The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The Lloyd Carr fiasco has laid bare dangerous faults within the hiring practices of the NOR-MAN Regional Health Authority. It matters not whether Mr. Carr got extraordinarily lucky when taken on by the NRHA. Surely some fortuity did aide Mr. Carr in his elaborate contrivances, but no amount should have allowed him to slip through the checks and balances of an agency entrusted with our physical and mental well-being. As has now been reported across Canada, toward the end of 2008 Mr. Carr was able to land work with the NRHA counselling our most vulnerable citizens as a mental health clinician for youth in Flin Flon and area. Mr. Carr did this despite a string of ugly facts that have been revealed through news reports. He had a criminal record for theft. He lied about holding a university degree. And, perhaps most shockingly, he had been fired from an Alberta addictions agency two years earlier for pilfering $634,000 in taxpayer money. Moreover, a simple Google search produces several freely accessible articles about Mr. Carr's high-profile troubles that predate his employment with the NRHA. A 2006 piece on the CBC website even includes his photo. One question is now rightly on the public's mind: how? How in this day and age can an impostor, skilled as he may be, bamboozle his way into one of the most critical jobs within the NRHA, into a position of authority over our children? Other reasonable queries are hypothetical but just as disturbing. Some parents, for instance, have wondered what may have happened had Mr. Carr's past misdeeds targeted kids, not money. Thankfully we did not have to learn the answer. And precisely because of Mr. Carr's deception, the chances that we will ever have to find out will be further minimized Ð or at least should be. As startling as this incident was, and as justifiably angry as parents and the public are, the NRHA has an opportunity to right its ship after this storm subsides. The agency launched an internal investigation last week after learning of Mr. Carr's past. A formal statement was expected yesterday, after The Reminder went to press. Whatever the NRHA says now and in the future, its obligation is to lay all the cards out on the table. What happened with Mr. Carr's presumed criminal record check? Why was his alleged university degree not verified? Why was more digging not done? Did he commit further crimes while in Flin Flon? Mr. Carr's hiring has already done its damage. To the parents who trusted him. To the children who depended on him. To public confidence in the health-care system in Flin Flon and beyond. We now need to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and why it won't happen again. The NRHA requires a transparent plan, preferably with some outside oversight, to ensure that no more Lloyd Carrs slip through the cracks. Perhaps Manitoba Health Minister Theresa Oswald put it best in speaking to this newspaper earlier this week. "If nothing else," she said, "this very troubling case has sent a very loud and clear message not only to regional health authorities, but to hiring bodies across the nation, that there is absolutely no time to waste in doing criminal record checks and child abuse registry checks, that they simply are not negotiable." Local Angle runs Fridays.
