Just like the old Naughty by Nature song suggest, you know me! Seems that if you run for office these days you book your brain at the door. Not only elected officials but their support staff seem to do the same! Just why is it so hard to have elected officials use common sense? Maybe if we start tossing these people in jail it would shake the foundation a bit and make these people use their head for more than a hat rack!
The Ontario Provincial Police will open an investigation into the erasing of documents in the offices of former premier Dalton McGuinty and his energy minister.
The Progressive Conservatives asked the OPP to get involved after the information and privacy commissioner revealed this week that David Livingston and Craig MacLennan, chiefs of staff to Mr. McGuinty and the former energy minister, respectively, had deleted all of their e-mails. In addition, Mr. Livingston asked the head of the civil service how to “wipe clean the hard drives in the Premier’s Office” shortly before Mr. McGuinty stepped down earlier this year.
Deleting these electronic records may have obliterated evidence in the costly cancellation of gas-fired power plants.
On Friday, OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis wrote to the Tories to inform them he had referred the matter to the force’s criminal investigative services branch “for investigation.”
“I appreciate the opportunity to respond to your concerns,” Commissioner Lewis wrote.
The New Democratic Party, meanwhile, has uncovered evidence that three more top aides to Mr. McGuinty also had their e-mails deleted.
What’s more, the e-mails of at least two of the staffers – who were both involved in the gas plant file – do not appear to have been wiped by the staffers themselves. Their e-mails were deleted on the same day, a significant time after the pair had stopped working for Mr. McGuinty.
New Democrats said Friday the former premier and several Liberal staffers must testify again before a legislative committee on the deleted records.
“Dalton McGuinty needs to come back and answer this new information from the privacy commissioner that in fact his chief of staff asked for information to destroy all the records on computers and frankly, we need to know: did he tell him to do that?” said NDP Energy Critic Peter Tabuns. “On the other hand, did he in fact, make it clear to him that information had to be preserved and the law followed?”
A Freedom of Information request filed by the NDP reveals that Chris Morley, who preceded Mr. Livingston as Mr. McGuinty’s chief of staff, Jamison Steeve, Mr. McGuinty’s principal secretary and Sean Mullin, a policy adviser in his office, also had their correspondence wiped clean when they left Mr. McGuinty’s office. It is not clear who erased the e-mails.
But in the case of Mr. Steeve and Mr. Mullin, their e-mail accounts were deleted on Aug. 17, 2012 – 10 months after Mr. Mullin had stopped working in Mr. McGuinty’s office and six weeks after Mr. Steeve had left.
When the government cancelled the Oakville gas plant in the fall of 2010, Mr. Steeve and Mr. Mullin were charged with breaking the news to TransCanada Energy, the firm contracted to build the plant.
According to their notes from that meeting, Mr. Steeve and Mr. Mullin told TransCanada the government wanted to “preserve value” of the company’s contract – a key pledge that informed later negotiations.
The province is estimated to have spent $585-million to cancel the Oakville plant and a second facility in Mississauga.
The cancellations were widely seen as a partisan ploy to save Liberal candidates from defeat in the 2011 election.
Premier Kathleen Wynne has called the deletion of e-mails “unacceptable” and says she has put in place procedures to make sure it does not happen again.
The power plants were cancelled, she said, because the towns where they were to have been built didn’t want them.
The Tories, however, say the Liberals only pulled the plug on them for political reasons.
“They’re concerned about protecting their own political hide and they’re concerned about protecting being in power,” MPP Monte McNaughton said Friday.
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