Hospital Backtracks on Hunka
Hospital Backtracks on Hunka
Hospital Foundation President claims appointing a new Chair and attempting to erase history was just "playing it safe".
Martin Hunka was elected as a Trustee to the Foundation Board on his own merits in 2015. He has and continues to serve in the capacity of Chair, with the utmost integrity. - President of the North Bay Hospital Foundation
After I reported on the North Bay Hospital Foundation’s removal of Martin Hunka (son of Yaroslav Hunka) as their board chair last week, the hospital seems to now be backtracking.
Shortly after news broke that Parliament had honoured Hunka and Speaker Anthony Rota had to resign, the Hospital Foundation quickly scrubbed all attachments they had to the Hunka family. The removed Martin as the Chair and listed their Vice-Chair as also holding the Chair position. They deleted all prior annual reports and deleted all historical Facebook posts that mentioned the Hunka name.
But today after receiving a lot of pressure, they have come out with a statement.
They told BayToday.ca that they were just “playing it safe” when they lied to the public and attempted to mislead the entire community. Tammy Morison, President of the North Bay Regional Health Centre Foundation’s full statement was:
Martin Hunka was elected as a Trustee to the Foundation Board on his own merits in 2015. He has and continues to serve in the capacity of Chair, with the utmost integrity. He has a longstanding history of serving our community and our Foundation. The decision to remove his information temporarily from the website was made in an effort to protect the safety and privacy of all those involved including volunteers and staff.
As of this morning, they have re listed Hunka as the Chair and removed the title of Chair from the Vice-Chair. How did having this man listed as chair 7 days ago pose any risk to anyone’s safety? If that risk was real, then how has it disappeared today?
Last Week:
Today:
The fact that they listed a new Chair last week raises a lot of questions on what transpired here. If the intent was to just to remove Hunka from the website temporarily, then why appoint a new Chair? Why delete all mention of him on their social media page and annual reports?
It appears like someone in this organization made a hasty decision to try and hide all associations to this individual and family. Unfortunately only after this was brought to the public’s eye, they have backtracked.
The organization has also re uploaded some of their annual reports (but has still chosen to omit all reports before 2020 which were previously available.
Last week:
Today:
Whatever happened here, the hospital is not being upfront and transparent. As a publicly accountable charity responsible for millions of dollars, they cannot mislead the public like this and attempt to erase key information from their website.
A full explanation and and apology should be given by this board and the foundation.
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If Martin Hunka believes that his father was a hero, then in my opinion Martin does not have integrity--especially now when he can no longer claim ignorance about what his father was. He might perhaps have a strong emotional attachment to his father and to his background as it was taught to him by his father--but integrity by definition requires the honesty and moral principles to not automatically equate one's emotional attachments with the absolute truth but to look at the facts (in this case, the facts of what the SS was and what it did), even if these facts conflict with what is in one's own heart. An SS soldier should never be celebrated in the Canadian House of Commons as a hero. And yet, I fear that some people with a positive emotional attachment to the SS tried to impose their will and their sentiments on the Canadian House of Commons and the Canadian people. I do not see any integrity in this manipulation of our ignorance and confusion about history. Martin Hunka is said to have the integrity to hold a position related to healthcare. But let us not forget what "healthcare" looked like during the time of his father's "heroism:" with genocidal eugenics being the ideology to which his father swore allegiance, millions of people were murdered, many were subjected to horrific medical experiments, and people with disabilities were the victims of forced euthanasia. And the majority of Europe's Jews, as well as many other victims, had been murdered by 1945.