Jinny Sims is no stranger to controversy
Credit to Author: Gordon Hoekstra| Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2019 23:39:11 +0000
Jinny Sims, who resigned late last week as a provincial cabinet minister, is no stranger to controversy.
• Sims first came to prominence in British Columbia 14 years ago when she led the B.C. Teachers Federation on a two-week illegal strike over public school working conditions.
As president of the BCTF she walked the picket line with her members in 2005 to protest large classes and growing numbers of unsupported special-needs children in regular classrooms.
At the time, vowing to defy a court contempt ruling, Sims declared: “We strongly believe some laws are so unjust that we cannot stand by and allow them to go unchallenged.”
• In May of 2018, Sims, who as minister of citizen services is responsible for B.C.’s records management, apologized for using her personal email while on the job.
Sims told reporters she should never have used a personal email account to contact her staff, deputy minister and chief of staff to the Premier’s Office. The practice is generally not allowed under B.C.’s Freedom of Information rules because personal emails have in the past been used by some to circumvent the FOI process and communicate government business without leaving an official record.
• Sims was also involved in a case earlier this year involving accusations from a former constituency office employee that showed she used her ministerial credentials to write visa reference letters for 10 Pakistani citizens. She also faced allegations from the former worker that she was continuing to use personal emails and other communication applications such as WhatsApp to circumvent FOI rules. Sims has said she did nothing wrong.
• Sims resigned as Minister of Citizen’ Services late last week, following the appointment of a special prosecutor for an RCMP investigation. No details of the investigation have been released.
In this 2005 photo BCTF President Jinny Sims (right) talks with teachers, parents and students on the picket line outside Chief Maquinna School in Vancouver during a rally.
After her term as president of the BCTF ended she returned to work as a teacher-counsellor in Nanaimo.
But she had the political bug and unsuccessfully sought the NDP nomination in Vancouver-Kensington for the 2009 provincial election.
She turned to federal politics and narrowly won in 2011 in the riding of Newton-North Delta, riding an orange wave under leader Jack Layton that saw the party win the most seats ever.
She lost in the 2015 federal election to Liberal candidate Sukh Dhaliwal by a considerable margin. She turned to provincial politics again and this time won a seat in Surrey-Panorama in 2017.
Sims emigrated to England from India at the age of nine. She earned a Bachelor of Education degree and moved with her husband to Canada in 1975. They spent two years in Quebec before moving to Nanaimo.