How terrible is eating a cookie?

This seems to have been floating around in the news for a while, but some cookie-related commentary seems to as though it may cost the head of Alberta Heath Services his job. To quote the Alberta premier: "I found the comments last Friday quite offensive. In fact, all Albertans found them offensive." Anyways, here's the video clip causing the controversy:

The first thing that you can observe is that PR isn't this guy's primary thing - in fact he's pretty terrible at it here. By comparison here he seems to make most computer scientists look like socialites. One question to ask: do you want your civil service agencies to be staffed by politicians? This guy's background (I met him at a talk just a few days before the controversy) is as a professor of public policy and in health administration in Australia - not a political office.

One of the things you find from that conversation (eventually) is that there's a media event in half an hour at which you could ask questions. Should you allow your public officials some level of downtime between meetings? To quote the guy's later blog post issuing an apology: "We had made a decision earlier that Dr Eagle would provide comments to the media after the session." and he does eventually make a reference to a media event in a half-hour.

My impressions from meeting that guy were that he reminds me a little of Sheldon - albeit in a more administrative role. He seems to need an explicit time allotment for an activity: Question period is question period; then wasn't question period.

Basically, given that I'm not a big fan of politicians running government agencies, I'd be inclined to let this incident go without firing the guy. That, and he could stand an appointment with some sort of PR consultant to help him better address such situations in the future.