Falsified Document

Adrian Dix backdated an official Premier’s Office memo for use in a criminal trial. He hid the facts until an RCMP investigation was underway – then he came clean.

In the midst of a criminal investigation into Premier Glen Clark, Adrian Dix produced a “memo-to-file” that appeared, at the outset, to clear his boss Glen Clark from any criminal wrongdoing.

Soon after, Dix was fired as Glen Clark’s chief of staff and picked up $70,000 in severance pay.

Later it was revealed during a court trial, with Clark as a defendant, that the memo was a fabrication that Dix had backdated to insulate his boss from potential conflict-of-interest allegations.

H.A.D. Oliver, BC’s Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner reviewed the actions of Dix and concluded that Dix took the extraordinary step in September 1998 of “obtaining the date stamp for Office of the Premier from his secretary’s desk, turning the date back to July 17, 1998, and stamping the memorandum with that date.”

After being chastised by the Conflict-of-Interest Commissioner, Dix even refused to acknowledge that faking a memo during a criminal investigation was unethical: “I don’t think that any of those mistakes involved wrongdoing, they weren’t ethical mistakes” – Adrian Dix, Vancouver Sun, Aug 30/02