On unreasonable explanations

Bloggers and columnists alike have had plenty to say about the Sask Party's negotiations toward a surgical tourism program sending Saskatchewan patients to B.C. But there are a couple of points which seem worth following up on based on Murray Mandryk's column in particular:

Lingenfelter noted one redacted page that he suggested was blacked out because it clearly showed the government was contemplating paying those premiums. McMorris and government officials insisted Monday that premiums weren't even mentioned in the blacked-out copy.

As per usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

A copy of the redacted words later obtained by StarPhoenix reporter James Wood didn't mention the word "premiums", but did show the B.C. government was requesting a fee for "administrative and capital overhead".

The first point is a relatively minor one. But it seems rather striking that documentation which was supposedly too confidential to be released in response an access to information request on January 5 suddenly became available to only selected media within a week. And I'd imagine the issue is one worth pressing if there's any more followup on the access request.

More substantively, though, I have to wonder whether Mandryk is right to let the Sask Party off the hook for its seriousness about the plan to send patients to B.C.:

Deputy health minister Dan Florizone was quick to explain Monday that this fee differed from a premium and -- more significantly -- it was B.C.'s proposal and not something that Saskatchewan was seriously considering.

Florizone's latter explanation appears a reasonable one, given that the Saskatchewan government doesn't ever seem to respond to B.C.'s plan.

Let's leave aside the fact that the discussion originated between the respective premiers who presumably wouldn't have been making idle chitchat, and focus instead on how the Sask Party responded internally. On multiple occasions, Ministry of Health officials told their B.C. counterparts that the issue was going to be presented to Saskatchewan's Treasury Board - first in September 2009 (a meeting that was cancelled for unspecified reasons), then in October.

Now, it's not clear why the meetings didn't take place. And if the Treasury Board step is a smaller one than it sounds like to me, then I'd be interested to hear that. But it would seem to me that a proposal wouldn't be lightly put in front of the Treasury Board - and that the purpose for taking it to that level would be in part to find budget room for a project which was at least under serious consideration in principle.

Which means that while at least this time the Sask Party didn't get to the stage of actually making final decisions before foisting a policy on the province, it seems hard to justify the conclusion that the proposal wasn't taken seriously on Saskatchewan's end - and downright impossible to defend Don McMorris' denials last fall.