BCMA board slammed for targeting doctor who sank $70-million deal

[monkey799]

The Vancouver Sun

Mon 24 Nov 2008

Page: A3

Section: News

By: Ian Mulgrew

 

The B.C. Supreme Court has rebuked the board of the B.C. Medical Association for trying to discredit a doctor who scuttled the $70-million fee deal brokered in 2005 to end a major public funding battle with the provincial government.

 

Dr. Caroline Wang -- a longtime BCMA board member -- also won an order preventing the board and a special committee it struck from further blackening her name."I order that the members of the special committee are restrained from exercising any of their powers," Justice Sandra Ballance said.

 

"They are restrained from issuing any judgment, report or recommendation in relation to any matter relative to the terms of reference. The BCMA is likewise restrained from receiving any such report or recommendation and from communicating the contents thereof."

 

Wang said she was pleased. "It's shone a light on the functioning of the board and it's a wake-up call for the [bCMA] membership," she said.

 

The ruling hammered the board and pulled back the curtain on a nasty, long-running schism within the medical profession over the governance of the association that acts as its political arm. By spearheading the defeat-the-fee deal, Wang precipitated further negotiations that led to a richer windfall for all B.C. physicians and a much more expensive bill for provincial taxpayers.

 

"I'm very pleased," she said over the weekend. "It's been a long journey for me. It really started in the summer of 2005 [during the fee dispute] -- this issue about transparency. I opposed the closed-door decision-making and the top-down corporate governance. But I'm surprised I had to go to this extent."

 

Ballance chastised BCMA then-president Geoff Appleton and the other executives who appear to have been fuelled in part by the loss of face during the headline-grabbing dispute with the Liberal government.

 

She issued restraining orders against Appleton and members of the special committee she said ought to be disbanded -- Evelyn Shukin, Carole Williams and Michael Golbey, president at the time of the 2005 dispute.

 

"This might look like it's about me, but it's really about the membership and the future of the BCMA," Wang said. "I was a board member for 10 years before this happened and held one of only two positions elected by the membership at large. Many members including me don't like the direction the board has been going in."

 

Her supporters are suggesting a special meeting of the BCMA membership be called to address the serious concerns raised by the ruling. "It is difficult to imagine how the conduct of the board, which fails to adhere to its own code of conduct designed to govern its own directors, could nevertheless be said to be acting in the best interests of the BCMA," Ballance said.

 

"On this basis alone, it can be said that the directors have acted in contravention of Sec. 25 of the Society Act, and with unintended irony, are thereby in breach of the code of conduct itself. Along the same lines, I question how the board's conduct can reasonably be seen as being in good faith. This statutory breach on the part of the BCMA justifies intervention by the court."

 

The deep division caused by the high-profile 2005 squabble soured some members of the board who wanted to see Wang disciplined for her temerity in bucking the majority's wishes and continuing dissidence.

 

Appleton's letter to the BCMA membership about the dispute with Wang was "rich with innuendo," the justice said. "I cannot leave these reasons without remarking that, from the outset, the board appeared to be heavy-handed and misguided in its treatment of Dr. Wang," Ballance added in her lengthy decision released last week.

 

The controversy spoiled Wang's run this spring for her seventh term on the BCMA board and she claimed that was one of her opponents' goals.

 

Wang got a lawyer when she realized what was happening after a board meeting in February and filed this suit, but her campaign was broadsided. "Based on the evidence before me, I cannot say whether Dr. Appleton or any member of the board deliberately intended to sabotage Dr. Wang's participation in the election," Ballance said.

 

"However, it would have been reasonably foreseeable to them that the contents of the Feb. 2 letter put her reputation and integrity squarely in issue and would cast a dark cloud of suspicion over Dr. Wang. The impression I am left with is that the board's conduct was due in large measure to the human dynamics at play, specifically the perception held by some directors that strident measures ought to be taken to put an end to Dr. Wang's chronic public dissension, combined with feelings of annoyance and, possibly, outrage at her perceived defiance in refusing to leave the February board meeting."

 

Wang, who was honorary secretary treasurer in 2005, disagreed back then with the official BCMA recommendation that the province's 4,000 GPs accept the government's offer and end the politically volatile dispute. Although the proposed pact included $16,000 annual bonuses for each qualifying family doctor, it also reduced a number of fees.

 

Representing more than 90 per cent of the province's 8,500 practicing doctors, the BCMA worked hard with the Liberals to craft the deal and told the media only "a vocal minority" opposed it. When the board refused to circulate an analysis outlining the proposal's drawbacks, however, Wang sent everyone her own negative assessment of the $70-million package. The deal collapsed.

 

A year later, in May 2006, family doctors got a better settlement as part of a broader $1.29-billion agreement -- other doctors benefited from a 10.4 per cent fee increase for services over four years while GPs got a 19.1 per cent hike.

 

A family physician for two decades in Richmond, Wang has long found herself at loggerheads with some members of the BCMA board. Their antagonistic relationship deteriorated further last year.

 

It is amply clear, Ballance said, Wang and others had become engaged in a major and ongoing controversy over the entitlement of a member of the board to express dissent and the acceptable parameters of such dissension.

 

But she concluded the board acted improperly. "Even if the special committee had been validly formed, Dr. Wang has demonstrated a reasonable apprehension of bias on the part of both Drs. Golbey and Williams such that they are disqualified," Balance said sharply. "Consequently, the special committee ought to be disbanded."

 

Of course the BCMA doesn't want to talk about it. They're casting aspersions on the embarrassing decision and consulting about an appeal with Howard Shapray, an expensive, top-drawer corporate lawyer.

 

"Without intending any disrespect to the court or Dr. Wang, we were very surprised and obviously disappointed by the judgment," Dr. William Mackie, current BCMA president, said in a message to the more than 11,000 membership, which includes medical professionals, not just practising doctors.

 

"The BCMA has retained senior counsel, who is of the view that there are legal, procedural and factual errors in the judgment which provide substantial grounds to challenge the judgment on appeal."

 

Wang said we'll have to wait and see what happens.

[Jochi1543]

Wow, restraining orders, that's pretty hardcore. I wonder what they were saying/doing.

[futuredoc]

I hope you didn't find this on the CBC forums, they really hate this kind of stuff .