Photo: FAMILY PHOTO Rebecca Warburton with son Dave in the early 1990s. Rebecca Warburton worked as everything from a CIA analyst contributing to then-U.S.
president Jimmy Carter’s daily briefings to a researcher and University of Victoria professor, but it was the infamous 2012 Health Ministry firings that put her in the headlines. Health Minister Adrian Dix, who advocated on behalf of the fired researchers at first in Opposition and later in government, said the general advice in such controversies is to move on, but that wasn’t Warburton’s style. “She was absolutely a force of nature,” Dix said of Warburton, who died suddenly at age 70 on March 13 after complications involving a ruptured appendix.
“This was a remarkable, determined, generous person who stuck to her position and stuck to her belief in the evidence.” Warburton, who earned a master’s degree in economics at the London School of Economics, worked for several B.C.
government ministries, and won a tenure-track position in UVic’s School of Public Administration three years after earning her PhD through the University of London in 1996. She was at the top of her game when she and seven of her colleagues, including her husband, were swept up in a flawed investigation by the then-B.C.
Liberal government. The probe involved an alleged data privacy breach and contract-award irregularities related to the B.C.
Health Ministry’s pharmaceutical services division. All of them were fired. “It was a case.
