NDP’s response to deleted emails likely to leave public in the dark
How is it incoming government ignored law around important documents?
Three weeks after Premier John Horgan apologized in the legislature and ordered his deputy to investigate the mass deletion of emails by his staff and ministers, the New Democrat government is continuing to withhold key details about how much rulebreaking actually occurred.
At least seven staff in Horgan’s office deleted every single email they sent — five of those staff nuking the records of what they sent for the crucial three-month period after the NDP first came into office in July 2017.
During that time, the NDP was transitioning into power, awarding jobs, handing out contracts, setting its first budget update and enacting its earliest promises to raise the minimum wage and eliminate bridge tolls. And yet not a single record was saved from key individuals close to the premier.
Then there’s the premier’s new special adviser, Don Bain, who after he was hired in late 2017 appears to have mass deleted all his sent emails except one: The human resources forms he needed to complete to get paid.
Three cabinet ministers have also been caught up in the controversy as well.
Solicitor General Mike Farnworth, Advanced Education Minister Melanie Mark and Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Minister Scott Fraser all leaned heavily on the delete key when it came to their emails. So what’s going on?
Why would seven staff and three ministers play so fast and loose with their emails, leaving no record of what they were sending?
How many more people were deleting their emails?
It sounds like the kind of questions that would have hounded the previous Liberal government, with its preoccupation for “triple-deleting ” pesky or embarrassing records so the public could never see them.
But instead, here we are, with a new NDP government, a new premier, a new cabinet, and all of the same old sets of controversies.
Perhaps a kind of mass hysteria gripped the NDP offices and caused everyone to accidentally hit the wrong key on their keyboard, at the same time, repeatedly, for several months.
Maybe someone spilled a Costco-sized flat of Coca-Cola over their work terminals, damaging their records. Maybe everyone fell asleep during the training sessions that explained it’s the law to keep important records of public interest when in government.
Or maybe, just maybe, there’s some sort of Chemtrails-level conspiracy going on here to cover up the greatest secret the B.C. government has ever known. Who knows.
The point is, something went wrong. The public deserves to know why it happened, by who, and be given a plan to show it won’t happen again.
Enter Don Wright, Horgan’s deputy minister. He’s the head of the public service, and is supposed to be a kind of professional bridge between the hyper-partisan political spinsters in the premier’s office and the non-partisan bureaucrats who work for government. He’s well-regarded even by the Liberals, and as such is a valuable resource for Horgan to deploy when a problem needs investigating by someone with credibility.
“I asked my deputy minister to have all information that had been removed from computers as ‘no records’ responses brought back into the system,” Horgan told the legislature on the last day of the spring session, May 31. “They’re being gone through now, and we’re reviewing the freedom-of-information requests that came from the opposition for information.”
Despite Horgan’s comments, we don’t really know much about what Wright is actually doing. He has no terms of reference for his review. He’s not producing a written report that documents his conclusions. And he doesn’t intend to explain the outcome publicly in some sort of statement or press conference, leaving us all at a loss to understand who was involved or their motives.
That’s a pretty poor way of investigating a serious issue.
Compare it to when Wright was asked by Horgan to investigate concerns over government scientists in the animal health lab earlier this year — he released clear terms of reference on what he was going to examine, hired outside help and produced two final reports that cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing in great detail. He earned extra kudos in doing so, because his report directly dismissed the conflict of interest concerns raised by Agriculture Minister Lana Popham, making her look foolish.
On the email issue, Wright is for some reason taking a different tact.
“The deputy minister has been reviewing records management in the premier’s office since government was sworn in — not just in response to specific FOI requests,” said a statement from the premier’s office. “If and where there is an indication that proper standards had not been met, records will be restored.”
Note the lack of commitment to make those records public.
Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the legislature, some government staffer’s email box will be magically refilled with records you can’t see unless you guess who deleted them and file a Freedom of Information request on a giant fishing expedition.
Basically, the whole operation gives NDP operatives exactly what they want: The political cover of Wright conducting a review, without any accountability from Wright to tell the public whathefinds.
Horgan in particular has a lot of explaining to do. He used the Liberals as a punching bag on issues of accountability and transparency when in opposition, spending years eviscerating them for covering up their records. He scored a lot of political points. And he used the email issue, along with many others, to portray the Liberals as a bunch of secretive, arrogant and corrupt individuals who had to be given the boot from office.
But the NDP found the moral high ground too slippery once they got into office.
Before they knew it, they too tumbled on the issues of accountability and transparency. To complete the fall from grace, Horgan found himself on the receiving end of the same questions he used to dish out about email deletion, during his estimates debate in the legislature.
Opposition Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson started by reading one of Horgan’s old quotes on the issue back to him: “The public is not well served when senior representatives — being paid a princely sum, to boot — are not recording their actions on a daily basis. That is, in my opinion, an affront to our basic institutions.” What happened to that Horgan, he asked.
“I did set a high standard with respect to the new government’s ability to live within the rules of the Freedom of Information Act, and we haven’t met that standard,” replied Horgan.
Wilkinson wouldn’t let up. “Was the training deficient? Did your senior staff fail to implement the training? Who dropped the ball, premier? That’s the question,” asked Wilkinson. All good questions. Horgan re-professed his “profound disappointment in this matter” and then ducked and dodged providing any answers.
The public should be profoundly disappointed too — not only that there’s mass email deletion problems going on in the highest offices of government, but that the NDP’s review into what went wrong seems designed to deliberately keep all of us in the dark.