The Province Newspaper
If Advanced Education Minister and former Mountie Amrik Virk doesn’t understand why he should resign his portfolio, Premier Christy Clark should ease him of that intellectual burden and fire him from her cabinet.
This week’s revelations that Virk was not only directly involved in a scheme to illegally top up the salaries of senior executives at Kwantlen Polytechnic University but also apparently withheld evidence of his involvement is not behaviour that brings honour to himself or to his cabinet post.
A second review of Virk’s conduct was ordered Monday by Finance Minister Mike de Jong after the NDP made public embarrassing leaked emails by Virk showing his direct involvement in improper payments to former Kwantlen vice-president Anne Lavack.
A previous report by senior official Rob Mingay, who is conducting the new review, found that the Kwantlen board of which Virk was a member knew about similar improper payments to current Kwantlen president Alan Davis.
Virk admits that he wrote the newly revealed emails, but wants us to believe that his involvement in the improper contract, not revealed to Mingay, slipped his mind.
B.C. NDP leader John Horgan and the B.C. Conservatives are correct to call on Virk to resign or be fired. How can someone who has done these things oversee B.C.’s post-secondary institutions? He cannot and should not.
