Can voters delete memory of gas plant scandal?

Guilty. Just not as first charged, nor for the original sins.

What began in the 2011 election as petty (albeit pricey) politics has concluded just in time for the 2018 campaign. Will the sordid gas plants saga influence the coming June vote, three elections later?

The original sin is ancient history but not forgotten. Just hard to fathom, given that the Liberals were two times lucky in the 2011 and 2014 ballots despite the stench.

On Friday, David Livingston’s luck ran out. He paid a personal price for a political scandal, convicted of the crime of attempted mischief to data and unauthorized use of a computer for trying to delete emails.

As chief of staff to former premier Dalton McGuinty, Livingston had nothing to do with cancelling those notorious gas-fired power plants. No, his mistake — ethically, politically, criminally — was more Nixonian: The coverup was worse than the crime.

In fact, the coverup was the crime. For there was nothing illegal in the cancellation of those power plants by a panicky McGuinty desperate for re-election.

The Liberals merely acquiesced to pressure from the equally opportunistic opposition parties who were promising angry suburban GTA voters that they’d unplug the plants. I wrote then and I’ll say now that all three parties were wrong to do so, but cynical isn’t criminal.

Livingston wasn’t even on staff at the time. His mistake, when he took over the premier’s office many months later, was in scheming to delete emails that opposition MPPs — who controlled the minority legislature — had lawfully demanded be turned over by the government.

Understandably, most public attention focused on sensational courtroom accounts of how Livingston misled senior public servants to obtain an administrative password under false pretenses, enabling an outside contractor to delete hard drives in the final days of McGuinty’s reign. But his sins were also more mundane, having many months before ordered staff to routinely “double delete” any emails targeted by a legislative committee.

To borrow a pre-email phrase from the post office, Livingston’s credo might well have been: Delete early and delete often.

His hubris holds lessons for everyone in politics. No one is above the law even when the legislature acts beneath itself. Court testimony showed Livingston was contemptuous of opposition MPPs for going on email fishing expeditions. It’s true that the Tories and New Democrats were using and abusing committee powers to go well beyond gas plants, but the legislature is supreme — right or wrong.

Given that the Crown never did prove precisely what was deleted in those scandalous final days, it’s quite possible that little of public interest was covered up — for the simple reason that any truly embarrassing gas plant emails would have been eliminated years before. More likely, the old McGuinty regime was trying to cover its tracks before the new Kathleen Wynne team stumbled upon the puerile plotting that characterized the old premier’s office, which is one reason the Crown dropped some of its original charges against Livingston.

The Liberals like to say their electronic deletions were akin to the shredding trucks ordered in by the Tories when they lost power in 2003. The difference, of course, is that the Progressive Conservatives weren’t shredding documents sought by lawmakers.

That’s what turned Liberal transgressions into Greek tragedy: Livingston, the prototypical private sector recruit into the public service, was a victim of his own “can-do” mentality that he could do as he pleased.

Laws must be obeyed, even if inconvenient, unless unconstitutional. If the legislature in its infinite wisdom votes to legitimize its own politically motivated fishing expedition, it cannot be thwarted by a chief of staff’s personal preferences.

Whether it was truly wise for opposition MPPs to then call in the Ontario Provincial Police, rather than formally sanction Livingston for violating the legal privileges of parliamentarians, is quite another matter. Criminalizing political deeds and misdeeds is not only overkill, it tends to hoist the opposition on its own political petard.

It is supremely ironic that in the same week that a Liberal operative was convicted for illegally deleting embarrassing emails, the Progressive Conservatives won a costly court ruling in a separate case to ensure that embarrassing emails about their own antics must be deleted by anyone in possession of them. An awkward transcript of top PC operatives discussing a disputed nomination contest was distributed electronically to various journalists last year, but must be deleted by order of the court. Or perhaps double deleted, just to be sure.

Proof that one party’s illegal coverup is another party’s court-ordered concealment. To delete, or not to delete, is a question of law — and politics.

Voters had the last word in the last two elections and will have their say again in the next one. Judging by their past verdicts, people may be disinclined to believe that any one political party is much purer than another when it comes to concealment. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca, Twitter: @reggcohn