The public wasn't warned of Taylor Dueck's release to Kelowna, despite repeated offences and a previous public warning in Abbotsford.

(LEVI LANDRY / iNFOnews.ca)

Of course heads should roll.

We got a peak behind the curtain of our justice system when we learned this week that a sexual offender molested an 11-year-old Kelowna girl while he was supposed to be supervised by a contractor working for Community Living BC.

Kelowna-Mission MLA Renee Merrifield, who appears to be finally growing into her role, took this issue to the legislature and much to her credit, identified the real issue.

Privacy. It’s a persistent stink throughout our public institutions and it needs to be reined in.

When Taylor Dueck was released from prison into the community under supervision, there was no public notice he was here. Somewhere between B.C. Corrections and the Kelowna RCMP, a decision was made to ensure his privacy by withholding public disclosure.

Surely that would have prevented the little darling from getting some equine therapy at a local horse barn.

Marshall Jones, managing editor

So yes, hopefully there’s some sort of review of procedures. Yes, presumably a few people should be fired for being terrible at their jobs.

But this is yet another fine example of the tyranny of privacy legislation in this country and more squarely in B.C.

It’s true democracy dies in darkness but that’s not the only casualty.

So too goes accountability. Down goes transparency in how our governments operate.

Speaking as someone who has been trying to pry these ridiculous secrets from the hands of pointless bureaucrats for the last 30 years, we are all under the dark cloud of privacy legislation.

Let’s count the toll.

Robert Riley Saunders took advantage of a bunch of poor and vulnerable Indigenous children under the cover of the absolute secrecy of the Ministry of Children and Families. It’s a miracle his crimes were ever exposed. We know what happened to him because he wound up in court. But what about his superiors? Or some of his colleagues who were accused of similar behaviour? You’ll never know.

The courts, once the final refuge for open information, regularly twists itself into a pretzel to avoid disclosure. Names are regularly removed from court judgements without any real explanation. One source of ours has to go to court to remove a public ban on her name because the press is basically forbidden from telling her story with her identity. B.C. is somewhat lucky compared to other provinces because we have a publicly accessible database recording all criminal allegations and offences. Except when higher profile offenders like Dueck or Curtis Sagmoen or Stephen Witvoet hit the system, they get special treatment and somehow files get expunged from the system.

So if, like me, you think it’s important to keep tabs on Sagmoen, who had the body of a missing young women found on his property, or Witvoet, a physiotherapist who couldn’t keep his hands off private parts of his female patients, they make it nearly impossible.

Police have become one of the worst offenders. The federal Privacy Act, they tell us, prevents them from identifying homicide victims. Somehow, somewhere about ten years ago, dead people were bestowed privacy rights.

The B.C. Coroners Service is a joke. Its job is to investigate public deaths. Then it insists on hiding that information from the public.

Twenty years ago, I could regularly walk into the coroner’s office and ask to see the binder of recent coroner’s reports. It was a wealth of vital information on how members of our community died. I saw the writing on the wall when a wealthy family lobbied the coroner to redact the coroner’s report on the death of their daughter. She died of a fatal drug combination of a birth control pill called Diane-35, prescribed as it often was for acne, and [REDACTED].

If your kid was on Diane-35, wouldn’t you want to know what combination of drugs killed an otherwise healthy young woman in her 20s?

These are just a few of hundreds of examples of what is lost under the censors’ pen. And with every decision from the courts that goes overboard on privacy, all the quasi-judicial bodies take their cue, cycling up on each turn to remove more information we need to know.

Government officials treat us all like children. They presume we can't handle the information. I guess they expect us all to trust them. And for some reason, we do and don’t care about it until their worst mistakes become public. Then we’re left to wonder how many we will never, ever find out about.

So carry on, Renee Merrifield. Give ‘em hell. Hold them accountable. Demand heads on pikes.

But don’t lose sight of how we got here, what made these terrible deeds possible in the first place.

They can do anything under the dark cover of privacy. Someone has to turn the lights back on.

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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