...


Thanks very much Lew.

I'll have more to say about this later.

And, as you might expect, I plan to keep on saying things about it, well past the 2.274 news cycles that the wizardry knows it takes for the local proMedia  to lose interest when a document is dumped on a Friday afternoon.


.