B.C.’s fired LNG advocate says he’s seriously considering legal action, despite an apology from the government over comments suggesting he hadn’t done any work while in the job.
It comes a week after former BC Liberal Leader Gordon Wilson was fired from his role as head of the LNG Buy BC program, and publicly criticized by Premier John Horgan and Jobs Minister Bruce Ralston for an apparent lack of written work.
Since then, a 180 page report penned by Wilson himself in 2014 has re-surfaced.
This information can be found on the government’s Open Information website, and had been the subject of an FOI by the then-opposition NDP.
LISTEN: Gordon Wilson not ruling out legal action against NDP government
Both Ralston and Horgan have subsequently issued public apologies.
“I offer an apology to Mr. Wilson and I am hopeful that we can now all move on and get on with programs that can help people,” Horgan said on Tuesday.
But speaking with CKNW’s Steele & Drex, Wilson said after consulting with his lawyer he’s determined that may not be enough.
“[My lawyer’s] opinion is, and I’m going to take it, that opinions given in response to media don’t constitute and apology, the damage that has been done is extensive and frankly the whole issue is going to hinge on our request for documentation of the review that was done.”
WATCH: Premier John Horgan offers an apology to Gordon Wilson at a press conference Tuesday
To that end, Wilson said he and his legal counsel want to see the paper trail that led up to his firing, and will assess whether the firing and subsequent public comments were conducted with malice.
“I would have accepted it, I get it, they understand my relationship with the former premier, they understand how I was appointed, my partisan affiliation. And if they said, ‘Thanks, you’re out of here.’ I would have said, ‘Adios, I’m gone.’ And that would have been the end of it.”
Wilson added that not only has he not received a personal apology from either Horgan or Ralston, he still hasn’t been given a formal notice of termination.
LISTEN: Premier Horgan and the NDP set to apologize to Gordon Wilson
Speaking on The Jon McComb Show with guest host Simi Sara, The Province columnist Mike Smyth said he spoke with Ralston on Monday about the report.
“Ralston said last week – and this is critical – the government did an internal review of Wilson’s work before they fired him. So I asked Ralston ‘how could you have done a review that did not turn up these documents?’ He couldn’t really explain that, he just said he relied on information that was given to him by other people,” said Smyth.
He also notes there’s an interesting twist.
“There are 28 separate updates filed by Wilson to Shirley Bond, and this is all on the government’s own website and one of the great ironies of it is that it was the NDP that filed the freedom of information request for this information.”
Smyth notes he took a call on Monday from Ralston who has since retracted his earlier comments and apologized to Wilson.