Boards of governors are responsible for running their organizations. Yet they are not taught what public accountability means and what the board’s own public accountability is.

A board’s public accountability means the obligation of board members to

1. state publicly before the fact what they intend the organization to bring about, for whom, and why they intend it
2. what performance standards they have in place for the people running the various key operations critical to solid achievement and gaining public trust
3. how they control performance, which means causing to happen that which should and causing not to happen that which shouldn’t
4. what came from what they did or failed to do, and how they applied the available learning.

These commonsense obligations should be in every organization’s bylaws but they are not, and no government has required it. That is because no government requires full and fair public explanation before and after the fact from those who intend to affect citizens in important ways. The laws for organizations are full of powers and duties but no public accounting beyond ritual financial statements and annual meetings.

Here is an example.

The conduct of the British Columbia provincial government’s health authority for Vancouver Island (VIHA), which runs the Island’s hospitals and health services has been such that citizens formed a citizens’ accountability group (CAG) to deal with the public accountability of the Authority.  A concern example is the Board’s privatization intentions. The Island’s hospitals used to have their own boards of directors to run things, accountable to their communities, but the government disbanded these to put all responsibility under a single board whose members are not elected but appointed by the B.C.Minister of Health. The VIHA Board is thus the public face of the Minister.  There are five such authorities for B.C.

The group wrote to the VIHA Board in May of 2008 to ask about its about its responsibilities and public accountability but did not receive a useful answer.

The group wrote again in July 2008 to propose a commonsense and unassailable public accounting obligation applicable to the Board, and asked the Board to say whether it agreed with it and, if not, why not. The Board responded to questions not asked and gave no responses to the questions asked.

In September 2008 the group wrote to each individual member of the Board, there being a problem with members getting only administration summaries of letters to the Board. The letter cited the 30 July “open” Board meeting in Qualicum on the Island, with people attending not allowed to ask questions from the floor.

The group’s question to the Board for the 30 July meeting, required in writing well before the meeting and responded to at the meeting in writing, was more fog. 

At the meeting, a very articulate  spokesperson for the Cowichan valley said, in an authorized short presentation that the Board’s decision to close a respected care facility without prior explanation of its intentions and reasons to the surrounding community of 80,000 meant that the Board had lost the public’s trust. And that is exactly what happens. Boards go into denial and don’t believe it can happen and, if they accept the linkage, don’t believe it need change their conduct unless some higher authority such as a minister of the Crown makes them. And that doesn’t happen.

Therefore it is up to citizens to form issue groups to keep asking legitimate accountability questions of the “directing minds” of governments, their agencies and other authorities until refusals to answer or  misleading or fog responses become a public issue attracting media attention. The advantage is that authorities know how to answer or stonewall “pressure’ attempts (placard parades, letters to editors, etc) but they don’t know how to deal credibly with legitimate accountability questions put to them. This is because they have never had to.