Six weeks ago, Natalie Clancy of CBC Vancouver called me to get my opinion on an interesting story. A neighbor of Surrey Memorial Hospital had pointed out that the Fraser Health Authority had torn down a perfectly good parking garage to build a new, well, parking garage. The story seemed weird, so Natalie started checking it out.

It turns out the FHA was spending nearly $30 million to tear down the old garage and build a new one, which was going to net the hospital an extra 300 spaces. In comments to the CBC, I questioned the cost benefit of that - $100,000 per parking space seemed outrageous.

Then the FHA spin doctors jumped in, informing Natalie, in writing, that the old garage had “significant seismic issues.” The story never ran, but both Natalie and I put in Freedom of Information requests to find out just how bad the seismic issues were. After all, the old parkade was built in 1988, and while experts told us that it should have a 50-year lifespan, FHA said it had “significant seismic issues.” We don’t want a public facility falling on innocent people.

Fast forward six weeks, and the long awaited FOI requests come back from the non-spin department in FHA: no seismic report exists. But their communications people had told Natalie flat-out it had “significant seismic issues”? How is that possible if it had never been looked at by an engineer.

On last night’s CBC News, Natalie broke the story wide open. Here is the piece:

Links to all our FOIs can be found here.

It looks like the FHA’s communications department “torqued” the truth to get rid of the CBC and me six weeks ago. Unfortunately for them, under provincial law, FOI requests must be fully processed and responded to. This is just another reason why we at the FOI don’t always take our governments’ word for it – we verify.

Kudos to Natalie and the CBC for this story, and I look forward to seeing what my next round of FOI requests at FHA uncovers.