Mcguinty more hypocritical as a citizen than as premier
TORONTO — In the immortal phrase of the fictional lawyer Jackie Chiles of Seinfeld fame, Dalton McGuinty was egregious, outlandish, disingenuous and outrageous.
The former Ontario premier was appearing for a second star turn Tuesday before the allparty legislative committee probing the gas-plants fiasco of his government.
(The controversial plants in Oakville and Mississauga were abruptly cancelled, the latter announced as a Liberal party campaign promise, and the costs — at least $585 million is the best estimate — consistently downplayed and lowballed by the government.)
If possible, McGuinty the private citizen is more arrogant, less forthcoming and more hypocritical than the politician McGuinty.
He was asked back in the wake of a withering report earlier this month from the province’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian.
Sparked by a complaint from New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns, who is also the most effective questioner on the committee, the probe revealed that senior political staff in McGuinty’s office were routinely deleting all emails in what she found was likely an attempt to avoid scrutiny.
Cavoukian herself appeared at the committee just before McGuinty.
She was there to answer questions and rebut testimony last week from the former premier’s chief of staff, Chris Morley, to the effect that there were so many rules telling staff to press delete that he counted 99 separate ones and golly, how was a body to keep track of it all?
In very neutral language, Cavoukian showed that Morley’s 99 rules are a crock. They boil down to far fewer, she said, and there are actually only four categories of records that need not be maintained and there is, anyway, no mandatory requirement to delete any of them.
“It is called the Archives and Record-Keeping Act,” Cavoukian noted dryly, “not Record-Deleting Act.”
Her point was that the legislative thrust is on document retention, not deletion, and anyone with half a wit would and should have known that.
A casual exchange with Tabuns toward the end of Cavoukian’s testimony nicely illustrates that ordinary common practice is the opposite of the McGuinty senior ranks.
Tabuns was explaining how he manages his own email account. “I just save everything because it’s easiest,” he said, at which you could see heads nodding in the room in unconscious agreement.
“Me too,” Cavoukian piped in.
Tabuns remarked on how bloody time-consuming it is to delete emails, and said, “It took a lot of work to delete.”
Cavoukian agreed. “That’s what struck me too. You really have to turn your mind to it.”
Thus did the commissioner in effect demolish what McGuinty, who relied heavily on Morley’s 99 rules, was to say a short time later.
He too emphasized how very complicated the rules were, and said his government did the right thing by bringing in the Archives and RecordKeeping Act. But having done that, “I moved on to the next thing,” premiers being busy and all.
He devoted very little attention to that bit of legislation, McGuinty said, because he was worrying about provincial test scores, job creation (knob creation perhaps?), health care, blah, blah, blah.
This is called ragging the puck in hockey, and the ex-premier excels at it, or as Tabuns snapped once, “You’re eating up the clock.”
McGuinty several times hectored the committee for its partisanship, a case of the very greasy pot calling the kettle oily. “You need to stop looking through that partisan lens,” he said once.
This is pretty rich, given that during the Liberals’ time to ask questions, McGuinty fielded some big fat beach balls from one Steve Del Duca, the MPP from Vaughan, such as, “Would you agree our government has been open and transparent on this issue?” to which McGuinty seriously replied, “No government could have done more.”
(Del Duca made a joke about being bald. I feel emboldened to suggest that perhaps the reason he shaves his head is to slide it into the unpleasant crevices apparently required of his role on the committee.)
McGuinty went on. “This is a partisan exercise,” he said. “This is not about finding the truth. This is about defeating the government.”
If possible, McGuinty was more brazen at the news conference he had afterwards.
Paul Bliss of CTV asked a thoughtful question. McGuinty, he said, had repeatedly dismissed the committee’s work as a partisan exercise uninterested in truth-seeking.
But, Bliss asked nicely, wasn’t it a bit beneath him, beneath the office he held until recently to impugn a part of the democratic process, where people are brought in as witnesses and testify under oath?
“I’m calling it the way I see it,” McGuinty replied.
A few minutes later, Rick Brennan of the Toronto Star could bear it no longer.
He pointed out how he had covered McGuinty in question period, frothing with partisanship, noted that at the legislature this is akin to breathing and asked, in essence, “How could you?” McGuinty smiled. “You understand,” he said. “I’m not sure Ontarians understand the real complexion of this committee.” He went on to say, in reference to the Conservative complaint that has sparked a criminal probe by the Ontario Provincial Police, that “calling in the police has now become a political tactic.”
At the end of that investigation of deleted emails, McGuinty confidently predicted that the police will say they have “no grounds for laying charges of any kind.”
As Tabuns told reporters after McGuinty’s appearance, “All the key people who were involved with this cleaned out all their records. That’s suspicious.” And it isn’t partisan to say so.
McGuinty told reporters that in his time as a private citizen — 13 whole days as of Tuesday — he has been reading the classics. Then he quoted Cato the Elder, the ancient Roman writer, who for a time ended all his speeches by saying, “Carthage must be destroyed!”
The opposition members on the committee, McGuinty said, were effectively doing the same thing, and he’d have more regard for them if they did it as nakedly as Cato: “The Liberal government must be destroyed!”
Oh, my, let his will be done.