Inside the investigation
Less than a week after The Standard published an expose on the tainted selection of Niagara Region’s chief administrative officer in 2016, a full-blown government probe was launched.
Last Thursday, regional council voted to hire a Toronto law firm to investigate the process that resulted in Carmen D’Angelo getting the $230,000-a-year job.
The Standard’s investigation, published on April 6, found confidential information about CAO candidates was leaked to D’Angelo during the selection process to hire Niagara’s top bureaucrat, a position responsible for a $1-billion budget and more than 3,000 employees.
So how did The Standard get this story? It’s a valid question. Understanding how journalists work can be just as important as the stories themselves. Last year, The Standard’s parent company, TorStar, began a trust in journalism initiative by giving readers behind-the-scenes looks at the news. In that spirit, we’re giving you a peak inside our investigation.
It began in the fall of 2017, when The Standard gained access to several neverbefore-released documents about the hiring of the CAO, including the secret memo.
A whistleblower initially reached out to me through intermediaries, passing along a broad, fairly vague outline of the documents. After some back and forth, direct contact was made through my encrypted email and, eventually, we met face-to-face.
After some research to confirm the source’s identity and credentials, I got down to the business of examining and verifying the documents. Digital data showed the memo was created by Robert D’Amboise, Regional Chair Alan Caslin’s policy director, and sent to D’Angelo. We have not established who sent the memo.
As critical as the documents are, we needed human sources to get to the red-hot centre of what happened in the fall of 2016.
I spent months interviewing people with the necessary access to information. All were worried about reprisals if their names appeared in print.
Anonymous sources are a thorny issue for journalists. In most circumstances, we want on the record interviews for the sake of transparency.
Sometimes those sharing confidential information insist upon anonymity. Even by talking to a reporter they risk professional blowback, including being fired or sued.
I am not at liberty to discuss the steps we’ve taken to protect the identities of sources for this investigation. I will not disclose them without their permission, and this includes not publishing the memo because we promised not to print the names of the candidates who spoke to us.
Beyond the cloak and dagger manoeuvring, anonymous sources create reporting challenges.
Even if an anonymous source is above reproach, what that person says may not be reportable precisely because that person is anonymous — information must be confirmed by other sources.
Double or triple confirmation is common practice. In this case, we had 10.
This type of work is a continual twosteps-forward-one-step-back process that requires fastidious patience. If something Source A tells you is confirmed by sources B and C, but Source C adds a new detail, you have to go back to the beginning and start over. And you do that as many times as required.
Some regional councillors have claimed The Standard is hypocritical for publishing a story about leaked information that uses, in part, leaked documents.
This could not be further from the truth. Every source we spoke to about the leaked memo said it was a serious breach of the integrity of a government hiring process, a breach the public wouldn’t know about if we hadn’t published the story.
In short, the story was not an act of hypocrisy. It is what journalism is for and why newspapers exist — so that you know what goes on in your government.