As an ed­u­ca­tor one of my con­cerns is ad­dress­ing "not-learn­ing" or re­sis­tance to learn­ing. In re­cent months some mem­bers of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship have re­peat­ed­ly demon­strat­ed by their be­hav­iours that learn­ing the fun­da­men­tals of con­cepts like "con­flict of in­ter­est" and "eth­i­cal-know-how" that are part of "New Pol­i­tics," de­spite clear and use­ful feed­back, is chal­leng­ing for them. While we might like to pro­vide chil­dren safe op­por­tu­ni­ties to "ex­plore, dis­cov­er, make mis­takes and con­struct un­der­stand­ings for them­selves" un­der the guid­ance of a knowl­edge­able teacher, adults en­trust­ed with man­ag­ing the pub­lic's purse and car­ing for the na­tion's psy­cho­log­i­cal well-be­ing may re­quire more di­rect in­struc­tion. In the case of Dr Fuad Khan, once he recog­nised the po­ten­tial eth­i­cal con­flict, and not just the po­lit­i­cal and le­gal ram­i­fi­ca­tions, it was his re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to bring it to the Prime Min­is­ter's at­ten­tion.

From there the pub­lic should have been in­formed, and these are the key points (lap­tops and tablets out): an ex­pla­na­tion giv­en as to why it would be nec­es­sary for Dr Khan to be al­lowed to pro­ceed with his prac­tice tem­porar­i­ly, a time­line giv­en as to when his du­ties there would be com­plet­ed or tak­en over by some­one else (named), as­sur­ances giv­en that he would not be tak­ing on any new pa­tients, sys­tems de­scribed and put in place for pro­tect­ing the rights of pa­tients who might have com­plaints with the in­sti­tu­tion or with him and of course the stan­dard guar­an­tee that this would not neg­a­tive­ly af­fect or com­pro­mise his oth­er du­ties as Min­is­ter of Health, with a clear out­lin­ing of con­se­quences should it be demon­strat­ed that it did. Giv­en the rel­a­tive­ly short-no­tice of his ap­point­ment the pub­lic would like­ly have been more un­der­stand­ing of the pro­fes­sion­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ties to at­tend to his pa­tients' well-be­ing and seek their best in­ter­est than the ir­re­spon­si­ble at­tempt at self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion that "It's not against the law!" New Pol­i­tics re­quires break­ing with old habits of think­ing and be­hav­iour. This con­cludes to­day's les­son.

Steven Khan

North Van­cou­ver, British Co­lum­bia, Cana­da