N.B. Liquor 'whistleblower' has 'alarming' information in Hartland case, lawyer says
CBC
A former top N.B. Liquor official has come forward as a potential whistleblower to offer "alarming new information" about a lawsuit alleging "manipulation" of a lucrative contract by the corporation, court filings say.
A lawyer for a Hartland businessperson who lost a lucrative contract for an agency store in the town says the information "directly contradicts" evidence filed by N.B. Liquor so far.
N.B. Liquor has responded with a court filing that publicly identifies the former official as Stacey McKinney, the former director of finance at the Crown corporation.
McKinney was challenging her firing from N.B. Liquor before the Hartland decision was made. Her lawyer told the corporation in March that she had information on more than 34 examples of "financial, ethical and illegal irregularities" there.
The corporation argues McKinney is not entitled to whistleblower status, a protection available to provincial employees, because she has yet to disclose any information under the Public Interest Disclosure Act.
That act, nicknamed the whistleblower protection law, says it exists "to facilitate the disclosure and investigation of significant and serious matters in or relating to the public service that are potentially unlawful, dangerous to the public or injurious to the public interest."
McKinney was fired by N.B. Liquor in June 2020. She says it happened just before she finalized audits of N.B. Liquor that would "impact the legitimacy" of its financial statements.
In a grievance, she says she'd been recommended for a leave of absence because of illness but was fired without cause instead.
In March 2021, her lawyer Joel Etienne told N.B. Liquor that McKinney had tried to report the more than 34 cases of improprieties to the audit committee of the corporation's board of directors.
They included financial reporting discrepancies, "inappropriate" expense claims and "financial control weaknesses" that pointed to possible "misstatements" in the corporation's financial statements.
Etienne's letter alleged that the "main culprits" behind the financial improprieties attempted to eliminate McKinney's position and her department by outsourcing the work to a private accounting firm.
"As this matter is currently before the courts, we have no comment at this time," N.B. Liquor spokesperson Marie-Andrée Bolduc in an emailed statement.
McKinney is still challenging her firing. That legal case is unrelated to the lawsuit over the Hartland agency store.
But last week Fredericton lawyer Erica Brown wrote to the court to say she had learned "out of the blue" that McKinney, who she didn't name, had information relevant to the case.
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