Gas plants trial focuses on emails

McGuinty note one of dozens showing the government in full damage-control mode

A late-night email from then-premier Dalton McGuinty asking if the builder of a cancelled Mississauga power plant was a Liberal donor is one of dozens released at the criminal trial of his two top aides.

The emails, recovered by Ontario Provincial Police forensics investigators after hard drives were seized in a search warrant, show the McGuinty government in full damage-control mode in 2012 and 2013.

There are references to the wiping of hard drives as “Pete’s Project,” but none of the documents shed new light on why McGuinty scrapped the Mississauga plant and another in Oakville before the 2011 election.

Many of the emails in the 179-page package filed as a Crown exhibit with Justice Timothy Lipson were previously released to a legislative committee probing the cancellations.

The committee had issued a legal order demanding documents on the decisions, as opposition MPPs accused the government of covering up the real reasons when political staff said they had no such records.

The email from McGuinty’s party account to his deputy chief of staff Laura Miller and two other staffers on July 16, 2012, asks about Eastern Power, the spurned builder of the Mississauga plant.

“Did that company contribute to the PCs as well as the OLP?” McGuinty queried, referring to the Ontario Liberal Party.

“Eastern Power contributed to OLP and PCPO,” Miller replied, using the acronym for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

Miller and former McGuinty chief of staff David Livingston are charged with breach of trust, mischief in relation to data and misuse of a computer system in the alleged wiping of hard drives in the premier’s office before Premier Kathleen Wynne took power in February 2013.

Both defendants have pleaded not guilty in the trial, which continues Monday at Old City Hall. McGuinty was not a subject of the investigation and has co-operated with police.

The Pete in “Pete’s Project” is a reference to Peter Faist, Miller’s life partner and a computer consultant who was paid $10,000 to clear hard drives in the premier’s office.

Peter Wallace, the former head of Ontario’s civil service under McGuinty, testified that Livingston requested a special password to clear hard drives of personal information in the premier’s office.

Wallace warned Livingston about the need to retain official documents and told court that hiring an “outsider” for the job was a major departure from standard procedure of using government technicians.

Miller emailed Livingston at least twice in late January 2013 asking if he was making progress in getting the special password.

“Not yet,” he answered on January 30, noting “somebody from IT may stand and watch what we do to make sure nothing was done to contaminate files or programs outside those on the desktops being dealt with. I guess that’s the concern: the fact that having the code gets us access to systems other than our own.”

In another email, dated Aug. 9, 2012, Livingston tells Miller and other staff “I don’t have a strong desire to be email monitor for the Premier’s Office” and instructs them, among other things, that “double-deleted” emails cannot be retrieved.

The email package includes several memos to the premier’s staff asking if they have any documents to satisfy freedom-of-information requests.

Livingston responded “nothing here” on Jan. 15, 2013, about four weeks before Wynne became premier, to one FOI request for any records from January to Oct. 1 of the previous year on the construction, relocation or other arrangements for the two cancelled gas plants.