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Opinion: CEO’s letter of resignation cites abandonment of priorities she was hired to achieve
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VICTORIA — The NDP government’s decision to back away from its ambitious makeover of the Royal B.C. Museum was behind the resignation of CEO Alicia Dubois.
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“The key mandate changes since I started have … left me unable to advance the priorities I was specifically hired to accomplish,” wrote Dubois in her letter of resignation to the RBCM board.“I was hired to build and create a modern, progressive, inclusive museum.”
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The former executive director of the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation, Dubois joined the museum on Feb. 22, 2022, at $250,000 a year, plus a $50,000 stipend.
At the time, the NDP government was on an all-out drive to “decolonize” the institution, tearing out Old Town and other third floor exhibits as a prelude to replacing the entire museum.
Dubois expressed dismay in her resignation letter that despite making progress on the internal culture at the museum and addressing Indigenous reconciliation, she was “unable to advance significantly the museum redevelopment.”
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“In addition to the museum upheaval, it has been a year of loss and health-related, lifelong adjustments for my family and the cumulative impact is now requiring my energy and attention.”
Dubois did not specify the personal reasons in the letter dated June 7.
The board held off until late on Friday afternoon to make the news public in a statement that said as little as possible about the reasons for her departure.
“She was not pushed out in any way,” board chair Leslie Brown told CBC News on Saturday. “It was her decision to leave.”
The museum released a copy of the Dubois letter on Wednesday after some pestering by reporter Rob Shaw of CHEK News.
However, it blacked out a key passage.
The final paragraph began: “As the board knows, after being pursued for the role …” The rest was redacted, leaving one to guess at her parting words.
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Dubois has asked the board to cover unspecified travel costs, Shaw reports. She was paid $4,125 in travel expenses associated with her move from Alberta to B.C.
The departing CEO is within her rights to suggest that the New Democrats pulled the rug out from under her after recruiting her to preside over the controversial makeover.
When the appointment was announced, the board cited her intercultural expertise and experience in “change management” within large complex organizations.
Those accolades came from Carole James, the former NDP leader and cabinet minister who then-premier John Horgan named as his personal representative on the RBCM board.
The full NDP plan to makeover the museum was announced May 13, 2022, provoking a widespread public backlash over the $1 billion cost, the eight-year shutdown, and the poorly understood goal of “decolonizing” the popular institution.
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A year ago today, Horgan himself stepped in to take responsibility for the debacle. He announced that the government was cancelling the redevelopment and sending the makeover back to square one for public consultations.
When Premier David Eby took over from Horgan late last year, he named Lana Popham the new minister of tourism with responsibility for the provincial museum.
As a resident of a riding in the provincial capital region, Popham recognized that the first job was to get the museum back on track as a tourist attraction and favourite of local residents. Early this year, she invited the news media on a tour of Old Town and the other third floor exhibits that had been shuttered at the outset of 2022.
Reporters were surprised to discover that Old Town and many other exhibits were far more intact than they’d been led to believe by the “decolonizing” rhetoric of the previous year.
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Dubois presided over the tour along with Popham. But it was apparent that the CEO and the minister were not on the same page.
Popham showed considerable enthusiasm for the place. Dubois seemed far more interested in the three-year public consultation on the museum’s future that she launched after Horgan’s cancellation.
Popham told reporters she would like to see Old Town reopened “the sooner the better” and preferably this summer.
When Dubois was asked about the possibility she replied “perhaps” before the end of the year.
Popham won that battle, with last month’s announcement that Old Town will partly reopen July 29.
As for the departure of Dubois, the minister sees it as an opportunity.
“With the CEO resigning and not feeling like she wanted to be part of it, I’m really excited to have an interim CEO while we search for a more permanent CEO that can fulfil this vision, absolutely,” she told reporter Shaw.
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The reopened exhibits will include “contextual revisions” to address historical lapses in the earlier displays.
But it will mainly be a celebration of what Popham calls “the people’s museum.”
“We’re going to have a fabulous reopening of Old Town,” she told Al Ferraby on CFAX radio this week. “I think we’ve gotten past the negativity of the last little while.”
Still, I doubt she’ll find it as easy to derail the decolonizing drive as it was to see off the CEO who was hired to preside over it.
vpalmer@postmedia.com
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