Seek and ye shall not always find
A report from Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey this week clearly shows that the provincial government has work to do on the accountability front.
Harvey’s report was sparked by an access to information request to the Department of Tourism about the creation of a $132,000-a-year position at The Rooms for Carla Foote, a former Liberal communications director and the daughter of former federal Liberal cabinet minister and Lt.-gov. Judy Foote.
It’s a multi-faceted report and I’m streamlining the findings here.
Basically, an applicant went to the Department of Tourism looking for records of any discussions about Foote’s hiring. Among the records they received, there was something missing: an email from the deputy minister of tourism directing the CEO of The Rooms to rescind an $80,000-a-year contract that had been offered to a new director of marketing and development.
According to the Department of Tourism, the contract had to be nixed because The Rooms had not followed protocol; it had failed to complete a Request for Staffing Action form before offering the contract.
One could reasonably assume in this circumstance, as the privacy commissioner did, that “a simple and logical solution would be to complete the Request for Staffing Action (form) and re-offer the position to the person who had just signed the contract. This did not happen.”
It did not happen because the Department of Tourism had its own candidate in mind for a newly created higher position — Foote as executive director of marketing and development.
The applicant who made the access request knew the email from the deputy minister existed because it was among the documentation tabled with a Citizens’ Representative report in June 2019. That report determined that then tourism minister Christopher Mitchelmore had violated his code of conduct by intervening in the creation of a new executive position at The Rooms and the hiring of Foote.
But the Department of Tourism later deleted that email and asked The Rooms to do the same. The Rooms did not.
But because Tourism deleted it, it did not turn up in response to the applicant’s access request.
That’s convenient if a government doesn’t want prying eyes to find things it doesn’t want found.
Privacy Commissioner Michael Harvey says the person who made the access request “questioned whether officials conducted themselves in a way to ensure that nothing was ever written down, i.e. communication in person or phone conversations” and “raised an even more serious concern… the possibility that those records existed but were deleted, perhaps improperly.”
Why does this matter? Because the privacy commissioner points out — as did Muskrat Falls Inquiry Commissioner Richard Leblanc — that unless records of decision-making are kept, the public cannot possibly access them and hold the government accountable.
“This is not a reasonable approach to good governance,” Harvey wrote in his report. “While there is not yet a legislated duty to document, principles of sound public administration dictate that records of significant decisions be created and retained, otherwise the right of access to information is devalued.”
Leblanc recommended in his inquiry report that the government incorporate the duty to document decisionmaking in provincial law within six months of his report being released on March 5, 2020.
A statement from the premier’s office Friday in response to my query said that work is underway: “We are currently working through government’s decisionmaking process and implementation will proceed in due course.”
We’re counting on it. There can be no real accountability if records are either not kept or can just magically go — poof!
Pam Frampton is The Telegram’s managing editor.
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