Crown seeks jail term in gas plant case

one of his crooked smiles.

His lawyers, Brian Gover and Fredrick Schumann, read aloud many of the 27 character letters, including from Livingston’s wife of more than four decades, Anne Grittani, and their daughter Megan Pollock.

Pollock lives in British Columbia; Grittani was present, but like her husband, seemed shattered by the conviction.

The couple’s other daughter, Emma Livingston Cook, who lives in Toronto, read aloud her letter about her dad, and like her mother, spoke about the toll the last four-plus years have taken on him.

They described a deeply private person, who took on the chief of staff job only because then premier McGuinty had asked him and who didn’t even belong to a political party, for whom the publicity and media scrutiny have been excruciating.

All of those who spoke or wrote in Livingston’s support asked the judge, in essence, to consider “the good he’s done in his life,” as youngest daughter Livingston Cook put it.

The group included business executives, prominent lawyers, figure skater Dylan Moscovitch (who won a silver medal in pairs at the Sochi Olympics, and whom Livingston financially supported), and those who have served on charitable boards with Livingston, a former TD Bank senior executive. Many of them credited him with making Infrastructure Ontario, where Livingston worked before taking on the job with McGuinty, the fiscally responsible, successful organization it is.

Prosecutor Tom Lemon didn’t quarrel with Livingston’s “otherwise good character,” but told the judge, “That only goes so far.”

He reminded the judge that Livingston was McGuinty’s designate and said he thus stood “in a position of trust.”

Essentially, what Lipson found in his decision last month was that Livingston quietly had arranged for unprecedented access to all the computers in the thenpremier’s office, lied by omission to the province’s top civil servant that this was indeed what he was after, then hired the boyfriend of a deputy to come in and wipe about 20 hard drives.

Livingston was the chief of staff in McGuinty’s office during the final turbulent months of the premier’s last term in the fall of 2012 and through the transition period in early 2013, when Kathleen Wynne took power.

McGuinty, who abruptly resigned in October of 2012 amid continuing opposition howls for gas plant document production from his government — that had been going on for months — was never implicated in what Lipson once said was a scheme to ensure “no records (about the gas plants) could be retained.”

Gover will complete his submissions Tuesday, with the judge expected to reserve his decision. No one would envy him the task, answering the questions judges so often face: How do you measure a man’s life and weigh a single transgression against decades of good work? How do you balance the duty to exercise restraint with the need to denounce bad conduct?