There’s great irony in government launching a cost-saving review by appointing a new person with an almost $400,000 salary to oversee it. But if Health Minister Josie Osborne saw that incongruity Monday, she didn’t let on — instead, charging forward aggressively to defend hiring Dr. Penny Ballem at a pricey compensation package to begin nickel-and-diming a system that, over the last two decades, Ballem helped create.
“Her extensive experience in the health-care sector, and the different roles that she has played all of these years, I think she is in a very unique and good position to be able to help lead this review,” said Osborne.
Ballem was named interim CEO of the Provincial Health Services Authority on Monday, to lead an internal efficiency review into agencies like BC Cancer, BC Children’s Hospital, BC Women’s Hospital, BC Emergency Health Services and the BC Centre for Disease Control.
The move was part of a promise Premier David Eby made during the election, after he was stung by criticism that B.C.’s seven health authorities were wasting frontline money, within a severely stressed health-care system, on a proliferation of highly paid executives, vice-presidents and senior managers.
As if to prove that point Monday, the government began the cost-cutting exercise not by firing the former PHSA CEO, David Byers, but instead seconding him into the ministry of health to review racism within the health-care system.
While he continues to draw his salary, taxpayers are now also paying a second CEO compensation package for Ballem at approximately $400,000 annually. Her first report is due in six weeks, said Osborne.
You could argue that Ballem is the architect of many of the inefficiencies found today in B.C.’s health-care system — first as a former deputy minister of health from 2001-06, where she created the PHSA, then later as a top ministry consultant during the reshaping of health care in the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently as Eby’s special advisor on health care.
She also served for six years as the chair of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which itself will soon be put under a microscope to find efficiencies that accumulated under Ballem’s watch. And she was, until late March, the special advisor to Osborne on strategizing health-care policy.
Is there a conflict with the NDP government choosing someone so deeply involved in the health-care system to review and improve its structures?
It doesn’t look great.
The Opposition BC Conservatives dubbed Ballem a “failed consultant” and “B.C. NDP insider” in question period on Monday, and questioned why she got the job.
“I have absolutely no problem standing up and defending the work that Dr. Ballem has been doing in the health-care sector for the past 35 years,” shot back Osborne.
“For 35 years she has had a sequence of different roles in the private sector, in the non-profit sector, in the health-care sector.”
Osborne cited the “sound and sage advice” Ballem has given her as well.
Still, her appointment comes with a cost for the NDP government — not just the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on Ballem’s salary, but the political capital the NDP has to burn through to justify a questionable appointment.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
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