Police want petty cash data blocked

Quebec’s access-to-information commission is deliberating on a demand by the Montreal police department to have two requests to see its petty cash claims declared “abusive.”

Police department lawyer Lyne Campeau argued on Wednesday that the two access-to-information requests filed by the Montreal Gazette in November 2016 are “manifestly abusive” and “exaggerated” because they would require an excessive amount of time to locate the more than 220 petty cash expense claims and process them to transmit to the newspaper.

One of the access requests seeks 11 petty cash claims. The other seeks all that were listed in the city of Montreal’s online searchable municipal contracts database at the time.

At the same time, the police force argued before access-to-information commissioner Lina Desbiens that every one of the petty cash claims, which range from $2,000 to $524,937.50, is “highly confidential” because it pertains to a police investigation.

As the newspaper reported last year, the Montreal police department had filed more than $1.5 million as “petty cash” expenses during a two-year period.

Cmdr. Gilbert Dagenais testified that all of the petty cash claims pertain to police investigations so they are all confidential.

Lawyer Mark Bantey, who is representing the Montreal Gazette, argued that the police department’s demand to declare the access requests abusive is a waste of time because the department is arguing that it won’t hand over the documents anyway because it considers them confidential. So the police won’t spend time processing documents, he said.

The commission should instead examine whether the petty cash claims are indeed confidential under Quebec’s access-to-information law, Bantey argued.

The entry for the $524,937.50 single expense claim, filed in October 2016, stated: “Expense — Operation and police investigation, detention. Police activities.”

A payment for the same amount — $524,937.50 — was made one year before, in September 2015, but wasn’t listed as petty cash. That entry in the city contracts database named a car fleet management company and said the payment was for gas cards for the police for 2015.

The police department had $1.1 million worth of expenses that were labelled “City of Montreal investigation petty cash” between January 2015 and October 2016.

The police labelled another $480,000 worth of expenses between the fall of 2014 and October 2016 as “Petty cash SPVM.”